Weekly Mind Dump: The GOP Plot to Take Over America - "Project 2025"
Is democracy "a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance"? 2024 will tell.
Week of 11/5-11/11, 2023:
Watching him in courtrooms seething, glowering, you know he dreams of arresting the judge, court staff and prosecutors and dispatching them to break rocks in a frigid, far-off MAGA gulag. Frustrated that he can’t, aware that he likely will soon lose his daddy’s fortune, he can’t sleep and is in gastric acid overdrive, which is taking a toll on his mental and physical health.
But Roy Cohn taught him to never give up, to “hit back twice as hard.” He’s already plotting his revenge. If, to quote H.L. Mencken, “on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last” and return to the White House “a downright moron,” a veritable blood bath will ensue. Finally, Donald Trump will be able to deliver on his vow, “I am your retribution.”
I highly commend to readers two recent disturbing articles revealing how Trump and his minions, buttressed by a constellation of reactionary “think tanks” manned by radical right-wing pseudo-intellectuals, are methodically plotting the Trump Restoration. Having learned lessons from 45’s chaotic four years in the White House, they aim to start by immediately eliminating the so-called Deep State and co-opting the Department of Justice. The grand guignol to follow would surely lead multitudes of Americans to mob Canadian diplomatic missions and border posts for asylum.
In “Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term,” Washington Post reporters write that “Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”
The reporters describe elaborate months-long plotting to realize Trump’s vision of suborning the federal government to carry out Act II of his putsch to overthrow American democracy:
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act. Project 2025 comprises 75 groups in a collaboration organized by the Heritage Foundation.
Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing Americans. He repeatedly tells his supporters that he is being persecuted on their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their enemies’ expense.
Trump’s designated January 6 stooge Attorney General-to be, Jeffrey Clark, is point-man on Project 2025’s Insurrection Act op, again putting to good use his alchemist’s approach to legal theory. And as to destroying the civil service, the project’s director, Paul Dans, told the Post, “We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists. We want conservative warriors.”
Academic/journalist Damon Linker, writes in a New York Times piece, “Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain GOP Extremism,” that “a coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince…the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.”
In addition to the Heritage Foundation, another leading “think tank” promoting extremism on the right is the Claremont Institute. Its “thinkers” include Michael Anton, who advocates “Caesarism,” or one-man rule embodied in Trump, who will re-right the nation “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function”; and January 6 coup legal conspiracist John Eastman, who remains uncontrite as he faces felony charges, having described Joe Biden’s accession to the presidency as “existential” to the country’s survival and leading to Republicans’ “eradication.”
Other conservative intellectuals, according to Linker, come from the religious right, those who paint a picture of unrelenting persecution of Christians by the left. Patrick Deneen, who teaches at Notre Dame, describes the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed. Citing Machiavelli, Deneen calls for “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of opposition, including “mobs running through the streets” to overthrow the liberal elites.
And, writes Linker, there are the far-right cranks with a following, such as Costin Alamariu, who wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’…. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”
These radical right “intellectuals” combined, Linker says, “are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.”
The chief enabler of these people is Fox and other right-wing media, who repeat their paranoid fantasies of a dystopian America with a failing economy, rampant crime, out-of-control drug addiction, porn-peddling in schools and a Soros-led cabal of extreme leftists out to destroy the country. If you inhabit this bubble and are weak in critical thinking, you fall easy prey to phantasmagorical political nonsense and its barker-in-chief, Donald Trump.
The GOP’s Project 2025 has the hallmarks of a fast-developing conspiracy to seize power, a vivid, detailed road map to full-blown Fascism, starting with politicizing the civil service, neutering the judicial system, and persecuting foes. It’s there in plain sight. Should Trump return to the White House, no one should express surprise at democracy’s demise.
Which would lead professional cynics like me (after being sent to a MAGA gulag, of course) to utterly give up on the American voters for making it happen, and agreeing with Mencken:
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.