The Heritage Foundation’s roadmap on how they want to transform the federal government has been discussed before, but not taken as deeply as it might have been. Carlos Lozada has taken time to read it, and the language he quotes is chilling. The entire opinion piece is linked here with full access:
Lozada starts out with some reflex both-sideism:
Every new administration that wins power away from the opposing party contends that whatever its predecessors did was terrible and that victory constitutes a popular mandate to fix or get rid of it all. Elections have consequences, politicians love to remind us, and a big one entails trying to change everything, right away.
It is possible to read “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — an 887-page document proposing to remake the executive branch, department by department, agency by agency, office by office — as one more go-round in this Washington tradition. With contributions by dozens of conservative thinkers and activists under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the book announces itself as part of a “unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, Jan. 20, 2025.” There is much work ahead, it states, “just to undo the significant damage that will have been done during the Biden years.”
emphasis added
Lozada throws in some disclaimers, that the plan hasn’t been officially endorsed by Trump, that a lot of it is what would be expected from a conservative standpoint. That bland observation demonstrates just how acclimated the media has become to an increasingly radical right wing agenda.
And how many times have we been told not to worry — because “they wouldn’t actually do that.”?
He notes that the first Trump term is now seen as a lost opportunity because of the inability of an inexperienced Trump to do more than create chaos — and this is a plan to give him a blueprint to follow, now that he has a clearer understanding of what held him back last time.
It’s not until the fourth paragraph down that Lozada gets to the real import of the Heritage Foundation plan:“Yet what is most striking about the book is not the specific policy agenda it outlines but how far the authors are willing to go in pursuit of that agenda and how reckless their assumptions are about law, power and public service.”
Lozada goes on to pass on some of what he’s culled from the nearly 900 pages of the plan. It’s truly frightening to realize just what these people plan to do, and how much effort they’ve put into it. If Trump doesn’t get to be the nominee — and that seems unlikely at this point — any Republican in the White House will do their best to put it into practice. The plan goes into every agency, every department, on how to make them conform to their goals, and calls for a thoroughly politicized federal work force.
Permanently.
Read the whole thing. I’m pulling out this section because it really shows the mindset of the people behind this and where they’re coming from.
Ironically, in this worldview, the people’s needs and desires can become circumscribed. In the book’s foreword, Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes that the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence should be understood as the “pursuit of blessedness,” that is, that “an individual must be free to live as his creator ordained — to flourish.” The Constitution, he explains, “grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” The book ties this argument to the philosophical and legal concept of “ordered liberty,” in which individual rights are weighed against social stability.
The notion that liberty entails the discipline to do the right thing, as opposed to the choice to do whatever things we want, has a long lineage in American political thought, dating back to the Puritans and the “city on a hill.” But in “Mandate for Leadership,” the answer to what we ought to do depends on the cultural and religious proclivities of the authors. “This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family — marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners and the like,” Roberts writes. It is also found in work, charity and, above all, in “religious devotion and spirituality.” Later, in a chapter on the Department of Labor, the book suggests that because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest,” American workers should be paid extra for working on that day. “A shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals,” it says.
emphasis added
This sounds like the kind of thought control/doublethink Stalin would have loved and Kim Jong Un demands. Vladimir Putin should be listed as a sponsor. I’m sure the Ayatollahs of Iran would applaud the religious basis for what constitutes proper behavior, if not the religion. Combine this with the theocratic rulings coming out of Federalist Society judges, Trump’s demand that presidents should have absolute immunity, and the xenophobic rantings of people like Sean Hannity, Orwellian doesn't begin to describe it.
I wrote this up last July (the photo at top) is a screen cap of The NY Times article that came out at the time. (Many people commented how The NY Times chose a photo that emphasized Trump’s ‘presidentiality’ complete with waving American Flag on Air Force One.) I got in trouble for quoting too extensively from the article because I’d run out of gift links. (Thanks again to Novapsyche for providing one.)
Lozada’s opinion piece is if anything more alarming than the Times report from back then. He quotes from the Mandate where a former Trump justice department official admits “until there is a return to a constitutional structure that the founding fathers would have recognized and a massive shrinking of the administrative state, conservatives cannot unilaterally disarm and fail to use the power of government to further a conservative agenda.”
Translation: They’ll give up their control of government only when we pry it out of their dead cold hands.
So what do we get for news coverage these days of what is going to be perhaps the most critical election since Lincoln first became president? Horserace coverage over who’s ahead, who has ‘problems’ — and damn little about what either candidate would do if they got another term in the White House. The idiots who are choosing to punish Biden for not magically ending the ongoing Israeli war crimes in Gaza, or complain that they have no idea what Biden has done for them are going to get a real shock if they think another Trump term is no big deal.
It would be a really good thing if someone — anyone — in the MSM would start taking the Mandate For Leadership apart and publish exactly what it would mean for ordinary Americans, in regular installments. Hell — it would be a great thing if the Democratic Party would do it. Call it “In Their Own Words” and issue a continuing series of press releases, social media posts, etc. The Right Wing Media Complex floods the zone with shit every day; it would be a good thing to put them on the defensive over this totalitarian path into Fascism.
If Trump suddenly disappeared, the Republican Party would still be an existential threat. We need to make people realize it while there is still time. With rare exceptions, the media isn’t going to do it. It’s up to us.
UPDATE:
Digby quotes a Guardian report on one of the people who is a co-author of Project 2025: Stephen Moore.
Moore and others named in the report are long-time advocates of privatizing Social Security — so that the financial industry can loot all of that money the system handles. As Digby notes:
All those people are staunch opponents of social security and medicare. If they can finally get their hands on all that money for their rich benefactors to play with in the markets, you can believe they will do it. Privatization has always been their goal and we’re far enough from the calamity of 2008 now (and the markets are booming) so they almost surely think people have forgotten what can happen when your entire nest egg is in the market. I could happen.
The Guardian article is a who’s who of predatory capitalists and ideologues:
Stephen Moore, a conservative economist whose controversial remarks about women cost him a seat on the Federal Reserve board in 2019, is now co-author of a plan to radically reform the US treasury as part of Project 2025, a vast rightwing effort to advance radical policy proposals for Donald Trump’s possible White House return.
“Project 2025 is all about forcing a far-right agenda on to everyday Americans,” said Tony Carrk, the executive director of the progressive watchdog Accountable.US, which produced an extensive report on Moore’s views and positions.
“So it’s no wonder they tapped a notorious social security opponent like Stephen Moore to help write their policy schemes.”
Moore, Carrk said, had “dedicated his career to slashing social security benefits and taxes for billionaires”.
Read the Guardian article if you want more details on the Rogue’s Gallery involved in this.