Project 2025 and the Economic Foundations of Liberal Values

Project 2025 represents more than a partisan policy agenda; it signals a structural reorientation of American governance. Its dismantling of liberal institutions reflects not simply ideological insanity but the economic fragility of liberal values themselves. Liberal rights and protections depend on continuous economic returns. As these returns diminish, elites pivot toward authoritarian models that consolidate power at lower institutional cost. Here I argue that Project 2025 is less a philosophical revolution than a recalibration of economic incentives—an attempt to sustain elite dominance by hollowing out liberal investments that are no longer considered profitable.

1. Liberal Values as Economic Investments

• Institutions such as education, healthcare, and civil rights enforcement require expanding tax bases; they are not self-sustaining.

• Liberal commitments are structured as investments: they enhance productivity and social stability but yield diminishing returns once basic needs and mobility are satisfied.

• During growth periods, elites support broad-based investment. In stagnation, capital shifts toward more controllable, extractive systems, setting the stage for authoritarian retrenchment.

• Rights and institutions are contingent on expanding fiscal capacity; without growth, liberalism weakens.

• For liberalism to endure, it must reassert its economic utility—demonstrating that broad investment in rights and productivity remains strategically superior.

2. Project 2025 as Strategic Retrenchment

• The initiative seeks to dismantle regulatory agencies, purge civil servants, and centralize executive authority.

• These measures function as cost-cutting strategies: hollowing liberal infrastructure reduces overhead while consolidating power.

• Nearly half of Project 2025’s 317 objectives were achieved within months, illustrating how quickly liberal institutions can be dismantled when their economic utility wanes.

• Rollbacks of DEI, reproductive rights, and environmental protections mark a pivot from inclusive growth toward elite consolidation.

3. The Role of Shared Right-Wing Sentiments

• Foreign ideologues such as Aleksandr Dugin amplify anti-liberal narratives, but domestic economic logic remains primary.

• Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory resonates less for its philosophical substance than for its alignment with elite incentives to maintain stability without redistribution.

• Liberal values endure only when they serve competitive advantage; when no longer profitable, they are abandoned.

4. Liberalism in Decline

• The erosion of liberal institutions is driven not by disbelief but by defunding.

• Centralized, loyalty-based governance is cheaper and more stable for elites than maintaining broad-based liberal institutions.

• Liberalism is being displaced as elites judge its investments unproductive relative to alternative models of governance.

• Project 2025 is both a symptom of this erosion and a strategic blueprint for post-liberal consolidation.

• Illiberal shifts are not primarily ideological revolutions but pragmatic responses to changing returns on investment in liberal systems.

1. For liberalism to endure, it must reassert its economic utility—demonstrating that broad investment in rights and productivity remains strategically superior.

5. Conclusion

Project 2025 illustrates the structural vulnerability of liberalism when its economic underpinnings falter. Liberal values, long framed as moral imperatives, function in practice as economic investments. As elites perceive diminishing returns, they retreat into extractive, authoritarian arrangements. Unless liberalism can renew its material utility, governance will continue its transformation from a public good into a private asset.