But (nearly) all the reporting and commentary on Project 2025 badly misses the point. I’ve only read a single writer who immediately grasped the true significance of Project 2025: The American Prospect’s Rick Perlstein, which is unsurprising, given Perlstein’s stature as one of the left’s most important historians of right wing movements:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/
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. The project of the right is grounded in a belief in Providence: that God’s favor shines on His best creations and elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is “that which leads to elite status.”
I think this matters, but also doesn’t. We gotta vote and rally people against this or it stands a chance of happening.
People have been deceived into voting against their best interests for decades and that effort has been helped by the rise of controlled cable news.
A history of fighting this and mostly winning gives us poor assurance it won’t happen in our life time - or largely by this time next year.
The GOP coalition isn’t a bunch of idiots deceived into voting against their interests. I mean, some probably are. But the core is a bunch of people who have been convinced that sacrificing one less important interest will give them a big win in passionately held goal. This gives nobility to the harms, because they are choosing harm for their belief in the greater good.
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.
I wonder if he thinks Chevron deference was a democratic institution.
