The first thing that struck me was its use of almost laughingly silly descriptions and condemnations of liberal trends or policies. The first note from its director, Paul Dans, declares that ‘The Long March of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass’. Either Paul Dans has no idea what Marxism really is or he is purposely using a description that makes no sense, simply as a way to toss red meat to his audience.
No one in any position of power in the left is espousing Marxism. Indeed, US liberalism is quite a bit more conservative than the current governments of most European nations, who are seen as middle-of-the-road by their constituents. And those citizens, by the way, seem generally quite a bit happier and more fulfilled than we are in most polls.
The project goes on to describe an America in free fall where the ‘very moral foundations of our society are in peril’. This type of hyperbole is disingenuous at best, but at worst can lead to dangerous consequences when taken at face value by Christian nationalists and right-wing extremists.
The first of four promises the project makes is to ‘restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children’. It sees government as an evil that subverts the family and promotes fatherlessness. It lays at its feet a litany of ills – poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts. It characterizes the efforts of liberals to use government programs to improve society as some sort of malevolent, Godless force.
Rational people can disagree over the reasons for the 50+ year intractable and complex nature of single parent households, drug addiction, homelessness, and crime, but the implication throughout this document is that this is a war between good and evil. This is not only simplistic and ignorant, but also by its religious and moral proclamations is an attempt to preclude further reasonable debate, compromise and progress on these important issues.
The second promise is to ‘dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people’. This section laments the growth of government and implies some sort of corrupt agenda of the executive branch and other ‘liberal elites’. It seeks to return to a simpler government that reflects the original intent of the founders, as if there is any more than a very tenuous relationship between that simple, isolated agricultural society and today’s incredibly complex, globally interwoven nation. This quasi-religious fixation on the original intent of the constitution and the simple world that it encompassed, including the societal mores and prohibitions of that time period, is at the heart of this document.
There is no doubt that any government can be bureaucratic and inefficient, and that continuous efforts must be made to eliminate waste and control its growth, but Project 2025’s fantasy of dismantling the so-called administrative state is a delusion that would exacerbate the already huge disparities in income and wealth and gut the protections against pollution, financial fraud, tax evasion, climate change, hunger, homelessness and other well-documented pitfalls of a complex, urban society.
The third promise is ‘defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats’. This voices the paranoia that the extreme right has regarding international cooperation, treaties, NATO, climate agreements, globalization, engagement with China and any other attempts to join with the rest of the world in addressing common interests and preventing conflict. Again, the bogeyman of ‘global elites’ is offered up as the root of all evil. This type of isolationism has been an undercurrent of American political thought for two centuries, but it is particularly absurd in a world that is so obviously integrated and co-dependent.
The 4th and last promise, to ‘secure our God=given individual right to enjoy the blessings of liberty’, is a vague jumble of half-baked complaints that somehow Americans are not really free to enjoy the blessings of liberty because of elites that want to limit the free market and tell everyone what they should think. Again, the tired labels of Marxism, socialism, fascism, wokism and other liberal epithets are invoked with scant concrete or analytical evidence of what the hell these horrors are inflicting on our brave, freedom-denied citizens.
The Reagan years are intoned repeatedly and reverently in the project as a brief golden age where the true American values revived our economy, brought back religion and morality and forced the Soviet Union to its knees. It neglects to mention that the economic success of that era paled in comparison to that of the 90’s under Clinton (and the deficit increased dramatically under Reagan due to tax cuts) and that the societal ills that Project 2025 blames on liberalism grew worse – more drugs, more incarceration, more births to single mothers, more crime. Moreover, Project 2025 might want to take note that the rest of the world, including our closest European allies, credit Gorbachev and other factors for the breakup of the Soviet Union rather than Reagan’s ‘tear down this wall’ and ‘evil empire’ approach.
And even Project 2025, despite its fervor to promote anti-globalism, cannot help but acknowledge the complexity of economic policy and it devotes some 50 pages to two diametrically opposed views on free trade (one for and one against).
One of the main techniques Project 2025 envisions for taking down the administrative state and accomplishing its goals is to use an executive order to change career civil servants into political appointees and replace much of the current so-called ‘deep state’. The chaos and inefficiency that would follow this type of drastic maneuver is almost unimaginable.
Some of the most aggressive goals of the project are not surprising - the plan to completely outlaw abortion, including pharmaceutical products, and jail any who attempt to sidestep these laws, and a crusade against the so-called woke agenda - outlawing transgender therapy, pornography (whose definition one might ask) and arresting/labeling as sexual deviants librarians or educators who allow educational materials that address these subjects.
The champions of Project 2025 are living in an illusory world, longing for an America that never was what they imagine it was, and certainly could never be recreated. They are particularly frightened by the changes in society that have occurred in the past 50 years – sexuality, birth control, abortion, gay and transgender rights, racial and ethnic mixing, feminism, decreases in churchgoing and religious affiliation, birthrate decline. Rather than engage in healthy dialogue on how these changes can be managed in a way that limits any negative ramifications, the proponents of Project 2025 want to destroy their perceived adversaries and initiate changes that every poll of public opinion says would be deeply unpopular with the overall population.
Project 2025 zealots may see themselves in a holy war of good versus evil, but in reality, they are fighting a doomed rearguard action against human evolution. It is certainly possible that Donald Trump could win the election and that they would get to implement some of their mean-spirited vendettas. But in the end they will find themselves stymied and gnashing their teeth as the world, in all its messy complexity, moves onward.
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