A great framing device I learned: the intellectual core of the #conservative movement—the ideas behind Project 2025—is not racism, xenophobia, or Christianity; but a commitment to the abstract concept of “Western Civilization”: a platonic ideal of a pure state built on morals, free from the corrupting influence of post-Machiavellian relativism. To achieve this ideal, the applications of racism, eugenics, nationalism, xenophobia, and religious fervor are put in place; the latter are only *methods* through which the former ideal is put into practice. That was tremendously clarifying to me.
Project 2025, and the folks at the Claremont Institute use lofty language to write odes to Western Civilization, without sullying themselves by directly using the dirty language of racism and xenophobia, leaving it to the implementors to figure out the details. That way, they can adopt and discard different bigotries as one fails and another succeeds, all while maintaining a coherent narrative thread.