It’s not the same thing; the neocon agenda of “Project for the New American Century” was intended to ensure a hegemony and ensconce powerful corporate interests into policy decisions (and particularly foreign policy) to a degree unseen since the 19th Century (when the United States had relatively little foreign power and international influence). Elements of this included undermining civil rights and (implicitly) internal objection and labor movements but it was mostly focused on making the United States the dominant global power.
Project 2025 is explicitly a proto-fascist agenda intended to reshape the executive branch of the government as dominant and not accountable to judicial, legislative, or other restraint. While some of the goals are incidentally consistent with the ideology of conventional neoconservatism and corporo-cronyism (denial of climate change and environmental conservation policy; rejection of civil protections for LGBTQ+, women, and minorities; rejection of reproductive rights for women), the principals behind it are not the standard neocons like Bill Kristol Robert Kagan, and ultimate goals are very different. (In fact, most of the neocons have either left the Republican-cum-MAGA party completely, or have been driven out as not showing adequate fealty to Donald Trump.) The purpose is to increase federal control over civil society to a degree unseen in American history and essentially the same trajectory as the rise of Nazism in late Weimar Era Germany, ultimately eliminating all but the trappings of liberal democracy.
This is a whole new thing; well, sort of, anyway. The United States has long had a political undercurrent of proto-fascism going back to early industrials who openly embraced eugenics, monopolistic partnership with government, and denial of essentially representation for minorities, but this was never a broadly held view among a vast swath of the population as it is now. Theo Horesh and Chris Hedges have both written of the emergent fascism in white and Christian nationalist movements that was formerly marginalized but has now become so mainstream that it can be represented by the candidate for a major political party—and one who has already held executive office with grave harm to the nation and population, and is campaigning a return based largely on grievance and revenge for imagined slights and wholly fabricated conspiracy—who speaks the quiet part out loud with impunity.
I don’t disagree with your analysis At All, and am grateful for your contribution.
My sweeping generalization was in an effort to say: they’re coming at us … again … from our right flank. The team name may have changed, the roster may have changed, and the strategic objectives may have changed, but it’s a similar assault on all that we hold dear.
Not a whimper but a bang!
With money, org charts, and machinery behind them.
What I truly don’t know is how much is actually ideologically driven vs. a naked and craven effort to re-package and re-brand something that they hope may lead to securing and maintaining enhanced power and money.
It’s like a large corporation that simply keeps market testing new product, but their overall goal is unwavering.
I also think the NeoCon/PNAC demographic has rather aged out of active duty, too. I suspect they overwhelmingly got theirs during Bush 43’s administration.
Oh, they are definitely absent of anything approximating an ideology. Like fascist movements in general they glom onto anything that they think will engender support through appeal to fear (particularly the fear of “The Other”, be that Jews, Muslims, immigrants, ‘terrorists’, pedophiles, ‘Communists’, et cetera) but they’re freeform in their hatred, adapting to whatever piques the popular interest. The fact that Donald Trump is their icon and notional leader is indicative of that, although this is far more pervasive than just Trumpism, and it is going to get worse as economic pressures, climate disasters, and the inevitable collapse of global order and trade cause more unrest. It is ultimately all about power and ‘winning’ even if that means being in control of a burned-out shell of a former superpower that is collapsing in upon itself.
The neocons got everything they ever wanted, held it for eight years, and then bitched and whined when they lost to Obama even though he mostly continued the same policies with the slightest of modifications for the next eight years, and even threw a temper tantrum when he co-oped their insurance plan and informally relabeled it “Obamacare”. They’re now so obsolete that Bush 43 doesn’t even get an invite to talk at the Republican National Convention and they ran Liz Cheney out of Montana on a rail for not being MAGA enough even though she’s such a hard-line conservative she’d give Reagan whiplash.
“securing and maintaining enhanced power and money” permanently, IS their “idelology”. They’ll shrinkwrap it in whatever variation of piety or identitarianism or recreational rage works best at any given time to keep the minions minioning, but the goal is to be the ones who prosper and rule forever because it is they who have the “god-given” entitlement to do so and everyone else should be thankful to merely continue to exist under their beneficent might.
I gather from the OP PBS link that the 50,000 can sue on grounds they were fired for their political affiliation, and probably win.
Then there is the hiring process for the replacements. It’s not guaranteed that the replacements will be true Trump loyalists. Or am I wrong there?
Then there is the fact that Trump tried the same maneuver in his first term, and no one was fired.
In order for this to work, federal judges are going to have to be extremely deferential to the President when he violates the law. Could happen, but it is never, or hardly ever, an easy job for the autocrat to consolidate power.
So I’m not giving up on America just because Trump got a second term.
The explicit point of Project 2025 is to concentrate power under the executive branch, and specifically under the Office of the President under a maximalist expansion of unitary executive theory. The judiciary is already compromised through the holdback of federal district and circuit court judicial positions, and of course the shenanigans that have turned the Supreme Court of the United States into a rubber stamp for ‘conservative’ decisions. Courts have already demonstrated a reluctance to hold a sitting President accountable if he is not impeached, and I guarantee that the first thing that Trump or a Trump-like candidate would do after inauguration is to undermine any ability of the Department of Justice to investigate, prosecute, or recommend action against him or any of his inner circle.
Trump doesn’t need to “consolidate power”; that has largely already been done for him (and it should be noted by the actions of both political parties although it is the GOP that has made a focused effort to undermine democratic norms and Constitutional protections in their plan to acquire and hold raw political power without the finicky nuances of representative governance) and Project 2025 is just an effort to really codify this into a legal and policy framework. The idea that the judiciary is going to stop an autocratic demagogue on ascent is a fantasy. And in fact if you look at Germany circa 1933, this was the same expectation that judiciary would put bumper guards on Hitler and the NDSAP, and they utterly failed to do so for the same reasons.
The below doesn’t specifically address Project 2025 but she does address the recent machinations of the GOP and the implications of the elevation Mike Johnson (“Who?”) to the House Speakership. Richardson may seem a bit rambling but her perspective and putting it in a historical context places the current developments in sharp relief: Heather Cox Richardson: Politics Chat, October 31, 2023
The thing is, while Trump would love to be the autocrat sitting in the White House in a fascist regime, I just don’t see that Trump is intelligent or competent enough to play the role. The only thing Trump brings to the table of a fascist movement is the charisma he inexplicably holds over millions of Republican voters. If Trump was the one actually calling the shots he’d run the ship of state onto the rocks. Even dictators need to have if not actual intelligence then a sort of animal cunning for what will and what won’t keep them in power. Think of how the Third Reich went down the tubes when a drug-addled Hitler stopped listening to his advisers and generals and started trying to fight an actual war based on the fantasies in his head.
Frankly, I would suspect that Project 2025 includes a script for Trump becoming a martyr to assassination, and being replaced by a V.P. who was less egotistical and a lot more of a team player.
Fascist autocrats aren’t noted for being particularly competent, and generally propped up by would-be benefactors (who often regret their support) and confederates. Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was a bumbler who fumbled his attempt to establish a constitutional monarchy in Mexico and declared an ill-advised war on Prussia. Benito Mussolini was good at spurring nascent Italian nationalism and forced the Catholic Church to reluctantly support him but floundered through foreign invasions where he barely managed to conquer Ethiopia and Somalia with third rate militaries, and annex the Albanian Kingdom. Adolf Hitler was canny at consolidating power but was paranoid and created constant churn in his distrust (frequently justified) for the people he casually appointed to high positions in government and industry. Of all of the European fascist upstarts and dictators, only Ferdinand Franco had staying power, largely because of the vicious infighting between the various socialists, anarchist, and Communists, and the fear of ethnic separatism that allowed him to maintain control over the Spanish population for decades.
The point of Project 2025 is to lay out a structure that allows Trump (or some Trump-like figure) to come to power despite their organizational and executive shortcomings, and there are certainly people who have and continue to buoy Trump in the believe that it will advance their own agendas even though trying to direct Trump is like getting a toddler to eat cake with a knife and fork.
“Sprawling camps” to house millions. That sounds expensive. It’s really going to be a boon to those states that build them. Like I suggested somewhere else, those camps would presumably have to at least provide minimum food, water, and a place to sleep. To people who leave conditions so bad that they walk halfway across the world to get away, those camps might seem like an oasis of sorts until, hopefully, they’re allowed in. It would be ironic if they actually attracted migrants.
This is true. But like other examples given, he was much younger when taking power.
Also quick. Chancellor in January. Non-Nazi parties banned in June. If Trump was Hitler, this thread would have been impossible by 2018.
If you want to compare a parliamentary system leader to ex-President Trump, look at Berlusconi.
I’m not saying Trump is AOK. I am saying that the American legal system, and a free press, and the vast majority of those 50,000 supposedly policy-making bureaucrats, will survive another Trump term.
Well, you might think that but the American (federal) legal system has largely become sidelined by corporate and monied interests and has utterly failed to protect incursions upon civil liberties; witness the vast expansion of civil forfeiture and eminent domain; the use of ‘three strikes’ laws to imprison people to decades-long terms for minor property or drug crimes; the use of intelligence apparatus to collect massive amounts of data on the American public; open corruption and influence peddling in Congress (by members of both major parties) with few repercussions, and at this point even considered business as usual; the influence of ‘dark money’ on politics and lobbying codified in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision; and of course a sitting President blatantly trying to influence and stop the electoral certification process in numerous evidential ways but not held to any account for either his direct actions or inciting an insurrection in the Capitol.
The “free press” was once a standard bearer in highlighting corruption and holding public figures accountable, but has become far less “free” (as in speech) as media outlets have been gobbled up and co-oped by large corporate media interests who have leveraged their financial support to influence editorial decisions, to the extent that few Americans have much trust for the factuality of news, and much of the conveying of critical investigative journalism has now fallen to comedy outlets who will dare to say the things that supposedly “hard-hitting” journalists won’t touch. The New York Times was manifestly involved in persuading the American public that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was predicated on “weapons of mass destruction” programs under the regime of Saddam Hussain that didn’t actually exist, and the recent appointment of William Lewis as CEO and Publisher of The Washington Post, even the integrity of that vanguard is in doubt. Of course, a majority of Americans don’t even care about the mainstream news press, preferring to get their ‘information’ from skewed social media sites that feed their belief system with conspiranoia and denial of facts.
Firing, forcibly retiring, or sidelining civil servants, who are the backbone of government regardless of which party is in control of Congress or the White House, is even more devastating to a continuity of democratic institutions and the preservation of technical capability to actually execute the legitimate functions of governance. A Trump regime doesn’t even need to directly terminate the employment of senior civil employees; it just needs to handicap them and place them under incompetent, indifferent, or obstructive leadership to cause experienced people to leave in frustration and be replaced with political employees and hacks, which is exactly what Trump did last time around with Cabinet and senior civil service appointments.
This confidence that the institutions of civil governance will protect democracy regardless of whatever shit-fuckery a malignant leadership might engage in is overstated and ill-founded. The last time we had such deliberate misgovernance at the Congressional and Presidential level, we ended up in a destructive civil war, and that was at a time with much less interdependence and no existential global crises.
Disclaimer - 37 year career federal bureaucrat. I personally believe there are countless ways the bureacracy can improved, but I perceive the bureaucracy is absolutely necessary and providing a great many benefits to each and every American.
I really try to not be alarmist, but this really scares me. In his first term, Trump consistently evinced a disdain for the federal bureaucracy, and a desire to significantly impair its ability to function. I am not aware of any clear ideology he desired to advance by doing so, other than just a general appeal that “big government is bad.” Perhaps he suggested that government hampered business interests.
Trump’s anti-government appeal is similar to what so many conservatives and libertarians proclaim - all government is bad - except, of course, the aspects that I personally benefit from.
It dismays me that the media and politicians are not more up front in proclaiming the harms Trump poses. The Dems should be continually beating this drum hard and castigating the Repubs for acquiescing. And the media ought to retreat from their position of feigned “neutrality” and avoiding editorial comment.
Really ugly stuff coming.
And, to add to my personal disclosure: I could retire tomorrow and live comfortably with pretty generous benefits. So ZERO portion of what I say reflects a desire to preserve my personal job or personally benefit - other than the extent to which I enjoy living in a society lacking Trump’s form of autocracy.
Could an incoming second Trump administration promulgate a reversing rule? Yes, but it takes time, and it is subject to judicial appeal (which is why the Biden administration might miss that early 2024 goal). Then a lot the 50,000, or whatever number, of fired employees, would appeal their individual firing on other grounds, such as politics or age discrimination. Before you know it, the four year presidential term is almost up.,
Now, if Trump term 2 is followed by another, younger, full-MAGA president, things will start looking worse, and safe posting may require becoming a VPN expert.
I can’t help but look at Trump’s tenure as president and the Republican party today without thinking he already ran the ship onto the rocks. Trump was unable to accomplish the majority of his goals while in the White House. He didn’t repeal and replace Obama Care, didn’t build the wall, he didn’t bring more or save manufacturing jobs in the United States, and as far as the Supreme Court is concerned any Republican president could have made the same appointments. And just look at the Republican party itself. They’re eating each other.
Trump already crashed the ship and they still want him. I’m still convinced a lot of Trump supporters just want to watch the world burn, so crashing the ship is a feature not a problem.
Quite so, the Republican party or what’s left of it, and the neoreactionary factions trying to reassemble themselves as the New GOP, are in the position that without the Deplorables, they can’t win, and Trump was the one who came up or stumbled on the trick to get them all motivated and rarin’ to go and to not care if the results were what was promised because they became identified with HIM not with some “cause”.
And yes, that group wants the whole thing to come crashing down. They see the system fucking them over, and no real prospect of things getting much better for them, so might as well bring it all down and let God sort them out.
