What Project 2025 means for democracy and what it says about the United States
During the first weeks of June, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley during a House oversight committee hearing brought to national attention, Project 2025, a political blueprint funded by the Heritage Foundation and drafted by a focus group of extreme right wing republicans that if followed effectively terraform the current United States government into a conservative right wing fascist state.
During the first weeks of June, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley during a House oversight committee hearing brought to national attention, Project 2025, a political blueprint funded by the Heritage Foundation and drafted by a focus group of extreme right wing republicans that if followed effectively terraform the current United States government into a conservative right wing fascist state. The project goes far beyond the traditional philosophy and beliefs of Republicans, laissez faire economics, limited government, deregulation, jingoism and a blurring of lines between the separation of (a Christian) church and state. This project according to Pressley is a clear design to destabilize if not altogether eradicate our system of government as we know it, eradicating checks and balances at every level while consolidating the power of the executive branch. Considering on record comments by Donald Trump over the last several years, the now infamous insurrection on January 6th and additional actions and comments from the far right during Biden’s presidency and leading up to the election, the idea that a far right group would create a roadmap to take over the government and undermine the core tenets of our constitution is not a far fetched conspiracy theory. In fact, Project 2025 is a logical gambit for Republicans to take in order to achieve the ends they’ve not been shy about promoting.
The creation of this particular project began in 2022, funded and devised by the Heritage foundation, a conservative think tank that has been a driving force behind Republican Policy since the early seventies. In some ways, the ideas that Project 2025 hopes to implement aren’t necessarily new or different from decades of policy conservatives have championed and pushed through our legislature and carried out with great effect to varying degrees of success whenever their candidate rose to the presidency and/or had a majority in Congress. What is so scary and concerning about this project is the scope, specificity and clarity of execution of the project. The audacity of the project not being a tightly held secret amongst its constituents, or the fact that its authors nor its supporters have not felt the need to clarify, explain or assure others of its purpose is both damning and frightening. But, in Trump’s America boldness and self righteousness reign and are the order of the day.
On their website, they tout the project as a “presidential transition project”. The summarized goal is to implement not only a conservative set of policies but to change the very rules and balances that allow for democracy to happen. Their means of doing so is based on a widely debated loophole or conceptual framing of the Constitution known as the Unitary Executive Theory. For a cadre of conservative constitutional law theorists, there is an interpretation of Article Two in the Constitution that conservative politicians believe gives the executive branch much broader powers than what is actually considered and outlined by the Constitution. Their reading of the article, to suggest the Executive Branch has sole domain over all departments within its branch is the spirit in which Project 2025 is born from. Effectively, Project 25 amongst other things looks to remove term limits from the President, bring the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commision and several other independent federal agencies under direct supervision of the Executive Branch making them answering exclusively to the President. It strips war powers from Congress completely and eliminates whole parts of the Federal government (including departments of Education and the FDA) altogether. Within the project, they detail undoing virtually every protection afforded under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, The Voting Rights Act and others. The list of changes is exhaustive with the overall plan exceeding 900 pages and touches every aspect of American life.
The Heritage Foundation has been a policy consultant for decades and published mandates such as this for years as signposts and guides for their constituents and politicians. What is so dangerous and urgent now is, never has the political landscape been so weak with a candidate that has had this much fervor, energy and hold over the conservative right. Trump embodies the white supremacist, misogynist, jingoist principles that are the rotting bedrock of this country's foundation. Throughout the generations, these ideas have persisted and at numerous points, even in current times they’ve threatened to become the norm of our government if not the spirit of a large portion of the citizenry. However, the failsafe of checks and balances, of elections and term limits were built in protections against fascism. These safeguards will always need protecting, and unfortunately we have seen the slow but steady erosion of their power, but with the coming election, we are at a moment where the transformation into a completely white supremacist fascist state will not only be total but also unchallenged and irreversible.
The question that is always asked is how did we get here? The truth is, we never actually left. In a nation that was built on safeguarding at its onset the livelihood of a very specific group, wealthy landowning white men, it is almost by mistake that their framing allowed loopholes for others who sat outside that group to come to gain those protections as well. Our history is filled with the fights for the rights to exist by any and all who weren’t amongst those founding fathers, and many of their descendants have worked to put the jack back in the box ever since. In our darkest times, the United States has reverted to type and to its roots, a country that was born of manifest destiny, of all men (who were considered men at the time of its writing, not after) being equal, and to defend its evangelical spirit. Project 2025 isn’t a new insidious plot, but the same old playbook with an update for the twenty first century.
