Excerpt: Power Is Making (or Breaking) the Rules

In an excerpt from his new book, “From Presence to Power,” Rashad Robinson explains how the Heritage Foundation remade the rules for post-Katrina New Orleans and paved the way for Project 2025.

(Courtesy of One World)

Excerpted from From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter—and Win, by Rashad Robinson, published by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Available now where books are sold. We encourage you to buy from Black-owned and independent bookstores.

The Heritage Foundation, a right-­wing think tank, became famous during the 2024 race for president by bringing together conservative and far-­right leaders from every domain to create a blueprint for the second Trump presidency, which they hoped could make all of their policy dreams come true. It was called Project 2025. And they got exactly what they wanted: Only eight months into Trump’s second term, the administration had already implemented half of the ideas the plan laid out.

It was a true exercise in power: finding a precise way to motivate and equip the Trump administration to reshape almost every aspect of how America works, as quickly as possible. Trump had already radicalized the court system in his first term. With Project 2025 as the blueprint, he and his team would now change the rules for job hiring and college admissions, international relations, the economy, workers’ rights, gender and race, corporate and environmental regulation, immigration, and much more. The authors of Project 2025 had a clear vision for transforming our society, and they knew that putting an actionable blueprint in the hands of the right decision-­makers would increase their chances of winning that change. They had it ready well before Trump won the election.

Twenty years earlier, however, the same organization that would go on to produce Project 2025 had, without any fanfare, rehearsed its strategy for taking over society—­very much behind the scenes. New Orleans was its laboratory. What the Heritage Foundation and its allies did back then can help us understand what is happening now and why so many different people, in so many different sectors, are going along with it.

On September 13, 2005, eight days after the televised concert for Katrina, the lights stayed on long after dark at the Heritage Foundation, just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. There was no press for this after-­hours meeting because it hadn’t been publicized. No one put out a press release. Yet, one by one, a who’s who of Republicans took their seats. Indiana congressman and future vice president Mike Pence—­at the time, the head of the influential House Republican Study Committee—­ hosted the meeting. The topic was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the opportunities it presented.

Those present at the meeting began mapping out the future of New Orleans. They aimed to remake the city in the interests of corporations and also in service of right-­ wing values, whether the people who lived there liked it or not. One of the declarations in their report—released September 12, 2005, demonstrating just how ready its members were to pounce—­says it all: “Private entrepreneurial activity and vision, not bureaucratic government, must be the engine to rebuild.”

While Kanye’s statement had been heard across the country and lingered as a topic of conversation, Pence, Heritage, and their co-conspirators stayed under the radar. It would be easier if the report was kept quiet: Avoiding any presence was a key to their power.

Weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit shore, the suffering of the city’s communities, especially its Black communities, was still on full display. The fatally inadequate government response to Hurricane Katrina allowed for more than 1,400 deaths, $170 billion in damages, out-­of-­control police violence (including an order to shoot “looters”), white vigilante violence, and a flood of misinformation and scapegoating aimed at Black people across the state and country. Most news media were still clouding any public understanding about who and what was responsible for the level of destruction that had taken place.

While most conservative political players and corporate leaders lacked any interest in the city before and during the storm—­especially when it came to protecting its Black residents, institutions, and culture—­they were more than happy to exploit its devastation afterward. Black communities were consumed with meeting emergency needs, which left them less able to defend themselves against a well-organized political assault. It was open season for the right wing. Mike Pence and his crew took aim.

Billionaires once hated government until they realized how much they could gain from leading government agencies and setting up multibillion-­dollar government contracts to make themselves even wealthier. Similarly, Republicans once wanted to stay as far away from “Black cities” as possible, until they realized the rewards they could reap by taking them over. The 2000s represented a new era of opportunism for Republicans, and they got started with New Orleans.

There Was a Plan to Change the Rules

Major social change—­changing the course of our future, the conditions we live in, the realities of our lives—­happens only when well-organized forces work to make it happen.

Efforts to rebuild New Orleans via “private entrepreneurial activity” had begun even before that one night in DC. In the immediate wake of Katrina, President Bush suspended rules requiring federal contractors to pay standard wages, waived affirmative action guidelines for federal contractors in the Gulf region, and marginalized

Black communities and leadership. (By October 2005, only 1.5 percent of the $1.6 billion that FEMA awarded in contracts went to minority-owned firms.) Meeting no formidable resistance only gave Pence and his colleagues the signal to keep going.

“The desire to bring conservative, free-­ market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot,” Pence told The Wall Street Journal after the meeting at the Heritage Foundation. “We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was.” The Journal allowed Pence to talk directly to the audience he wanted to reach while staying off the radar of anyone who might cause him trouble. The racially coded meaning in Pence’s words also conveyed a very clear message for Pence’s Wall Street audience: This is a majority Black city, but don’t you worry about that. We’re going to clear the way for corporate executives and investors like you to take over New Orleans. Get ready to join the party.

The Wall Street Journal summed it all up very clearly in that same article: “Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-­ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies.” Pence and the people at that September 13 meeting hatched a plan: thirty-­two regressive policies, all aligned with what journalist Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine” and the “disaster capitalism” playbook. Privatizing the city was one of their key aims, and nothing was too big to fit in their laboratory: schools, healthcare and hospitals, housing, policing. And it was clear what they wanted out of it: a steady stream of profits and political control.

That’s not how New Orleans was set up to work before, but these would be the new rules that governed how people made decisions across the region. They would control which decisions were encouraged and which were discouraged.

Generally, power is the ability to make changes that wouldn’t otherwise happen and prevent changes that otherwise would. In the context of major social change efforts, power is about controlling the rules that shape how society works. Having power means being able to change rules so that a system starts to produce more of the outcomes you want and fewer of the outcomes you don’t.

Power isn’t only about the written rules that state how things are supposed to work; it’s also about the unwritten rules that determine how things actually work. Being able to control both is power at its highest level. (I dive more deeply into written and unwritten rules in chapter 5.)

The Heritage Foundation, its backers, and everyone in league with it had a thirst for power and a vision for changing rules. But they also had what they needed to execute that vision: the infrastructure of power. They had relationships, policy expertise, resources, a way of getting organized to launch attacks on the city’s independence from different angles. That’s what enabled them to put their plan into practice instead of just publishing it as a paper that sat on people’s desks and went nowhere. (In chapter 8, I discuss the idea of infrastructure at length.)

As a result of the ideology they put into practice, thousands of public housing units were demolished and replaced. The new housing stock was unaffordable to the previous tenants, even those largely unaffected by the storm damage. Residents didn’t just passively lose their homes; they were driven out. And while they were gone, their homes were stolen by real estate speculators, corrupt contractors, and banks acting like vultures feeding on dead prey. There might have been systems or at least attitudes and customs in place to prevent that before, but no longer.

For thousands of people, the idea that the city was their home—that they belonged there and that any recovery effort should make it possible for them to return and recover—­was completely erased from the newly hatched right-­wing recovery playbook. The rules of the game had changed so much, so quickly, that everyday residents of New Orleans were no longer even welcome to play the game.