Interview with historian Thomas Zimmer about Project 2025

[Nevilledog]

https://statuskuo.substack.com/cp/144856318

Many of our readers have asked us to explore the details and dangers of “Project 2025”—a right-wing plan for how to move America toward authoritarian rule under a second Trump term.

Few writers and scholars have been as clear-eyed and outspoken about this threat as Prof. Thomas Zimmer, who teaches 20th-century U.S. and international history at Georgetown University. We turned to Professor Zimmer to have him lay it out in plain terms and to help raise the alarm.

— Jay Kuo

You’ve written extensively about Project 2025. Can you explain in basic terms what that is, and what makes it different than other right-wing campaigns and projects?

Over the past few months, detailed plans have emerged on the Right for what they want to do upon getting back to power. Different factions on the Right are preparing separate plans, and there is real rivalry between them.

Among all these planning efforts, “Project 2025,” launched in April 2022 under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, stands out because it unites much of the conservative movement and the machine of think tanks as well as activist and lobbying groups behind the goal of installing a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime. As members of its Advisory Board, “Project 2025” currently lists over one hundred organizations and institutions. It’s a Who’s Who of rightwing actors – Alliance Defending Freedom, America First Legal Foundation, Center for Renewing America, Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Young America’s Foundation, Moms for Liberty, and on and on and on.

“Project 2025” is a plan to execute what amounts to a comprehensive authoritarian takeover of American government. Broadly speaking, it envisions a vast expansion of presidential power over the executive branch. Moreover, “Project 2025” seeks to dismantle certain parts of government, the administrative state, and federal agencies – while simultaneously mobilizing and weaponizing others. And finally, “Project 2025” is a promise to purge from government anyone who is not all in on the Trumpist project and replace them with loyalists and ideological conformists.

In its own words, “Project 2025” consists of four “pillars”: (I) A policy agenda spelled out in the 920-page report they published last April titled: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”; (II) a personnel database, intended to build an army of loyalists; (III) a “training effort” that currently consists of online courses they call the “Presidential Administration Academy” to get these loyalists and all political appointees ready to implement the rightwing agenda; and, finally, (IV) “a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.” This fourth “pillar” is, at this point, still distinctly vague and seems to exist only in the form of an announcement of future action.

*snip*

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[Think. Again.]

2. Thank you for posting this...

Zimmer's clear and rational explanations of what exactly we are facing should a republican take the Whitehouse again is ...unnerving at best.

These last 2 paragraphs by Zimmer seem extremely important to me:

"How do we raise the alarm? One of the more frustrating aspects about American politics is that if you simply trace the radicalization of the Right and the Republican Party, there is a good chance a mainstream audience will dismiss you as a leftwing conspiracy theorist or an unhinged “activist.” Donald Trump’s outrageousness notwithstanding, it is difficult to convey to people who don’t pay much attention to politics how much the power centers of conservative politics have been taken over by anti-democratic extremism. One way to deal with this problem is to get people to actually read and listen to what emanates from the Right. If you don’t believe and feel like you can’t trust my (lefty / liberal) assessment, maybe you can believe them? In this respect, “Project 2025” is really helpful – because rightwing leaders could not possibly be clearer about the reactionary vision they want to impose on the country, and the radical strategies and tactics by which they want to impose it against the will of the majority.

There is no doubt “Project 2025” would transform America into a much nastier, much more dangerous, much more hostile place for anyone who dares to deviate from what the Right deems the “natural” order. In a very real sense, that’s what’s on the ballot in November. The election isn’t really about Biden vs. Trump; it’s a referendum on whether the effort to finally realize the promise of a truly democratic, pluralistic, multiracial society should be continued or abolished altogether. Those are the stakes."

[Bundbuster]

3. What's outrageous is that the oligarchs come right out with their whole fascist plan

But what's even more outrageous is that half of this country says "So what?" It just boggles my mind every day.