Formally known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, Project 2025 is an initiative spearheaded by the Washington, D.C.-based conservative think-thank, The Heritage Foundation. Its goal is to create a conservative policy agenda for a potential Trump administration beginning in January 2025. Among other things, the organizers are putting together a “180-day playbook,” vetting personnel, and training them to be ready to hit the ground running on day one of a next Trump presidency.

On the surface, there is nothing unusual about such an initiative. There are several high-profile think-thanks across America, from progressive to conservative, that engage in these types of activities all the time. They play a highly useful role in helping shape the domestic and foreign policies of whichever administration is in office. Because of its conservative bent, Project 2025 unsurprisingly focuses on familiar issues such as abortion, immigration, gun control, and others that Republicans have talked about for decades. But the entire initiative has become highly controversial and has garnered lots of press coverage due to its scope and the radical nature of some of the things it aims to do.

What has generated the most controversy is the stated goal of Project 2025 to dismantle the administrative state and vastly expand presidential powers. Under that proposal, thousands of career civil servants would likely be fired and replaced with loyalists who would be willing to carry out the president’s ultra-conservative agenda. Independent agencies such as the Justice Department would be placed under direct presidential control, as part of a broader concept known as “unitary executive theory.” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a recent podcast interview that the nation is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Naturally, Democrats have made Project 2025 a key campaign issue. Leading party figures and grassroots members have consistently argued that extremist Republicans are aiming to create an autocratic form of government in America. Fearing that this narrative is harming his campaign, former President Trump recently sought to distance himself from the project. In a social media post last month, he wrote: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.” According to some press reports, that disavowal is what prompted Paul Dans to resign as director of the project. The status of Project 2025 remains unclear, but the Democrats are keeping the issue alive.

Our national political environment is in such turmoil now that every single effort should be toward healing, not further division of our society. That is why it is so unfortunate that some people at the Heritage Foundation chose to embark on an initiative that is so radical that even the former president has been forced to disown it.

In my view, the Democrats’ expressed fear that Project 2025 would turn America into an autocracy is somewhat overblown. But the concern still has to be taken extremely seriously.

In his book, They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer recounted conversations that he had with ten ordinary Germans from various walks of life in 1952. Those engagements were part of an effort to get a sense of how fascism took hold in Germany so easily during the Third Reich. All ten men had been members of the Nazi Party. Mayer had traveled to Germany to spend a year at the University of Frankfurt as part of that sponsored research project. Among the people he interviewed were a policeman, a teacher, a baker, a tailor, and a carpenter. Mayer admitted to being a little afraid for his country upon his return to America. He wrote: “I felt—and feel—that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.”

Mayer’s point was that we are all highly susceptible when it comes to surrendering control of our societies into the hands of would-be totalitarian rulers like Adolf Hitler. He recalled a conversation in which one of his German colleagues at the university told him that it was difficult, even for a highly educated person like him, to detect what all those “little measures” that the authorities employed to gain power might eventually lead to. In his colleague’s words, “One no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

There is no resemblance of the Germany of the 1930s to today’s America. The Germany of that period was nowhere near the mature democracy that America is now. The Weimar Republic, which preceded the Third Reich, existed for a mere fifteen years. America has robust institutions that have stood the test of time, and a democratic culture that is quite unique even in today’s world. These constitute the basis of my belief that even if the proponents of Project 2025 were to get their way, the risk of their policy implementations turning this country into a fascist state is slim to none.

Nevertheless, those ideas could still do a lot of damage so we shouldn’t be overly sanguine that our institutions would save the day. The architects of Project 2025 belong to the same ideological club that has helped Viktor Orbán turn Hungary into an illiberal democracy. The danger is that once it takes hold, that type of political corruption is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

Expanding on his concern for America due to what he learned in Germany in 1952, Mayer wrote: “If I—and my countrymen—ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm.” That was a chilling sentence to read. Our nation has become so dangerously divided that our collective faith in our institutions is eroding at an alarming rate. That is why no one can take for granted that our governance system will hold in a national emergency. Even the Supreme Court, which is the final arbiter on all manner of contentious issues, is widely seen nowadays as heavily politicized and corrupt, and is therefore increasingly distrusted. That should worry everyone.

America’s strength has historically derived from its citizens’ openness to all kinds of ideas, the willingness of its people to have their viewpoints challenged robustly, and their readiness to make compromises to settle differences. That national character is being lost, unfortunately. It is frankly quite irresponsible for any American to talk in such revolutionary terms as the Project 2025 architects have. That type of conduct should not be condoned in a nation that is supposed to be an example for the rest of the world on how to build democratic governance systems.