Read JD Vance’s fiery foreword to Project 2025 Leader’s new book

In classic American films pulp FictionIn The New York Times, John Travolta’s character has just returned from Amsterdam and discovers that consumer goods in Europe are the same as in the United States, but just “a little different.” That’s how I feel about Kevin Roberts’ life. He grew up in a poor family in a corner of the United States that’s largely ignored by the American elite—but his corner is in Louisiana, while mine is in Ohio and Kentucky. Like me, he’s Catholic, but unlike me, he was born Catholic. His grandparents, like their grandparents, play a major role in his life. Now, he works far from where he grew up, just steps away from my office, in Washington, D.C.: He’s the president of one of the most influential think tanks in Washington, and I’m a U.S. Senator.

Now he has written this book, exploring many of these topics I have been concerned with this issue in my own work. But his focus is very profound, and his writing is easy to understand, making it easy to understand his true academic rigor.

Never before has a figure of Roberts’s depth and stature within the American right attempted to articulate a true new future for conservatism. The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it has been the most influential intellectual engine for Republicans, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Yet it’s the very power and influence of the Heritage Foundation that makes it easy to avoid risk. Roberts could collect a nice salary, write a nice book, and tell donors what they want to hear. But doing the same thing, Roberts argues, could lead to the destruction of our country.

If you’ve read a lot of conservative books, or think you have a good understanding of the conservative movement, I think what follows will surprise, even shock, you. Roberts understands economics and supports basic free-market principles, but he doesn’t idolize decades-old theories. He argues persuasively that modern financial corporations would have been almost completely alien to our nation’s founders. The closest eighteenth-century analog to a modern Apple or Google was the British East India Company, a behemoth of public and private power that would have made its subjects completely inaccessible to the American sense of freedom. The idea that our founders wanted their citizens to be subjects of this hybrid power is ahistorical and absurd, yet too many modern “conservatives” idolize the market to ignore it. A private company that can censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence agencies and other federal bureaucrats should be scrutinized, not supported, by the right. Roberts not only understands this on a visceral level; he is also able to articulate the political vision to conduct the scrutiny effectively.

Roberts sees conservatism as centered on the family. In this, he draws on the views of the American Old Right, which recognizes—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our children to marry and have children. We should teach them that marriage is not just a contract but a sacred—and, where possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from engaging in behaviors that threaten the stability of the family. But we should do other things, too: create the material conditions in which having a family is not just the preserve of the privileged. That means better jobs at all levels of the income ladder. It means protecting American industry—even if it leads to higher consumer prices in the short run. It means listening to young people who tell us they can’t afford to buy a house or start a family, and not just criticizing them for their lack of virtue. Roberts is expressing a fundamentally Christian cultural and economic view: one that recognizes that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.

My childhood was not an easy one by any objective standard. Neither was Kevin Roberts’s. Both of us were negatively impacted by family instability, and both of us were saved by the close ties of family—grandparents, aunts, uncles—that are often the first and most effective component of our social safety net. Both of us saw how factories leaving town could destabilize the economic stability that provided the foundation for those families. Both of us learned to love the country that, despite some bumps along the way, gave us and our families a second chance. In this book, Kevin tries to figure out how we can retain as many of the factors that made his life successful while correcting the factors that failed. To do that, we need more than a politics that simply undoes the bad policies of the past. We need to rebuild. We need an offensive conservatism that goes beyond just trying to stop the left from doing things we don’t like.

I sometimes use a metaphor to illustrate what the conservatives of the previous generation got right and what they got wrong. Imagine a sunny garden that is well maintained. It has some imperfections, of course, and a lot of weeds. It is this stuff that makes things we want to grow attractive to it, and things we don’t want to grow attractive to it. To get rid of the bad stuff, a well-meaning gardener treats the garden with a chemical solution. This kills many of the weeds, but it also kills a lot of the good stuff. Undeterred, the gardener continues to add the solution. Eventually, the soil becomes unsuitable for growing anything.

In this metaphor, modern liberalism is the gardener, the garden is our country, and the voices discouraging the gardener are conservatives. We are right, of course: in our quest to correct problems (some real, some imagined), we as a country made a lot of mistakes in the 1960s and 1970s.

But for the garden to recover, it’s not enough to simply undo past mistakes. The garden needs more than to stop adding bad solutions, although it does need to do that. It needs to be recultivated. The old conservative movement believed that if you kept government out of the way, natural forces would take care of things — we’re no longer in that situation, and a different approach must be taken. As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s all right to take a laissez-faire attitude when you’re safe in the sun. But when dusk falls and you hear the wolves howling, you’ve got to gather your forces and load your muskets.”

We all realize now that it is time to unite and get our guns ready. These ideas are essential weapons in the battle ahead.

–J.D. Vance