Yves here. Project 2025 is a dog’s breakfast. Per Lambert, it reads as if it was put together by a committee, with different factions getting pet ideas in and then no one bothering to knock heads to make sure it was at least somewhat cohesive.
However, that does not mean that Team R won’t find bits in it they want to hoist and push hard, so it bears some watching.
Matt Stoller has made the point for some time that the Democrats really aren’t interested in ruling, which Neuburger stresses here. I’ve long believed that the Dems are mainly interested in the patronage and personal revolving door opportunities that come with controlling the Executive Branch.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
I want to add a few notes to the discussion on Project 2025, then hopefully pass from this discussion forever. Some of these notes may seem trivial or obvious to you, but I guarantee some will not. Read on.
What is Project 2025?
First, what is the Project 2025? According to the Project 2025 website, this is what it hopes to accomplish:
The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.
It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.
This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.
Ignore the fact that much of the Project, at least according to its website, is a mess of right-wing fantasy, unserious planning, and contradiction.
(Fantasy: “The entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One.” Unserious planning: “The DNI and CIA Director should use their authority under the National Security Act of 1947 … remove IC employees who have abused their positions of trust.” Contradiction: “Liberal democracy” is applauded, but “liberals” engage in a “ruthless pursuit of absolute power.” Also here. In addition, the Mandate document has as much an idea of what constitutes “the Left” or “Far Left” as any professional Republican propagandist. Reread the long quote above.
Every Administration Wants to Accomplish Its Goals
Put those problems with the document aside, though, and simply consider what the document promotes for the next administration: “a governing agenda and the right people in place.”
Except that this is proposed by the enemies of “the left” (I think they mean simplyDemocrats), how is their plan different from what the Actual Left — for example, a Sanders administration, the Manchin-cancelling one we imagined for ourselves — should or would do?
Thanks to this thread by Cory Doctorow, we’re pointed to historian Rich Perlstein’s contextualization of the Project. Doctorow (emphasis mine):
As Perlstein points out, Project 2025 isn’t new. The Heritage Foundation and its allies have prepared documents like this, with many identical policy prescriptions, in the run-up to many presidential elections. Perlstein argues that Warren G Harding’s 1921 inaugural address captures much of its spirit, as did the Nixon campaign’s 1973 vow to “move the country so far to the right ‘you won’t even recognize it.'”
The threats to democracy and its institutions aren’t new. The right has been bent on their destruction for more than a century. As Perlstein says, the point of taking note of this isn’t to minimize the danger, rather, it’s to contextualize it. The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without “interference” from democratic institutions, so that their power to extract wealth from First Nations, working people, and the land itself is checked only by rivalries with other aristocrats.
Perlstein identifies declarations of similar “projects” in 1921 (the Harding administration), 1973 (the second Nixon administration), and 1981 (Reagan).
There’s nothing new in this. It’s standard fare for any administration that wants to shake things up, either left or right (by “left” I mean the actual left). If you don’t like your predatory neoliberalism liberally sauced with Christo-fascist ideology and toxic misogyny, of course it must be fought.
But it must be fought, not for its method of change, but for its ideas.
Examples of Project 2025 Methods
Consider the 2009 Obama administration. Progressives wanted him to thoroughly clean house, fire the Bush-Cheney embeds or left-behinds. He didn’t. There was no Project 2009, to our great demise.
Or consider a “Sanders administration of the mind,” the one we wanted him to have. How much of the neoliberal trash should he have thrown out? How about all of it, including Joe Manchin (also here).
So No, the civil service should be preserved, contrary to what Project 2025 envisions, but…
Yes, the recalcitrants and left-behinds must be replaced if any new administration is to accomplish its goals.
When You Win, You Must Rule
If you win power and don’t use it, you’ve lost. Unless your goal was to change nothing (see Biden in 2020), you’ve failed in your goal.
Ian Welsh provides a stark reminder of this in several posts appropriate to this subject. In one he says (correctly, in my view):
You can’t play a game by the rules if the other side is determined to cheat and thinks you shouldn’t even be on the field.
The piece is entitled, “Why The Left Keeps Losing and What They Must Do to Win” (by “the left” he means the actual left). The context is what had been happening in South and Central America in the late 2010s, as well as what happened to Corbyn in the UK.
Enemy of the (actual) left will break every rule to make sure the left never wins. For example, in the UK: “Labor party staffers were working actively to lose the 2017 and 2020 elections. We have emails, we have proof.”
And here at home: “The US overthrew multiple elected governments overseas if they considered them left-wing. At home, coincidentally, JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcom X [sic] were all assassinated within a period of less than ten years, and we are expected to believe that the US security apparatus had nothing to do with that. (This doesn’t even pass the laugh test.)”
The lesson here is, when the actual left gains power, it must use it. That’s what every good change-agent movement attempts to do.
In that sense, the method of Project 2025 is not at all new; it’s the goals that are so repugnant. If we reject those methods in trying to accomplish our goals, we reject our own future win.
The Law of Purges
This leads to an obvious corollary, the law of purges: Purge your enemies from power or they’ll fight you forever.
As Welsh points out in another piece aimed at giving advice to incoming left-wing Latin American administrations (emphasis mine):
Let’s not dance around. Your first step will be to break the power of the current economic and political elites who are not willing to convincingly join you–or, at least, let you rule without trying to sabotage you.
You must do this all at once. When it happens, it has to happen to everyone to whom it is going to happen. This is Machiavelli’s dictum, and he was right. After it has happened, those who weren’t broken know they’re safe as long as they don’t get in your way.
If the breaking keeps going on and on, everyone who still has something to lose (and still, thus, has power) lives in fear. They must destroy you before you destroy them.
His example is a North American one, our wished-for Barack Obama in 2009, he of the “Yes, we can.” Here’s Welsh’s expansion of that basic idea:
Let’s give a concrete example. Assume Obama was really a left-winger. He gets into power in 2009, and he really wants to change things. He needs to take out the financial elite: Wall Street and the big banks.
They’ve handed him the opportunity. Here’s part of how he does it: He declares all the banks involved in the sub-prime fraud racket (all of the big ones and most of the small ones) conspiracies under RICO.
He then says that all the individual executives’ money are proceeds derived from crime and confiscates it. (This is 100 percent legal under laws as they exist). He charges them, and they are forced to use public defenders.
They are now powerless. This is the second law of purges: Anyone you damage, you must destroy utterly. If you take away half their power, and leave them half, they will hate you forever and use their remaining power to destroy you.
Leave them whole, or destroy them. The financial executives would have been destroyed, and win or lose in the courts, the next five to ten years of their lives would be consumed by personal legal nightmares.
If Obama were an actual leftist, he would have done all this … and we would have applauded him for it, despite the Machiavellian character of the means.
If Sanders had won in 2016, he hinted he would have cleaned house … and we would have applauded him for it. In fact, his core supporters would have been miserable had he not had the courage to use what power he had won.
So let’s not be too hard on Project 2025 for its methods. The reason: In some future year, when Jupiter perhaps aligns with Mars, we, the actual left, may win power for ourselves. Will we piss it away or use it?
If we use it, these methods are exactly those we’ll employ.
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One of the reasons for the success of the Cuban Revolution was the uncompromising and thorough removal of Batista regime officials. Castro wanted the new Cuba to be run by communist amateurs, not the experts of the old regime. For those who served the bourgeois system would always remain the reserve army of the counterrevolution. In the end, with the guidance and support of the Soviet Union and other friendly countries, Cuba was successfully put back on track.
The real reason for much of the 1930s Soviet purges, cleaning out much of the remaining bourgeois old guard and the Trotskyist elements. They became extreme and self-defeating under Yezhov who was removed by Stalin. The impact upon the Soviet army is much exaggerated as many purged had already been brought back, also the scale of the purges has been shown to be much less than the exaggerations of Cold War propaganda as the Soviet archives have been opened. When the Germans attacked, Stalin was sure that the leadership of the Soviet Army would remain patriotic and not make peace with the Germans.
The historian Losurdo’s work is a very good antidote to the Cold War propaganda that still continues with the likes of Applebaum.
The biggest mistake made by Venezuela and Nicaragua is the lack of the purge carried out in Cuba. The oligarch class will never give up until destroyed.
The power of a US president is limited esp. domestically, in all sorts of ways by the separation of powers.
Running an entity like the US is too big a job for one person so they have to rely on advisors. They also have to rely on the instruments of state carrying out the orders and Congress, elected by a biased system, can prevent many of those actions. Mid terms and the necessity to get bills through two houses make it difficult to get anything significant done. So we get a few popular measures but fundamental change is unlikely to happen.
It is depressing but with American elections, much of the governing class , the secretaries of state -appointed- not elected, change. In China Xi has abolished term limits with much else and Putin seems set to rule until he drops.
The British constitution does allow for fairly quick change of the rules. Even replacing a PM. But the City still has a huge say-out of sight of the voters, for the most part.
I don’t know how we could change it. But if we had the right people on the front bench it could happen. Sadly it will probably take an emergency for that to happen.
Where can I READ the entirety of the “british constitution”?
I thought they just made it up as they went along.
Agreed, the bourgeois oligarchy have embedded themselves thoroughly in all areas of power since they defeated the landowner class in the Civil War, and that includes a media and educational institutions that thoroughly indoctrinate the average American. If a President attempted such a purge he would either quickly change his mind after a chat from the security services or suddenly die of “natural causes” or exposed to some massive scandal and impeached. Look what they did with Trump for four years and he wasn’t even serious about a purge. It is rumoured that Harold Wilson had such a chat with the British Security services after becoming PM again in 1974.
The security services and various right wing elements plotted to remove Wilson when he was Prime Minister. The book “Smear” by Ramsey and Dorrill goes into this at length. And the same thing happened when Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party.
Neuberger and Welsh make an excellent point. The only way Corbyn could have stayed in power – and advanced his progressive policies – was by reforming Labour from the ground up. This would have involved letting the constituencies decide who their MP should be. British political parties – all based in London – regularly parachute unpopular candidates (think Peter Mandelson and Shaun Woodward) into “safe” constituencies. Sometimes said candidates are so unpopular that the constituencies cease to be “safe”. Given the hostility within the London party bureaucracy, this would have been difficult: Corbyn would have had to purge that bureaucracy as well. But he had an enormous mandate – Labour had more grassroots members than any other party in Europe at the time – and letting each constituency re-select their MP, or choose a new one – would have transformed the party.
So, yes, reform can only be achieved by determined action. Unfortunately it is the Blairites with their man Starmer who appear to be aware of this.
As much as the project 2025 disgusts me in every sense, I take this as a sign of things to come. Yes, this type of thing has happened before, and they not only got their way for a time, but they regrouped every time and came back to “do more ruling”.
Since the founding fathers made this country a “republic”, they were clear what they wanted. A ruling elite to control the levers of power. government, money, press, commerce, etc. When groups as transparent as the council on foreign relations, whose members in the last hundred years have had such a commanding role in all of these policies and institutions and the history of the twentieth century, and still no one likes to mention all these “old names” returning for both republican and democratic administrations. Calling all these think tank scions and their associations of helpers, unrelated to each other gives them power. Missing the point that this IS the “deep state”. You know, the political class. However you want to cleave it. There is only one world. we all just go round and round. These think tanks, the washington consensus; and their stealthy power to get things done. That is what they have. and since it is helping their aim…. being hereditary aristocrats… who are in proximity to real wealth …. and power; it makes sense they will never stop on their own. Why would they?
We should at least teach our children to see the rulers of evil, while they go about ruining everything.
Maybe then, our grandkids… would be aware enough to form a real threat to them.
Look at things now… the rulers, screw up everything… but since nature is vast.. they find more… what a crappy way to exist.
So our politics are all about concrete material benefits for the bureaucratic classes? This rightwing assertion isn’t necessarily wrong, but the prob is they refuse to apply it to their own favorite institutions such as the military. They also, these days, like to go on about free speech but then not so much when the speech involves their favorite foreign clients such as Israel and its leader to whom they give standing ovations. If one wanted to make the case that American democracy has degenerated into a battle between factions of bureaucrats and their rice bowls there’s plenty of evidence. The Dems and Repubs merely deploy different high minded sounding rationalizations. Harris’ tendency toward platitude speak doubtless comes from lots of practice. She’s our latest middle class aspirant on the make. Pass the arugula.
Some of us would argue that America’s original sin was not so much slavery as our love of money. Self aggrandizement is a strong motivator for building a civilization but not so much for keeping one. In that sense the 1960s hippies got it right but it didn’t last long.
To the extent the Hippies initially incarnated and built upon the ideas of Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Scott Nearing, Karl and Groucho Marx, et al – communalism, non-violence, self-suffiency, “enoughness,” etc – yes, but that was quickly overtaken by mass marketing, New Age grifto-capitalism and the implementation (for shorthand purposes) of the Powell Memo.
Look no further than Stewart Brand, once the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog and Co-Evolution Quarterly, who has gone on to mock his former efforts and has long been a shill for Silicon Valley surveillance/venture capitalist/transhumanist interests.
History, if there is to be one, is not likely to be kind to the Hippies.
This is a much more realistic portrayal of ‘Project 2025’ than the usual liberal “blueprint for fascism” scare pieces. I’m glad, because in an earlier article Neuburger hinted at such a view himself. But as he says here, this is nothing new. On the other hand, while some of this is certainly right-wing fantasy, it is noteworthy that when such “blueprints” appear in crucial transition periods when the Right takes power, they actually *act* on them. As Yves points out, the Democrats do not, and haven’t since the Great Society. Neuburger summarizes the main point here:
“There’s nothing new in this. It’s standard fare for any administration that wants to shake things up, either left or right (by “left” I mean the actual left). If you don’t like your predatory neoliberalism liberally sauced with Christo-fascist ideology and toxic misogyny, of course it must be fought. But it must be fought, not for its method of change, but for its ideas.”
This also hints at why the Democrats don’t do this type of thing anymore. Their primary policy trajectory is also neoliberal. Both sides favor “predatory neoliberalism.” The main difference is the rhetoric and secondary issues, or “ideas,” used to mobilize their somewhat different constituencies. The Dems fear-monger the “misogyny” and “Christo-fascist ideology” of the right-wing Republicans. The Republicans champion these ideas to mobilize their base. It’s all part of the show while the actual policy apparatus keeps moving right regardless of the party in power.
For me, if liberals really wanted to fear-monger about a “blueprint for fascism,” then they should aim their guns at the various policy papers of the neoconservatives. The neocons laid out clearly for anyone who cared to read them their plans for world domination. They got their people into positions of power. They infiltrated both political parties so that ‘R’ or ‘D’ didn’t matter, and when in power they purged personnel who resisted their policies from key foreign policy institutions. And then they *acted* on those very plans. They massively increased our national security apparatus both abroad and at home. They’ve left death, chaos, and smoldering ruins in large chunks of the world, and they’re *still at it*! So… why aren’t the liberals crying about this *actual* fascist threat? I wonder…
You look at the American position in places like the Ukraine, Gaza, Iraq, Africa, etc. and see what a dog’s breakfast it is. Personally I blame it on that fact that the leadership of the US is infested with ideologues rather than hard-headed realists. A case in point – the Ukraine. Those ideologues thought that they could not lose and felt that understanding such mundane things like industrial capacity and military strategy was beneath them. The point here is that with this 2025 project, that they want to replace government workers with ideologues who will all have their axes to grind. They won’t take the time to understand how government works but just give orders and expect it all to work out. This is exactly what happened with the the Coalition Provisional Authority set up in Iraq after the invasion that was heavily staffed with Republican loyalists. And look how that turned out.
When “For The Greater Good” becomes the rallying cry of both sides, it’s time to flee to calmer pastures.
xcellent! And I also liked the referenced Ian Welsh articles.
Personally, I give Obama credit for changing the national discourse on race relations in a positive direction. It perhaps would have been too much to take on the financial establishment at the same time. Similarly, Biden and the Dems (including Sanders) may have figured that they couldn’t take on the national security establishment while making incremental inroads against monopoly capitalism.
(My opinion is that the latter (Biden embrace of neocon foreign policy) was a deadly mistake. )
Jupiter and Mars are in conjunction now.
I jumped in and read through portions of the document. It’s nearly 900 pages. It was excruciating reading. I didn’t make it through much, but I would sum it up as:
“Hey Chat GPT, write a dark 900 page, when-I-rule-the-world fantasy, as a Ayn Rand style soliloquy, written in the voice of a 2024 Tea-Party think tank alum that admires James Dobson.”
The text is full of in-group buzzwords and memes that would fall completely flat with impartial or skeptical ears. So many of the underlying presumptions are ridiculous or obviously false to anyone with a little bit of knowledge. I didn’t detect a single new big idea. Warmed over 1980’s Libertarianism at its most radical, steeped in identity grievance and white nationalist, christo-fascist, male-rights internet gobbledy-goop. Basically the project 2025 guys want to abolish any federal agency or government entity that might ever ameliorate the most extreme abuses of big business or have the audacity to interfere with the wishes of our modern God-King billionaire class. That’s it.
In order to govern the progressive left needs a vast and well-designed muscular federal government. This is hard. The right wing fringe of libertarians only desire a frontier where there is no law and might equals right so the strong can do exactly as they wish. This is easy. Government must be destroyed. It is always harder to build than destroy. Project 2025 is the mission statement of a delusional vandal. There’s nothing I saw in the document related to governing, just the destruction of the state’s capacity to govern.
“But it must be fought, not for its method of change but for its ideas.”
“If we reject these methods in trying to accomplish our goals we reject our own future win.”
Call me Mr. Naive but in my opinion, it is the very logic of these methods (the necessity of purges, etc.) that has tended, historically, to almost guarantee catastrophe both for the real Left as well as the real Right.
The very definition of politics as articulated by the brilliant Nazi theorist, Carl Schmitt, in his 1932 classic, “The Concept of the Political,” is now endorsed in 2024 as a key assumption necessary for “the win,” for the modern Left in 2024.
As Schmitt argued:
“The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
Is it this supposed conflictual reality of human life, an intense and inevitable difference, which will now guide us to victory?
Agreed. I don’t think the quoted piece is one of Welch’s best efforts. He’s trying to be hard nosed and realistic, but I think he just comes across as a different kind of naive. Maybe, like he claims, it’s a dog eat dog world and the only way to successfully prevail against an opponent fighting dirty is to fight dirtier yourself. But I think the idea that anything good will result out of that – even if you win – is naive. It’s simply a moral race to the bottom. Both sides lose.
I do think that he’s correct in saying that if you’re playing by the rules of the game and the other side isn’t, and it’s not working for you, you need to change the game. But you don’t need to accept the other side’s definition, either. You can look to change it in ways that favor you. It doesn’t need to be a competition to see who can be the most ruthless authoritarian. You can, for example, try to change people’s minds and establish yourself as the more trustworthy choice. That’s what Sanders tried to do, and what Trump has largely done (the fact that he’s done so despite being famously untrustworthy himself just shows how much of a weakness there was to be exploited).
There is a difference between court politics and popular politics. Machievelli’s rules are the rules of court politics: how to dispense and retain power. But if you are going to exercise power in a democracy, you need a long-term vision that will win majority backing.
The problem with the last 40 years of UK governments is that even the successful ones, in Westminster terms, have failed to unify the country around any lasting vision and so the castles they have manouevered so hard to build have all been built on sand….
The logical apotheosis of this problem is the Mark Fisher quote, that within capitalism it is impossible to conceive of an alternative to capitalism. No alternative has been set out to win the deep state / civil society / call it what you will since the Powell memo etc. and so we live in neoliberalism in the West.
I have been reading the history of Austrohungary(*) and specifically its collapse at the end of WW1. Overnight, independence movements seized the popular consciousness in every constituent polity within the Empire: Czeochslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Croatia / South Slavs etc. Lone voices had banged drums but suddenly there was a crisis that meant power was for the taking. Today, perhaps no alternative can win mass backing until a real crisis hits the West but this comes nearer with the rise of the muli-polar world and the collapse of US hegemony. The alternative needs to be articulated today to be rallied tomorrow.
(*) This is all the fault of NC and whichever poster keeps recommending reading the Good Soldier Swejk. Thank you very much that person! I am very glad I took your advice (halfway through so far): it is mordant and compelling and at times it is laugh out loud funny. In the background however is the progression of WW1 on the Eastern Front and I realised I know nothing about this. I’d love to find a good source with maps showing who controlled what territory when, launched which operation etc. If anybody has recommendations, I would love to hear them!