We’re hearing, at least through media sources one might consider somewhat left-leaning, that “Project 2025” from the Heritage Foundation is an open plan for a fascist takeover of the United States following the example of Mussolini or even Hitler. Both those leaders mobilized street thugs, neutralized the legislative and judicial branches, and co-opted big business almost entirely. They also brought state/provincial and local police forces completely under their central control. Is Trump or any American leader even remotely capable of herding the cats that make up our decentralized, fragmented, and largely dysfunctional government? I’m a little skeptical, so let’s take a look at what’s actually in the document.

Keep in mind, the Republican Party did not even manage to pull together a written party platform in 2020. It was literally the party of no ideas. And that, in fact, does sound like Mussolini, who had no real concrete or coherent policy proposals, and ruled more on charisma, machismo and promises to Make the Roman Empire Great Again. And from what I understand, he was far better at campaigning than actually governing. Hitler, evil as he was, certainly put together a highly functional administrative state at least for a few years. And right off the bat, this document makes a “promise” right in the introduction (pp. 35-36) to decentralize power and dismantle the administrative state.

First of all, the actual document on the website is called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” and then further down the page, “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project”. Each chapter of this thing is written by a different “conservative scholar” covers a different part of the executive branch. So at this point, I have to say it seems totally normal for the leader of the executive branch to have a plan for who he (or she – I’ll just do the pronoun thing once) wants in each box of his org chart and to have some idea of what he would like each person to do once they are there. So I’ve skimmed through this 920 page document very quickly and tried to pull out a few highlights. It’s hard because although the document claims to make concrete policy recommendations, it doesn’t really. It mostly identifies key positions in the executive branch and recommends hiring people to fill them who agree with a very nebulous policy agenda of “protecting Christian families”.

• It talks a lot about “families”. What it seems to mean by this is married heterosexual Christian couples with children.
• It talks a lot about Christianity. It talks a lot about school choice. What it seems to mean by this is married heterosexual Christian couples teaching their own children to think like them. It actually states that “schools serve parents” and that parents are their children’s “primary educators”.
• It talks about protecting Christian American families within our borders against foreigners. This seems to be the primary purpose of the military.
• It talks about debt. What it seems to mean by this is eliminating most of the social safety net, possibly to lower taxes for Christian families. Of course, this does not apply to the cost of protecting Christian families from foreigners, which is worth any price.
• But amid all this nebulous rhetoric, there are some concrete policy proposals that are just blatant giveaways to rich and powerful big business interests. A few are below (I can’t figure out how to make a simple indented list in this latest ridiculous version of WordPress.
• “The President should eliminate the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), which is cochaired by the OSTP, OMB, and CEA, and by executive order should end the use of SCC analysis.” [because why would our children need food, or coastal population centers? This is evil.]
• Double down on the war on drugs. This does not mean helping addicts, which is a “leftist woke” idea. It means ramping up violence on our streets, at and near our borders. And this should not be managed by people with professional experience, it should be managed by politicians with political aims.
• Lots of homophobic stuff. I won’t even go into it. When the “next conservative President” is looking for all these political appointees, a great place to start the search will be closets.
• Merit hiring, merit pay based on performance appraisal results, and the ability to let underperformers go in the civil service bureaucracy. Okay, I could get behind this one in theory as should anyone who has ever been to a post office. But they also want to gut benefits for federal workers, which is not really the right idea. [A good idea would be more along the lines of extending similar benefits to private sector workers. And most of the private sector, save certain corners of the finance industry, would benefit greatly from this. But the finance industry gets what it wants, such as no functional health care system.]
• They just generally want to gut the bureaucracy and starve the beast, of course. Same old ideas they have always had. They sell them on the idea that the money would be given back to average people, when in reality these ideas are always used to justify subsidies for the already wealthy and powerful at everyone else’s expense.
• Prepare for “great power competition”, and specifically for a war with China over Taiwan. Then stick a fork in China’s eye. [great way to pare the national debt, right?]
• Active support by active duty military for border control.
• NUCLEAR MODERNIZATION AND EXPANSION [because why do our children need to survive to old age at all? This is evil.]
• Just shovel money at defense contractors without limit, and make producing weapons the focus of the U.S. economy. Funding research and development is okay only when it is about weapons.
• Double down on recruiting high schoolers into the military. pp. 134-135 – this section is particularly chilling.

I’ll go ahead and post this since I haven’t posted in awhile. Maybe I’ll continue looking at the document in another post.