What's Wrong and Right with Project 2025

by Thomas Neuburger

I want to add a few notes to the discussion on Project 2025, then hopefully pass from this discussion forever. Some of these notes may seem trivial or obvious to you, but I guarantee some will not. Read on.

What is Project 2025?

First, what is the Project 2025? According to the Project 2025 website, this is what it hopes to accomplish:

The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.

It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. 

This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.

Ignore the fact that much of the Project, at least according to its website, is a mess of right-wing fantasy, unserious planning, and contradiction.

(Fantasy: “The entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One.” Unserious planning: “The DNI and CIA Director should use their authority under the National Security Act of 1947 to … remove IC employees who have abused their positions of trust.” Contradiction: “Liberal democracy” is applauded, but “liberals” engage in a “ruthless pursuit of absolute power.” Also here. In addition, the Mandate document has as much an idea of what constitutes “the Left” or “Far Left” as any professional Republican propagandist. Reread the long quote above.)

Every Administration Wants to Accomplish Its Goals

Put those problems with the document aside though, and simply consider what the document promotes for the next administration: “a governing agenda and the right people in place.”

Except that this is proposed by the enemies of “the left” (I think they mean simply Democrats) how is their plan different from what the Actual Left — for example, a Sanders administration, the Manchin-cancelling one we imagined for ourselves — should or would do?

Thanks to this thread by Cory Doctorow, we’re pointed to historian Rich Perlstein’s contextualization of the Project. Doctorow (emphasis mine):

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.

Perlstein identifies declarations of similar “projects” in 1921 (the Harding administration), 1973 (the second Nixon administration), and 1981 (Reagan).

There’s nothing new in this. It’s standard fare for any administration that wants to shake things up, either left or right (by “left” I mean the actual left). If you don’t like your predatory neoliberalism liberally sauced with Christo-fascist ideology and toxic misogyny, of course it must be fought.

But it must be fought, not for its method of change, but for its ideas. 

Examples of Project 2025 Methods

Consider the 2009 Obama administration. Progressives wanted him to thoroughly clean house, fire the Bush-Cheney embeds or left-behinds. He didn’t. There was no Project 2009, to our great loss.

Or consider a “Sanders administration of the mind,” the one we wanted him to have. How much of the neoliberal trash should he have thrown out? How about all of it, including Joe Manchin (also here).

So No, the civil service should be preserved, contrary to what Project 2025 envisions, but…

Yes, the recalcitrants and left-behinds must be replaced if any new administration is to accomplish its goals.

When You Win, You Must Rule

If you win power and don’t use it, you lost. Unless your goal was to change nothing (see Biden in 2020), you failed in your goal.

Ian Welsh provides a stark reminder of this in several posts appropriate to this subject. In one he says (correctly, in my view):

You can’t play a game by the rules if the other side is determined to cheat and thinks you shouldn’t even be on the field.

The piece is entitled, “Why The Left Keeps Losing and What They Must Do to Win” (by “the left” he means the actual left). The context is what had been happening in South and Central America in the late-2010s, as well as what happened to Corbyn in the UK.

Enemy of the (actual) left will break every rule to make sure the left never wins. For example, in the UK: “Labor party staffers were working actively to lose the 2017 and 2020 elections. We have emails, we have proof.”

And here at home: “The US overthrew multiple elected governments overseas if they considered them left-wing. At home, coincidentally, JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcom X [sic] were all assassinated within a period of less than ten years, and we are expected to believe that the US security apparatus had nothing to do with that. (This doesn’t even pass the laugh test.)”

The lesson here is, when the actual left gains power, it must use it. It’s what every good change-agent movement attempts to do.

In that sense, the method of Project 2025 is not at all new; it’s the goals that are so repugnant. If we reject those methods in trying to accomplish our goals, we reject our own future win.

The Law of Purges

This leads to an obvious corollary, the law of purges: Purge your enemies from power or they’ll fight you forever. 

As Welsh points out in another piece aimed at giving advice to incoming left-wing Latin American administrations (emphasis mine):

Let’s not dance around. Your first step will be to break the power of the current economic and political elites who are not willing to convincingly join you–or, at least, let you rule without trying to sabotage you.

You must do this all at once. When it happens, it has to happen to everyone to whom it is going to happen. This is Machiavelli’s dictum, and he was right. After it has happened, those who weren’t broken know they’re safe as long as they don’t get in your way.

If the breaking keeps going on and on, everyone who still has something to lose (and still, thus, has power) lives in fear. They must destroy you before you destroy them.

His example is a North American one, our wished-for Barack Obama in 2009, he of the “Yes, we can.” Here’s Welsh’s expansion of that basic idea:

Let’s give a concrete example. Assume Obama was really a left-winger. He gets into power in 2009, and he really wants to change things. He needs to take out the financial elite: Wall Street and the big banks.

They’ve handed him the opportunity. Here’s part of how he does it: He declares all the banks involved in the sub-prime fraud racket (all of the big ones and most of the small ones) conspiracies under RICO.

He then says that all the individual executives’ money are proceeds derived from crime and confiscates it. (This is 100 percent legal under laws as they exist). He charges them, and they are forced to use public defenders.

They are now powerless. This is the second law of purges: Anyone you damage, you must destroy utterly. If you take away half their power, and leave them half, they will hate you forever and use their remaining power to destroy you.

Leave them whole, or destroy them. The financial executives would have been destroyed, and win or lose in the courts, the next five to ten years of their lives would be consumed by personal legal nightmares.

If Obama were an actual leftist, he would have done all this … and we would have applauded him for it, despite the Machiavellian character of the means.

If Sanders had won in 2016, he hinted he would have cleaned house … and we would have applauded him for it. In fact, his core supporters would have been miserable had he not had the courage to use what power he had won.

So let’s not be too hard on Project 2025 for its methods. The reason: In some future year, when Jupiter perhaps aligns with Mars, we, the actual left, may win power for ourselves. Will we piss it away or use it?

If we use it, these methods are exactly what we’ll employ.