Project 2025 Does Damage Control, Still Has Executive List
You have probably heard of Project 2025. It is the Heritage Foundation's 922-page recipe for open capitalist dictatorship under Donald Trump. As its chief Paul Dans wrote, “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” (Mandate for Leadership, p. xiv) Among the ingredients of Project 2025: dismantle the Department of Education and other federal agencies, reduce taxes on big corporations and the super-rich, and cancel any climate change law that oil and gas companies don't like.
The centerpiece is a “unitary executive”: make the president the open, direct ruler over the entire federal government, including supposedly independent agencies like the Department of Justice. Federal employees would have no civil service protection; the president could put his men wherever he wanted them. The Congress, spineless as it already is, would have no control over the White House.
It turns out that a huge part of the U.S. population has heard of Project 2025, and they don't like it.
An early July poll by YouGov found that about one-half of U.S. adults had heard of it. Project 2025 had a 13% favorable and 64% unfavorable rating. Among independents, it was 7% favorable and 38% unfavorable. Even among Republicans, 12% viewed it unfavorably.
Navigator has also polled it. At the end of June, the polling firm found that Project 2025 had a 10% favorable and 19% unfavorable rating. By mid-July, that favorable number stayed steady at 11%, while the unfavorable rating jumped to 43%.1
The numbers testify to a strong bourgeois democratic sentiment of the people. After these poll results came out, the liberal media publicized Project 2025 to reinforce popular alarm. Even the BBC in London chimed in.
Trump began to deny any connection to Project 2025, even though Mr. Dans had been a high personnel director in his administration.
Trump strategist Chris LaCivita wrote public statements disavowing the project. He started saying that people involved in the project would be barred from a second Trump administration.2
Under this onslaught, the Heritage Foundation tried to backtrack. It announced that Project 2025 chief Dans is departing.
But don't think the blueprint has been tossed into the fireplace.
Another arm of the project, a personnel database of more than 20,000 applicants for potential political appointments should Trump be reelected, will remain in operation, people familiar with the matter said.3
The hundreds of “conservative” ideologists who flocked to Project 2025 made the mistake of being candid. The liberal ruling class knows better. What do you really know about Kamala Harris’ plans to help U.S. capitalists keep the profits rolling in? About her plans to prop up the U.S. empire? Even the way she became the Democrats’ nominee is a backdoor story. When Biden finally withdrew, an open convention of the Democratic Party was the expected small-d democratic way to nominate a candidate. For a couple of days, liberal commentators wrote furiously to promote one or another prospective nominee.
But with lightning speed, billionaire donors to the Party decreed that Harris shall be the nominee. The Harris campaign received $200 million within a few days. Backers include George Soros, the currency manipulator who brought misery to a whole country when he broke the British pound; Reed Hastings of Netflix; Melinda French Gates, the divorced wife of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates; vulture capitalist Vinod Khosla; Reed Hoffman, who made his fortune with LinkedIn; Hollywood and online shopping magnate Barry Diller; and a series of Wall Street financiers including Marc Lasry, Frank Baker, and Christina Lewis.4,5,6
The answer to crude fascism is not capitalist democracy. The answer is socialist revolution. We the working class can run things. Working-class democracy is government of the working people, by the working people, and for the working people.
We have no recipe today for precise institutions. We were raised on lies about the communist movement, from scare stories in elementary school to fuzzy abstractions like “totalitarianism” in college. In revolution we will improve on the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Soviet Union and China during their socialist phases.
We the working class can make our own prosperity, share it in equality, and dedicate our energy and creativity to liberating labor from capitalist slavery.
Footnotes
1. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/30/2259368/-Project-2025-has-not-been-shut-down-much-to-Trump-s-dismay
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/30/project-2025-director-paul-dans-leaves-heritage-foundation
3. Ibid.
4. https://fox5sandiego.com/news/politics/list-these-are-the-billionaires-backing-kamala-harris/
5. https://fortune.com/2024/07/22/kamala-harris-endorsements-wall-street-billionaires-donors/
6. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kamala-harris-rich-donors-lina-khan/
Charles Andrews is the author of The Hollow Colossus
A list of his occasional essays is at http://www.hollowcolossus.com/moreCA.htm