Responding to Project 2025
It’s really encouraging to see the heightened media coverage of Project 2025. Surely (he thinks!) as people learn more about it, fewer and fewer people will elect a candidate for president aligned with those who developed it.
Even if said candidate narrowly escaped an assassination attempt yesterday evening.
But responding to it requires a deeper understanding of where it came from, how deep its roots are in the culture of the United States, and which people are supporting it. Cory Doctorow offers help on all three counts. It’s a long piece, especially for the web world, but I think it’s well worth a careful read.
I’ll highlight several important points here. First, the document is but one statement in a long history of statements, statements by conservatives in the United States who think it immoral that they be asked to give up any of the power and wealth they’ve accumulated, regardless of how they came to accumulate it. In fact, many of them believe, the existence of their power and wealth proves their superiority to the rest of us.
When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a hereditary meritocracy: a bloodline infused with God’s favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the “good bloodline” reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty. Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his “race realism” with mystical nonsense: “God favored me with superior genes.” The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn’t favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.
Many of these people see democracy itself as a threat to their existence and/or a set of strategies they can manipulate to frustrate the will of the people. One of the ironies of this movement is that these manipulations attract the support of many who stand to lose by the implementation of these strategies. I’m reminded here of Hannah Arendt’s notion that tyranny emerges when an elite person or group manages to get himself (isn’t it always a him?) appointed or adopted as the representative of the mob. Surely (he thinks!) people who don’t have resources to flourish, or even survive, in the world as we know it won’t elect a candidate for president aligned with a movement dedicated to take still more resources from them.
Even if said candidate narrowly escaped an assassination attempt yesterday evening.
But, Doctorow continues, those pushing Project 2025 have assembled a rather haphazard of people supporting their movement, offering something to each of them, even though many of whom have radically different views of the world.
Pandering to all these groups isn’t easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things – the post-Roe forced birth policies that followed the Dobbs decision are wildly unpopular among conservatives, with the exception of a clutch of totally unhinged maniacs that the party relies on as part of a much larger coalition. Even more unpopular are policies banning birth control, like the ones laid out in Project 2025. Less popular still: the proposed ban on no-fault divorce. Each of these policies have different constituencies to whom they are very popular, but when you put them together, you get Dan Savage’s “Husbands you can’t leave, pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate, politicians you can’t vote out of office.“ …
The constituency for “husbands you can’t leave, pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate, politicians you can’t vote out of office” is very small. Almost no one in the GOP coalition is voting for all of this, they’re voting for one or two of these things and holding their noses when it comes to the rest.
Doctorow suggests that this could be the Achilles heel of the movement. We should push the different proposals in Project 2025, highlighting those that, while attractive to a minority of conservatives, are deeply unpopular to others.
But back to that candidate who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt yesterday.
Even though Trump insists he knows nothing about Project 2025, while saying at the same time that he disagrees with much of it, his current and former advisers have been deeply involved in its development. Working against Project 2025, together with emphasizing the many ways in which Trump’s campaign is tied up in it, is crucial. In the end, responding to Project 2025 is itself a response to Trump’s candidacy.