Project 2025: Reaganism 2.0?
US plutocracy does the same thing over and over again, expecting the results will be different this time around
Trickle-down economics, derided as “voodoo” by George H.W. Bush in the 1980 Republican primary election against Ronald Reagan, still haunts us in the US — even as tax cuts for the wealthy, social spending cuts, and increased military spending year after year creates domestic austerity leaving ordinary people in dire straits.
In the beginning
Ordinary people don’t matter much to Project 2025. This bane of the Democratic Party (if political messaging is correct), actually got its start way back in 1979 with the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate For Leadership.” The foundation’s board of trustees (including Nixon’s Treasury Secretary Bill Simon and Ford’s GSA Administrator Jack Eckerd) wanted a road map for changing the entire US federal bureaucracy.
The Heritage Foundation, an organization once referred to as “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis,” created this road map by following this guidance: “If a conservative candidate were to become the President-elect in just 16 months, what could be done by an outside group to prepare for these new opportunities?” They focused on reducing the size and scope of government and strict construction of the Constitution.
These conservative ideologues, guided by neoliberal economics, believed that deregulating and privatizing a wide range of activities would spur private sector innovation and allow the United States to dominate the world economy. They really argued that wealth would “trickle down” to benefit all of society.
Ronald Reagan distributed copies of the very first “Mandate For Leadership” to his incoming cabinet when he took office, and they in turn followed its recommendations, especially tax cuts for the rich and rebuilding the military.
Post 2016
Since Reagan, a new “Mandate For Leadership” has been published every four years. By the time Donald Trump was elected, the Heritage Foundation had eight years worth of conservative ideas built up with technically no outlet while a Democrat was in the White House (although looking carefully at the “Affordable Care Act” it is easy to see the Heritage Foundation influence).
“An unspoken aim of Project 2025 is to inject some ideological coherence into Trumpism.” In other words, the Heritage Foundation wants a second bite of the apple since its first attempt to bring Trump to heel (the 2016 “Mandate For Leadership”) didn’t work.
Moving forward
The Heritage Foundation believes that it can insure success of its plan in four steps:
- Use the “Mandate For Leadership” as a guiding manifesto
- Recruite and vet conservatives to serve in the next administration, then revive Trump’s infamous ‘Schedule F’ Executive Order to shake up the federal work force and get rid of people who don’t share the Heritage Foundation point of view
- Use a “Presidential Administration Academy” to train the new workforce per the “Mandate For Leadership” guidelines
- Use a ready made playbook for the first 180 days of the incoming administration that contains things like draft executive orders
If reading a 900+ page document (the Project 2025 “Mandate For Leadership”) just to get an overview isn’t your cup of tea, Emma Shortis, “Friday essay: Project 2025, the policy substance behind Trump’s showmanship, reveals a radical plan to reshape the world” is more approachable. In it she outlines the general goals of Project 2025:
- Abolish the Federal Reserve
- Reverse all climate change mitigation policies
- Increase extraction of fossil fuels
- End economic exchange with China
- Expand the nuclear arsenal
- Conduct a cost-benefit analysis of United States participation in all international programs including the UN and related agencies
As Shortis says, “Project 2025’s Mandate is iconoclastic and dystopian, offering a dark vision of a highly militaristic and unapologetically aggressive America ascendant in ‘a world on fire.’”
Despite this totalitarian pronouncement, a saving grace for the world beyond US borders is the rising multipolar nature of geopolitics. Nations are moving on and the US as a “superpower” is a distant memory.
Will Washington, DC ever wake up?
