Defining Fascism And Contextualizing Project 2025 Within It
The Heritage Foundation has a plan - not a democratic plan, but rather a reach for control. We wrestle with it by first defining Fascism. Then, we rail against it, as should all Americans.
Hello, friends,
Last week we did a general update article where we talked about everything from the idea that there are two tiers of justice to a little Republican ambition called Project 2025.
With a week to think about it, I’ve decided it’s a good idea to do a slightly deep dive into Project 2025. It’s self-described as: “The project is the effort of a broad coalition of conservative organizations, primarily led by The Heritage Foundation, that have come together to ensure a successful administration begins in January 2025. With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”
Now, with such a dense package of what I can only assume to be Republican bullshit, there’s a limit to how deep a dive I can actually pull off within the time-span of a week. Or even two weeks. Hell, it’s worth noting that spending too much time on this would be the equivalent of submission to an indirect gish gallop. It starts talking about the Department of Justice at around 545 pages in.
In other words: I could build multiple articles out of this plan, but it would come at the cost of looking into other, more pressing issues.
Ultimately, we’re going to tie this project back to an idea we often talk about at the edges of this publication. I’ve talked about it before on my personal website, but I figure it’s time to provide a condensed definition here: Fascism.
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Defining Fascism
Those of you who’ve already checked out my prior article on the topic understand that I subscribe to Roger Griffin’s definition of Fascism, which is the somewhat complicated phrase “Palingenetic Ultranationalism.”
The “ultranationalism” is the easy part to define, which Oxford defines as “extreme nationalism that promotes the interests of one state or people above all others.” From my perspective: If Patriotism can be defined as love for one’s country, and nationalism can be framed as putting one’s nation above other interests, than ultranationalism is essentially “My country, right or wrong.”
It’s the first word, the “Palingenetic,” that gets people tripped up. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a whole page dedicated to Palingenesis. It’s tied to the concept of the rebirth of a given people.
Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios said it best in his Alt-Right Playbook episode on Fascism. You can watch his video for his own take, which is awesome, but I’ll summarize my biggest take-away in paraphrasical form here: ‘We are an ancient and noble people, but we’ve been kept down for some time. But now is our time to rise again!’
Yes, spellcheck, I just made up a word.
When you put the concept of Palingenetic Ultranationalism together in its proper context, it takes the Paligenetic myth of “we are an ancient and noble people who will rise again” and essentially adds an, “At any cost to others - it’s our way or the highway, there’s no other path to greatness but this” to it.
So let’s compare that concept to what Project 2025 is spouting.
Project 2025 Is A Fascist Plan For The U.S.
Let’s begin at the beginning, with the document’s foreword: “Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today:” writes Dr. Kevin D. Roberts in “A Promise To America.”
He then goes on to list a number of ongoing problems, some real but most imagined, that plague America. In other words, “We are an ancient and noble people who have been kept down.”
Put another way by Roberts, “The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline.”
Then, he outlines the whole purpose of Project 2025: “The legacy of Mandate for Leadership, and indeed of the entire Reagan Revolution, is that if conservatives want to save the country, we need a bold and courageous plan. This book is the first step in that plan.”
This is their “Our way or the highway.”
But, maybe I’m being unfair.
After all, a premise is just a premise. Republicans don’t hold the Executive branch (though they clearly hold the Judicial one), so they have to pretend there’s some kind of problem in the country in order to argue that they deserve power. And, fittingly, they have to claim they have some kind of plan in order to fix those problems. There’s nothing unusual about that.
So let’s dig into how they plan to do this.
Gee, Project 2025 Is Only About Scrapping The Bureaucracy
“Reducing the number of federal employees seems an obvious way to reduce the overall expense of the civil service, and many prior Administrations have attempted to do just this” argues Project 2025 in Chapter Three, “Central Personnel Agencies: Managing The Bureaucracy.” The way this is phrased makes it seem like this is purely a cost-cutting measure, but it doesn’t take Chapter Three long to get into who would be targeted, and why.
They suggest scrapping the entire governmental approach to working with unions: “Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place. The bipartisan consensus up until the middle of the 20th century held that these unions were not compatible with constitutional government.”
I mean, do I really need to spell out why they’d attack unionized employees?
Another point I took note of in this chapter was when the authors said, talking about Trump’s term in office, “Fortunately, the later PPO, OPM, and Senate leadership began to cooperate to build a strong team to implement the President’s personnel appointment agenda. Any new Administration would be wise to learn that it will need a full cadre of sound political appointees from the beginning if it expects to direct this enormous federal bureaucracy.”
As I would have told my students back during my teaching days: Extract the key phrase, “full cadre of sound political appointees.” Evaluate that.
What they are doing is making clear they intend to dismantle the existing governmental bureaucracy in order to replace it purely with political appointees. Project 2025 disfavors holdovers from the prior administration to retain institutional knowledge, in exchange for favoring a whole new form of bureaucracy that ultimately doesn’t resemble what existed beforehand.
So, let’s explore what this looks like in practice.
For Starters, Project 2025 Wants To Rearrange Homeland Security.
Look, I was barely turning into an adult around 9/11 and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003. I don’t really remember how things functioned beforehand, I just know they changed after the 9/11 attacks, so it’s hard for me to easily sum up whether or not those changes worked. DHS incorporated a bunch of pre-existing organizations that had existed under different departments, and added the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Well, Chapter Five of Project 2025 deals with DHS, and hoo boy is it a doozy. In fact, it’s such a doozy that instead of trying to copy-paste all the relevant data, it’s best if I take a screengrab and post it as an image:
In other words, this would be a complete and total overhaul of our national security apparatus. While there are certainly things I disagree with about what currently exists - say, the Patriot Act - the idea of a President totally overhauling our defensive posture is…Risky? I mean, we consolidated all these agencies under DHS precisely because a massive attack was pulled off against our populace. I’m all for re-examining some of those decisions, but this isn’t a re-examination.
It’s a purge.
Remember how we recently talked about a President needing all sorts of political appointees to accomplish their agenda? That’s true of any President, but under ordinary circumstances we would expect those people to get behind the wheel of a car that is already in motion. Or, I’m sorry, in this case it’s a military apparatus, so it’s more like a tank.
And in this case, they’re stopping in order to build a whole new tank.
A tank filled with brand new political appointees who will answer only to their boss.
Do tanks even have drivers’ wheels? I dunno.
My point is, this is a radical reconstruction of our government’s defensive setup, and it eschews a conversation about what could be fixed gradually in exchange for immediate politicization of a brand new system. It’s impossible to guess how many open cases would, with this rearrangement, get lost in the cracks.
But - hey! - maybe I’m just looking at military stuff because Ultranationalism is tied to military stuff. Okay! Here’s a few glimpses at other stuff that I know many of you probably care about. At the very least, it’s stuff I care about, and since I’m the one writing this article you’ve read over 1,400 words of (I hope!), I guess that’s what we’re going to look at.
Oh, Look, They Still Want To Tear It All Down
The first sentence of Chapter Eleven, fittingly enough, calls for the destruction of the Department of Education. We’ve talked before in this publication about how Republicans want to weaponize education as a tool to create harm, and this would remove any Federal oversight from that situation. That would further encourage regressive educational policies on the state level.
Chapter Thirteen is about the Environmental Protection Agency, and it's a surprise that they aren’t calling for it to be destroyed outright. Oh, sure, they believe “EPA’s structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed to reflect the principles of cooperative federalism and limited government.” But at least they don’t want to outright destroy it.
Chapter Fourteen is about Health and Human Services, and while there are certainly a lot of changes that we need to our healthcare system - see our article on Medicare For All - I somehow doubt that the first priority we need to worry about is, as stressed by Project 2025, “white populations alone losing 7 percent of their expected life span in just one year.” Funny how other groups weren’t explored, there. I wonder why. It’s also no surprise that there’s a great emphasis on “religious freedom” as well as “protect[ing] children’s minds and bodies” from “Radical actors inside and outside government are promoting harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of ‘gender identity.’” I wonder why.
Transphobia much?
Chapter Eighteen is about the Department Of Labor, and in case you had any doubts, the first paragraph contains the sentence “The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family.” It focuses significantly on Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) as well as Critical Race Theory, insofar as to say that it needs to get rid of those things. There’s also a lot of talk about getting the Equal Employment Opportunity Office to stop collecting data on race. I wonder why.
Racism, much?
It’s definitely Palingenetic - a certain type of American is obsessed with that.
There’s More, But I’m Tired.
Let’s be really real. I’ve done about four chapters in moderate depth, with another four or so in mild depth, and there are thirty of these things. Thirty of which I am simply one Human and unable to get through. This publication is and will always be free, so it’s not like I’m getting paid for this, which is fine.
I’m in it for the cause of fighting this Fash bullshit.
If you want to dig in, yourself, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment here with what you find. I encourage it! But I think I’ve managed the task of framing Fascism, then framing how these changes support Fascism.
In Other News…
First and foremost, Senator Tommy Tuberville continues to blockade military promotions, apparently setting our defenses back by years. My suspicion is that he is doing this because he plans to stall all possible promotions until such a time that a Republican president is making the promotions, similar to how this article’s “kick out the old and bring in the loyal” mantra goes.
At least 20,000 are feared dead in Libya alone after the Mediterranean Sea experienced tropical storm Daniel. Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, and even Egypt got hit with devastating storms, each to their own degree. These things are rare, but this might be the most powerful ever recorded. Not unexpected given a time of climate change.
U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy unilaterally declared an impeachment proceeding against Joe Biden. Good luck, I guess. What does he think he’s going to accomplish? Go Go Kamala Harris? Even the linked CNN article notes that he did this while not, you know, passing a budget.
Hunter Biden was indicted on gun charges. I guess I’m not gonna vote for him for President or anything. His dad? Maybe, sure. Also - hey, when are we gonna talk about Jared Kushner’s $2,000,000,000 deal with the Saudis around the time that Mister Bone Saw killed Jamal Kashoggi?
It sure looks like Elon Musk tried to foil a(nother) Ukrainian attack on Russian targets by cutting access to Starlink. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation? But it’s definitely shady, and it wouldn’t be the first time he didn’t do what was necessary to help Ukraine defend itself.
Apparently, there is a test that can establish whether or not a person took abortion medication. That’s…Ominous.
Speaking of ominous, at the time of writing this article the United Auto Workers are about to go on strike. We cheer them on just like we’ve cheered on the WGA/SAG strikes. And as of day-of-publication, the strike is on.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.
The American ruling class are going for The Handmaid's Tale version of fascism in their Project 2025 which depends heavily on 'sex' as opposed to 'gender', whereby people's genitals will define their roles in society. This is why trans people are under attack, because they comprise a firewall against Christian fascism's direction. If Project 2025 takes hold then there will be no going back unfortunately. Such a regime will be a thousand times more brutal than anyone can imagine.