The New Odor

In the early 1940s, Adolf Hitler promoted a new economic and military policy for his "thousand-year Reich" called the "New Order," which he said was a program meant to preserve peace and harmony in Europe once the war was over.  In fact, the New Order was designed to make Germany the strongest country in Europe by confiscating resources from countries incorporated into the German state, like Denmark, and from countries turned into puppet states by the Nazis, like France, so they they could never rebel against or break free from the Reich.

Well, the Republican Party and the Heritage Foundation a similar plan called Project 2025, which they say is meant to facilitate conservative policy goals such as individual freedom and economic opportunity once a Republican becomes President again, hopefully for them in 2025. In fact, Project 2025 is designed to implement an enforce a reactionary agenda that would benefit wealthy individuals and powerful corporations at the expense of the middle and lower classes and would persecute Americans based on race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. It plans to dismantle the administrative duties of government, increase the number of political appointees in key departments, put government agencies directly under presidential control, deregulate big business at the expense of antitrust and environmental concerns, and disregard "sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights," and any other social issue that Project 2025 says is "used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights" by deleting those terms "out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists," according to Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, in the Project 2025 manifesto's foreword.

Project 2025 doesn't say its objective to set push forward an America First agenda, but it might as well have thrown in quotes from Charles Lindbergh himself to buttress its case. It twists the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in particular into defending American withdrawal from global agreements designed to ensure un-American concepts as environmental protection, women's rights, a code of conduct on the seas ("I always thought that when you're on the high seas you can do whatever you want" - Ronald Reagan), and children's welfare.  Here's Kevin Roberts again:

One of the great premises of American political life is that everyone who can read in that book must have a voice in deciding the course and fate of our Republic. Progressive policymakers and pundits in America either fail to understand this premise or intentionally reject it. They enthusiastically support supranational organizations like the United Nations and European Union, which are run and staffed almost entirely by people who share their values and are mostly insulated from the influence of national elections. That’s why they are eager for America to sign international treaties on everything from pharmaceutical patents to climate change to "the rights of the child" - and why those treaties invariably endorse policies that could never pass through the U.S. Congress. Like the progressive Woodrow Wilson a century ago, the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.

Except that the political system the right wishes to set up in the United States would be one not subject to democratic accountability.  They not only want a stronger executive, they want to divert power from the administrative state to Congress. When was the last time Congress was accountable for anything?

Not even the most mundane issue is spared in Project 2025's bid for total control.  Consider transportation, for example, a pet issue of mine.  I thumbed through Project 2025's manifesto to gauge conservative approaches toward public transit, and I found - sure enough - an advocacy to severely curtail spending on new transit projects while "reducing costs that make transit uneconomical," though, as CNBC recently reported, part of the problem with America's public transit system - possibly the worst transit system in the industrialized world - is that we haven't spent enough money on it.  Because - and this is why conservatives hate public transportation - there's no money in it.

And by he way, the Project 2025 manifesto doesn't even mention Amtrak.

It does mention public broadcasting - it wants to get rid of public broadcasting as we know it.   This is a topic so sprawling on its own that it deserves a separate discussion, which I'll present in my next blog entry. 

The big takeaway from Project 2025 is this.  The far right not only wants to make it easy for Trump or whoever the next Republican President may be to implement its fascist, reactionary agenda.  By destroying the administrative apparatus of the federal government and putting the President in greater control of agencies that can be hijacked by the executive branch, it wants to make it difficult if not impossible for the liberal opposition to restore it in the future.  And what about the liberal opposition, which the far right has so much contempt for?  Well, for starters, gerrymandering and an assault on voting rights would likely continue.  But all a restored Trump Presidency has to do, theoretically, is crack down on an anti-administration demonstration in Washington, like it did on a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020, and use the event as an excuse to declare martial law and outlaw opposition parties, using the military to escort Democrats from the Capitol and criminalizing dissent in short order.  And with the Federal Communications Commission, or Uncle Charlie, directly under the administration, all TV and radio news outlets would be shut down . . . except conservative ones.

And when dissent is made a capital crime, the executions will be broadcast on OAN.