Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud
Project 2025 and a Philosophy of Violence.
As President Joe Biden refuses to leave the presidential race, a sense of panic has begun to consume the American left, but they are not panicking merely because of the fear of losing an election.
They are not even panicking because of the fear of a second Donald Trump presidency. Democrats are panicking because a violent conservative ideology and philosophy that is much bigger than a second Trump presidency would now have the power to shape American society for generations. A conservative philosophy has already taken control of the Supreme Court and given the president vast immunity protections that theoretically could allow him to assassinate his political rivals. In 2025, conservatives intend for their philosophy of violence to consume every facet of the American government.
A massive defeat for the Democrats in November would mean that the American right’s philosophy of violence would have prevailed and when the opposition can use violence to claim and sustain power, it becomes much harder to recover from a defeat. Civility would have been murdered and violence would have become the new norm. The American left may never recover if they lose this election.
I know that last paragraph might sound hyperbolic, but earlier this month Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said the quiet part out loud. He expressed the violence that underpins his conservative agenda. He articulated what we know to be true, but he said it so loudly that it became nearly impossible for the public to imagine that the violence does not exist.
While appearing on Steve Bannon’s show, “The War Room,” Roberts said that the United States was “...in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Essentially, American conservatives will agree to not resort to violence so long as the American left allows them to win their revolution. But if the left attempts to win elections or implement progressive policies, we should expect bloodshed.
Roberts’s conservative revolution is a philosophy of violence, and we know this because he told us so.
The revolution Roberts is referring to is called “Project 2025” which is a bold, ambitious, and frightening policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 is a roadmap for the potential second Trump presidency to remake the United States according to conservative ideals that will have a lasting impact far beyond the end of his presidency. Project 2025 is a 920-page plan whose agenda includes banning the abortion pill, increasing the role of the Bible in shaping domestic and foreign policy, and drastically reducing the power of the federal government.
Due to the toxicity of Project 2025’s agenda, Trump has attempted to distance himself from it, but if he wins the presidency again, we should all expect that Project 2025 will play a significant role in his administration. Over 140 people who have worked with Trump have contributed to Project 2025.
The fact that the plan is nearly 1,000 pages, was produced by a prominent conservative think tank, and represents a collaboration of over 100 conservative organizations projects an aura of civility and legitimacy to this effort. But Roberts’s statement that it “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” speaks to the violence that shapes and underpins this agenda. Violence and the threat of violence are just as important as a 920-page document for implementing their agenda.
Roberts can casually talk about violence as a tool for implementing his policy agenda and get celebrated by American conservatives and not condemned by mainstream America because violence has always been an integral part of American society, yet we have been conditioned to believe that the violence does not exist. The phrase, “saying the quiet part out loud,” is an example of this conditioning.
To be clear, I used that phrase in the fourth paragraph of this column not because I believe it is the best way to describe Roberts’s statement, but because I know that this is the phrase that Americans often use when someone expresses an unpleasant truth. This phrase is nonpartisan and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips even produced a campaign video titled “Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud,” where he promised to be a candidate who was bold enough to say unpleasant truths to the American people.
The normalization of such a phrase speaks to a profound problem with American society because it expresses how we are aware of the unpleasantness of our society, yet want to be sheltered from reality and coddled by idyllic fantasies. We want the American Dream, but not the American reality.
By describing unpleasant truths as “the quiet part,” we acknowledge that we know that the awfulness exists, but we just want it reduced to a whisper so that we can imagine that it does not.
For example, Americans know that our Founding Fathers condoned chattel slavery and that many of them owned slaves, but our society chooses to not describe them as virulent racists whose approval of and participation in slavery must incline us to question their understanding and implementation of democracy. We want the unpleasant truth of slavery to remain quiet and we do not want people to say it out loud, yet by aspiring to keep these truths quiet the American left gives the American right a significant political advantage.
The American right aspires to conserve or recreate traditional American values, and they do so by expressing the ideals Americans like to hear while also implementing the quiet truths most Americans want to believe never existed.
American conservatives have even created an entire legal philosophy called “originalism” that argues that American laws must be interpreted according to the intent of our Founding Fathers.
Originalism is legitimate only if Americans agree that our founders were good people and that today’s America equates to something they would approve of. If instead we acknowledge that our founders were racists, we could easily conclude that they may disapprove of the progress towards racial equality this nation has made over the last 200 years. By American society choosing to ignore the racism and violence that underpins the founding of the United States, American conservatives become emboldened to implement originalism, and then Americans can act surprised when their agenda takes people’s rights away, makes our society more violent, and creates racial division.
Another example would also be the conservative stance on gun rights that has resulted in the rapid proliferation of gun usage across the United States and deadly school shootings have become the American norm for well over a decade. Conservatives argue for the protections of the Second Amendment because Americans allegedly needed guns to protect themselves from the British and other threats, but Americans never talk about how the Second Amendment was also created so that white colonizers could terrorize enslaved people and suppress slave rebellions, and also terrorize Indigenous people and force them off of their land.
Regarding the Second Amendment, the quiet part was omitted from the document, but readily implemented by white Americans. When we pretend that the quiet part does not exist, conservatives become empowered to protect gun rights, and then regress our society into an increasingly violent place.
The conservative culture that the right works to protect and aspires to recreate expresses the disingenuous façade of civility of the white-dominated pre-Civil War antebellum South of the 1800s and Jim Crow of the 1900s. The quiet part of these eras consisted of racial violence, violent white supremacist militias, rampant inequality and oppression, and a status quo of white Americans living apart from non-whites. In the 1900s, this white “apart-ness,” or “apartheid” in Afrikaans, was called segregation and separate but equal, and in the 1800s, it was called chattel slavery.
The entire conservative agenda follows this script where they cater to the ideal while also implementing the violence, and American society struggles to stop their agenda because we do not want to confront the quiet part. We want the quiet part to remain quiet. We want the evils of our society to appear so banal, insignificant, and confined to the past that we can pretend that the evil not longer and has never existed. We want the American Dream to crush reality even though we can only live in reality and not the dream.
Project 2025 is not a bluff and the threat is very real, but thus far the American left has been unable to call or challenge them on their dangerous agenda. The left has been unable to do so because the left’s philosophy also professes that America’s greatness derives from its inception although the left as we know it was created during Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s.
Reconstruction ended slavery, expanded citizenship to Black Americans, and provided voting rights to Black men. It also created America’s first civil rights acts and the Department of Justice. The progress of Reconstruction also empowered the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s that created the modern Democratic Party.
Reconstruction is the foundation of today’s Democratic Party, and the equality of this era was never intended by our Founding Fathers—Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857 proves this.
In this decision, the Court concluded that Scott, a Black man, could not sue for his freedom because America’s founders never intended for Black people to have the rights of white citizens, therefore, Scott did not even have the right to sue for his freedom. In his opinion, Taney stated that his interpretation of the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution meant that Black people were “altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Dred Scott is considered as one of the worst decisions by the Supreme Court in American history. This decision consists of saying the quiet part out loud and then making the quiet part the law of the land. This is the same agenda as today’s conservative movement, and Project 2025 is 920 pages of this violent philosophy.
The American left and right celebrate the same people, and this dynamic makes it much harder for the left to combat the right’s agenda. The American left celebrates America’s founders because these founders allegedly created a roadmap for transcending their imperfections that included racism and chattel slavery despite Taney explicitly stating that this roadmap never existed. Through this logic, or illogic, Reconstruction becomes an extension of and not a deviation from our Founding Fathers, and as a result, the left will tacitly embrace ideals that undermine Reconstruction and the progressive movement in America.
This is a profound philosophical dilemma that the left must rapidly confront because until they have a new philosophy that centers their movement around Reconstruction they will never be able to adequately counter the right’s philosophy. The urgency of this massive problem combined with Biden’s disastrous campaign is why the left is panicking.
Reconstructionism is the philosophy that the left needs. Reconstruction has been kept quiet for far too long, and if we want to preserve our democracy, we need to say it loudly.