Will Project 2025 Go on Even with Kamala as President?
Remember the debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris? Remember when she said, “What you’re going to hear tonight is a very detailed and dangerous plan known as Project 2025, that the former president wants to implement if he gets re-elected.” That’s how she decided to warn the audience at the very beginning of the first and possibly last debate with her opponent, former President Trump.
To this, Trump decided to say that he had “nothing to do with it,” a fairly false claim that plenty of journalists and pundits repeatedly refuted over the course of these months. But would things really change if we ended up with Harris?
Even if Trump repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025 back in July, he still endorsed the Heritage Foundation’s work while it was still being drafted. “This is an astounding group, and they are going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for what our movement will do and what your movement will do” he stated at a dinner hosted by the foundation back in 2022.
From the far-right perspective, Project 2025 stands as a metaphor for the Hoover Dam against “the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions.” The 900-page document claims in its introduction that “The federal government is a behemoth weaponized against American citizens and also conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege like never before.”
The entire purpose of this project is to restore the original moorings in the American Republic. If you thought that more than 50 conservative think tanks and NGOs gathering together to formulate policy for a future president is totally unprecedented, it’s not your fault.
But in reality, it’s not really news under the sun. Project 2025 is far from the first time a bunch of far-right Beltway policy wonks decided to collide to help set an agenda for a would-be conservative presidency.
Moreover, if the political class had any intention of being truly transparent, they would have called this playbook Project 1965, since that’s how far back the American right started working on resetting progressive policies.
There’s definitely plenty to be outraged about even with a cursory read of Project 2025. Conservative policymakers want to privatize the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Food Insurance Program, and the federal housing loan giants, such as Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, and all the other federal subsidized student loans.
The Project 2025 gurus also wish to eliminate the US Department of Education (DOE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The DOE’s crime is the fact that they are “a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which, as the COVID era showed, isn’t specifically concerned with children’s education.
Schools should be quite responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination.” As for NOAA, they are a huge “operation that has become one of the number one drives of the climate change alarm industry and” are “harmful”, given their “fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
However, these far-right recommendations are still not enough to spark consternation. There’s way more out there. Project 2025’s authors also plan to coerce the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) into requiring all states to track abortions within their borders or threaten those states with “cutting of funds.”
The CDC’s “abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are completely inadequate”, as one author wrote in the project. He also mentioned that “liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism.”
On the same note, he recommends that the CDC “immediately end its collection of data on gender identity,” a scientific reality they rapidly labeled an “unscientific notion.” As for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)-targeted programs, critical race theory, and gender identity, Project 2025’s authors mention eliminating “social engineering, climate change (mitigation), critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies.” They also refuse to believe that “systemic racism” is even a thing.
However, as shocking as Project 2025’s prescriptions are, most of them aren’t even new. A decent number of them have already appeared in the Heritage Foundation-led publication Mandate for Leadership, which has been a quadrennial manual for conservatives for over 40 years.
At its core, the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators made this specific playbook available both to the Democratic and Republican parties. With an increase in the number of conservatives in power, the Mandate for Leadership became completely tuned to center-right and far-right rule.
There have been nine Mandate for Leadership publications in all all presidential election cycles since 1980, except for 1992, 2008, and 2012. In fact, in 1981, conservative policy wonks desired “revitalizing the economy,” through deregulation and massive tax cuts to “strengthen the national security” with beefed-up defense budgets.
They also aimed to “halt the centralization of power in the federal government.” How, do you wonder? Well, through privatizing public goods.
The roots of Mandate for Leadership go way back to the resistance to the fight for racial justice and civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. The backlash against the Civil Rights Movement helped spark a series of the conservative movement’s rise.
In 1962, as Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater prepared for an eventual run as the Republican nominee for president, he also declared that he was not a fan of segregation. “But I don’t like the Constitution kicked around either.”
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to make its way through Congress, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond went on TV to declare that he decided to leave the Democratic Party for the Republicans. “The Democratic Party has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups” Thurmond angrily added.
The stage was then set for a merger between the embryonic conservative movement, the Republican Party, and former members of the Democratic Party’s southern wing over their shared opposition to civil rights and other social justice problems.
That coalition reached its peak in Richard Nixon’s very successful “Southern Strategy” and appeals to a wider but silent majority that got him the presidency back in 1968. Ever since then, conservative operators have been working relentlessly to infuse their right-wing ideas into many different areas of American life.
The partial privatization of the US Postal Service is only one example. The authors of the first Mandate for Leadership called for an end to the public “monopoly” of the US Postal Service back in 1981.
So even if Harris becomes the 47th president of the US in January, Project 2025, or better yet, the post-1965 project meant to make the US a far-right nation-state will continue. She might potentially stop the full implementation at the federal level with Democratic control of the House and the Senate or with her veto power.
However, she won’t be able to stop it at the state level, where plenty of recommendations from American conservatives are already completely implemented.
Moreover, using “active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen” to patrol the border and arrest all the “illegal aliens” is also on the project’s agenda. In fact, both the Trump and Biden administrations have already started implementing this xenophobic policy.
As for Texas, Tennessee, Florida, and all the other states, they have managed to deploy their state National Guards in the most recent years, even if they did so in a rather disorganized fashion.
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