This outdated distinction between married women and other women is clearly intentional, sending the message that Heritage and its allies are trying to roll back not just “wokeness” but even the movement to treat women as equal participants in American society. It’s a microcosm of what this effort is intended to do: restructure the country so that, just as it was 100 years ago, primarily heterosexual white men can decide how power and status are distributed.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which has overseen a firm that has clearly leaned toward supporting Donald Trump and his political stance, offered his take on the current situation in an interview with former Virginia congressman and professor David Brat (R-Virginia) on Tuesday.
“Let me talk about the far left,” Roberts said. “You and I both serve on the faculty and on the Faculty Senate and we understand that the left has taken over our institution.” Roberts said the reason the left is “infuriated” is because now “our side is winning.”
“I just want to encourage you in a practical sense,” Roberts added. “We are in the process of a second American revolution, and it will be a bloodless revolution if the left allows it.”
To be sure, the Trump campaign has been winning, especially recently. This is not because the Trump campaign has convinced most Americans that its policies and worldview are desirable. Rather, it reflects the Supreme Court’s decisions to overturn abortion access, strip federal agencies of their power, and, most directly, to grant broad immunity to the president (something that the right “really should be encouraged to do,” Roberts told Brat). The Supreme Court that made these changes was born largely against the will of the people, not by the will of the people. The immunity decisions, for example, were opposed by most Americans, even most Republicans — at least until the issue was framed to grant immunity to Trump.
Roberts describes this moment as a second “revolution,” and he hopes it will be a less bloody one as long as the left doesn’t put up too much resistance. But what is his side rebelling against?
His comments leading up to this declaration of war include hints that the left has “taken over” institutions, including universities. We know what this means given recent events. He is talking in part about college students being more liberal than non-college students. This divide existed before Trump but has grown during the Trump era. He is also talking about the right’s perception that college admissions and job opportunities are driven by race and identity considerations that disadvantage white people. He talks about how he and others like him feel that others different from them are gaining power at their expense.
This, of course, is the heart of Trumpism. During Barack Obama’s presidency, populism became an increasingly powerful part of Republican politics, and the gap between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans began to widen. The ostensible catalyst was taxation, a framework strongly promoted by traditional elements of the Republican Party who saw tax cuts as a key policy goal. Rank-and-file members of the Tea Party movement often put it differently: they challenged where their tax money was being spent: to people on welfare, or what they saw as non-white urban people. To foreign governments. To immigrants.
Trump benefited from this worldview, largely because he shared it and sought to spread it. Make America great again. America is not great now, when black people are protesting the police, pride flags are flying, and immigrants are seeking new lives in America. Let’s restore America to the greatness it was before, so you don’t have to hear Spanish in the supermarket or notice someone dressing up as a woman. Let’s silence and sideline the elites in New York and Los Angeles who, in the view of many Republicans, actively discriminate against whites and Christians.
This fear that the rise of the left will weaken America is pervasive on the right. Justice Samuel Alito has spoken publicly about it, as has former Attorney General William P. Barr (and, of course, Trump does it all the time). The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is primarily focused on the right’s efforts to secure power as a response to this fear. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision is rooted in the idea that the problem was not in response to Trump’s 2020 election loss, but in the Biden administration’s efforts to hold Trump accountable through the investigation led by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
The decision was written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who also argued in a 2013 decision that the days when black people were systematically disenfranchised were over. The decision became an early benchmark for right-wing efforts to restore power to traditional American values and therefore to traditional Americans: white Americans.
A lot of this is about demographics and power. America’s demographics are changing, but not in the way most people think. When the baby boom began, whites were the majority and blacks were the minority. Today, about half of young Americans are black, Asian, Hispanic or mixed race, and the immigrant population is about the same density as it was a century ago. They’re more likely to take advantage of the shift in acceptability of LGBTQ+ identities.
This change means more voices challenging the American system’s implicit or explicit favoritism toward white, heterosexual, and male people, and that means more backlash. Race and gender are easy scapegoats for problems, from unemployment to college rejections to (to name a more extreme example) plane crashes. Those arguing for change are younger, which means more likely to be non-white, and more likely to have attended college. There’s an overlap.
Trump promises to stand up to them, as does Heritage’s Roberts: His revolution would reshape government to suppress the will of the people, but it also recognizes the importance of social issues, like using “Ms.” instead of “Mrs.”
America has been moving for decades towards a government where power is distributed broadly and without regard to identity. For the right, this is problematic, as getting more people to vote, for example, is seen as “rigging” the election because more people are perceived as Democrats. Hence the birth of Roberts, Trump and their revolution.
But this time, rather than creating a new nation based on equality and law, the goal is to completely reverse the trajectory of the American Revolution and concentrate power in the hands of a single leader who happens to look a lot like them.
