By Carl Davidson
LeftLinks Newsweekly, April 12, 2024
It's one thing to seize upon outrageous snippets from Trump's stump speeches and media postings: getting rid of vermin who penetrated our borders, protecting our bloodline from criminal animals from shithole countries, calling for violence against his opposition, denying the legitimacy of votes in Black communities, and many more. We can correctly expose these as fascist rants Trump has plagiarized from the book of collected speeches by Adolf Hitler that his ex-wife tells us he keeps by his bedside. The only reason to doubt her is the likelihood that Trump rarely reads anything other than Twitter posts against him.
All that is fair game. Election campaigns always engage in a war of words that try to paint the opponent into an unsavory corner. And using Trump's words against him is more than justified. Even his assertion, as our cartoon above suggests, that he aims to be a dictator on 'Day One' and maybe more. One problem, however, is a good portion of the electorate doesn't take it all that seriously. Some simply dismiss it as amusing hyperbole, 'There he goes again...', and then balancing it off with a tortured 'whataboutism' regarding Team Biden.
But we're getting closer to a more profound day of reckoning. It's urgent that we set aside this level of discourse and get deadly serious. Our adversaries have done so, and they've made everything very clear for the past six months. We're referring to 'Project 25,' the 900-word governance plan released by the Heritage Foundation. Previously a conservative think tank behind Ronald Reagan's sunshine libertarian conservatism, the outfit has been reborn as a full-blown authoritarian and fascist enabler. Nor does Heritage stand alone. It has organized some 100 far-right think tanks and base organizations to join Project 2025 and combine their efforts to implement it on all state and local levels, as well as at the federal level.
What's the substance of Project 2025? For starters, we can't say we haven't been warned. In chilling detail, it outlines measures to reverse everything from the Obama reforms to LBJ's Great Society and Voting and Civil Rights Acts, then FDR's New Deal, and even the Reconstruction Era's 14th Amendment. Then, it goes beyond simple advocacy and begins the work of assembling and training at least 50,000 Neo-confederate and Christian nationalist cadres who will replace all the personnel to be removed in a great purge of the civil service. Project Director Paul Dans said, 'We want conservative warriors' in these positions, which are supposed to be apolitical by current statute.
Heritage's idea echoes Trump staffer Steve Bannon's desire for a dismantling of the 'Deep State.' It goes further, asserting that while nearly all military officers below the rank of general are 'patriots,' those above that rank are not. The generals have been corrupted by 'woke' ideology, meaning they wince at the idea of automatically obeying presidential orders even when the orders are patently unconstitutional or otherwise illegal. These generals, they claim, are also guilty of working to build a military that observes 'DEI,' meaning 'diversity, equity, and inclusion.' Heritage goes further. They aim to scrub out all references to DEI from all levels of government, from the Oval Office, Congress, and state governments, down to local school boards.
So far, we haven't got past openers. Project 2025 plans to scrub the Department of Education, purging all those who they claim 'inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” If only this contained some truth! But we know what it means: reversing all the gains won in the 1960s opposing the Dunning Schools 'Lost Cause' ideology’s defending white supremacy and restoring 'Confederate Heritage.' It means getting rid of the exposure of anti-Chinese and anti-Chicano pogroms in the West. It means restoring women to the 'pedestal' and back under the thumbs of their local patriarchs.
Next, we get an idea of why so many on this far right are Putin fans. They aim at reversing all legislation protecting the LGBTQ+ community, especially demonizing the transgender community, equating 'transgenderism' and 'transgender ideology' with 'pornography' and 'pedophilia.' To counter these evils, it insists on restoring the 'traditional family,' claiming that 'families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.' Same-sex marriage is on the chopping bloc, along with anything else that's 'non-binary,' which they claim is 'ideology' and thus not natural.
There's not time or space in this editorial to go into all the drastic changes, if not outright abolition, spelled out for the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and more. We've just highlighted a few critical talking points from a 900-page action plan. But believe us, it's draconian all along the line.
But here's something to consider: Why has Heritage openly announced all this? Such things are usually kept under wraps until it's too late to do anything about them. We think there are several answers. One is that Heritage has to gain wider legitimacy and more allies if it hopes to succeed. Electing Trump is just step one. If he's not to be thwarted by the 'Deep State' (You can read this as our 'bourgeois democracy,' such as it is), he has to hit the ground running, with a phalanx of fascist warriors ready for action on 'Day One' and beyond. The second step is legitimacy. Heritage wants to avoid any opposition claiming a 'secret takeover.' They are gambling on the prospect that few besides policy wonks will actually read the document.
But we should read it. And we should believe it as well. Take the advice of Sun Tzu in The Art of War: 'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.'
We know this may be difficult for some. They may fear the upcoming reckoning: that to defeat Trump, they will have to set aside 'politics as self-expression' in favor of strategy and tactics and vote for Biden or, in case of unforeseen circumstances, whoever heads the Democratic ticket.
A few may even cling to a popular but foolish notion that 'we don't read books.' That idea can get you killed. For a revitalized and stronger left, we need a revolutionary instrument of all the organic intellectuals of the working class and all the oppressed. We need cadres who can be 'permanent persuaders' among all insurgent constituencies. Why? As Ho Chi Minh once observed, 'the harder the core, the broader the front.' We can't do this with a militant minority alone. At this conjuncture, there is an antifascist majority in our country, but currently, it is mainly a majority 'in itself,' but not yet entirely 'for itself.' Therein lies the task: 'What do we do next?' Don't waste any time. It's getting shorter by the day.
Tell what you said in your essay about Trump not being taken seriously enough to our Progressive Democrats of America PDA National Field Team Assistant. Our field team assistant understands that moves to remove the Democratic presidential team from the Alabama are a real threat but I am not sure that the threat of Trump is taken seriously. Perhaps we will see in tomorrow's Monday April 15, 2024's PDA zoom meeting meeting on liaisons