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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the dual meaning of anti-policy as being against ‘bad’ things (immigration, terrorism, corruption) and against using policy as a technique of governing. Using the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’, we explore how anti-policy is producing a new form of illiberal governance.

Paper long abstract

This paper introduces the panel’s theme. The rise of anti-policy has become a defining feature of the contemporary political landscape. By ‘anti-policy’ we mean discourses, programmes and measures aimed at preventing or combatting ‘bad’ things (e.g. anti-terrorism, anti-trafficking, anti-corruption) or things deemed woke such as anti-racism, multiculturalism and DEI. But anti-policy is also an argument against using policy itself as a tool of government. While the ‘anti’ prefix suggests these policies are oppositional, reactive and repressive, anti-policies typically create spaces for actions and programmes that are productive and performative of a new form of governance.

Whereas anti-policies appear to be defined by the fields that they oppose (e.g. drugs, immigration, discrimination, globalization, communism and even liberalism), we argue that this leaves strategically undefined what they are for, which legitimises the mobilisation of largely unbounded and unchecked resources and power for their implementation. The result is often political leaders’ hasty creation of bricolage platforms for governing through personal networks and independent, autonomous action.

In this panel we ask, how should we interpret the rise of anti-policy? What are the contours of this emerging form of governance? What are its key features? How does it operate, and what should we call it? In this paper we explore these questions through an analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’, their ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’, and the way these ideas have been implemented, for example in the Department of Health and Human Services.