https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual
"Like you, I have heard a lot about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's
roadmap for the actions that Trump should take if he wins the presidency. Given
the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project,
it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect:
https://www.project2025.org/
But (nearly) all the reporting and commentary on Project 2025 badly misses the
point. I've only read a single writer who immediately grasped the true
significance of Project 2025:
The American Prospect's Rick Perlstein, which
is unsurprising, given Perlstein's stature as one of the left's most important
historians of right wing movements:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/
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. The project of the right is grounded in a
belief in Providence: that God's favor shines on His best creations and
elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is
"that which leads to elite status."
When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power,
this is merely a
hereditary meritocracy: a
bloodline infused with God's
favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience,
with the "good bloodline" reflecting superior
genetics and not the favor of
the Almighty. Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his "race
realism" with mystical nonsense: "God favored me with superior genes." The
corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn't favor you, or
because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.
So we
should be alarmed by the right's agenda. We should be alarmed at how
much ground it has gained, and how the right has stolen elections and Supreme
Court seats to enshrine antimajoritarianism as a seemingly permanent fact of
life, giving extremist minorities the power to impose their will on the rest of
us, dooming us to a roasting planet, forced births, racist immiseration, and
the most expensive, worst-performing health industry in the world.
But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous,
humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified
force, marching to victory after inevitable victory. The American right is a
brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large
number of turkeys to vote for Christmas."
Via David.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
