By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Project 2025, a project organized by the so-called “scholars” at the Heritage Foundation, is in essence an aggregation of contemporary Conservative Thought, if I may so denote it, along with strategies and policies for carrying putting it into practice in a second Trump Administration. Project 2025 has been much in the news lately; see “Inside the Next Republican Revolution” (Politico), and “Project 2025’s Guide to Subverting Democracy” (The Nation). The House Democrats have set up a task force to be a “central hub” of opposition to it; here is the Heritage Foundation’s response. We can expect Project 2025 to be an issue in the 2024 campaign (no doubt, for Democrats, under the heading of “our democracy”).
The entire document (“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”) can be found here. (I will refer to the document as “Mandate”(1), so as to avoid confusing the project with the deliverable. From Mandate’s opening chapter:
We want you! The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. Welcome to the mission. By opening this book, you are now a part of it. Indeed, one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States, and we hope every other reader will join in making the incoming Administration a success. History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. In recent election cycles, presidential candidates normally began transition planning in the late spring of election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late. The federal government’s complexity and growth advance at a seemingly logarithmic rate every four years. For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. The entirety of this effort is to support the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be.
Sounds great. Makes you wonder why the Democrats can’t get it together to do something similar; they’re supposed to be the smart ones, after all.
Mandate is 920 pages long. That’s a lot of pages. In the time available I can’t analyze any of the policy proposals, although I hope to look at some of them in a later post (conservative thought on public health and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is especially horrid). My question is this: How can we be sure that Mandate is serious, and not some sort of diversionary tactic, like Biden’s much-ballyhooed “Unity Task Force” during the election 2020 transition? To that end, I propose two simple litmus tests: One for the spooks, and one for the Censorship Industrial Complex. If conservatives in power fail either litmus test, than Mandate is not what it purports to be (“a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan”). In addition, following the epigraph from Sun Tzu, I will do a close reading of Mandate’s prose. Does Conservative Thought have a define its enemy? If not, then Mandate in particular, and Conservative Thought in general, is indeed reducible to a series of “irritable mental gestures.”(2)
Spook Litmus Test
On the spooks (or, as we say, the “intelligence community, or “IC”), from page 212:
I have helpfully outlined the litmus test in red: Firings. Hearings compelling testimony from Clapper, Brennan, and the 50 former (really?) intelligence officials on RussiaGate and the Hunter Biden laptop debacle would also be nice. If there are no firings, then Mandate is not a serious document. (Note that “firings” makes election 2024 existential for the intelligence community, but then you knew that.)
Censorship Industrial Complex Litmus Test
I am sure there are more components and institutions involved in the Censorship Industrial Complex (see Matt Taibbi) than CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), but CISA will do to go on with:
I have helpfully outlined the litmus test in red: Firings. The test and the existential stakes are exactly the same.
Does Conservative Thought Know Its Enemy?
Let me once again quote fascist legal theorist Carl Schmitt from The Concept of the Political:
(T)he specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.
Taking Schmitt’s view, for the purposes of this post, as read, does Conservative Thought make this distinction successfully? As a vibe, yes. As a coherent doctrine, no. I present the Table 1, which I hope shows these conclusions.
I apologize for making you squint — you can skip over the table to the close reading, here — but I felt that the columns needed to be adjacent. For a designer, the table also exemplifies Tufte’s “small multiples”; it’s no accident that the “left” and “liberal” columns are almost the same length, and Marxist by far the smallest (For a full-size/full-resolution image of any example, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the tables thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”)
To construct Table 1, I searched Mandate for the following terms: Left, Liberal, Marxist, and Radical. I collected 35 examples, which I believe are representative. If you will examine the examples, the incoherence — the “irritable mental gestures” — of Conservative Thought seem to me inescapable. I will refer to each cell by Column Heading and Number: For example, “Left #1” is the topmost lefthand cell.
TABLE 1: The “Other Side” in Conservative Thought
Left #1 mentions “the other side” (that is, a Schmittian enemy). Does Mandate describe “the other side” coherently? Let’s find out, going column by column: Left, Liberal, Radical, and (dread word) Marxist.
Left is the enemy, but what is the Left? Left #2 tells us there is a “far” left, apparently different from special interests, and radicals (whoever they are, but presumably not the Left), in government. Left #3 gives us an example, Antifa, but surely Antifa is not a special interest (nor in government; they’re anarchists). Left #4 tells us swathes of the State Department’s workforce are left, but presumably not far left? Left #5 introduces “left-of-center,” but what is this center of which they speak? Not far, presumably, but what? Left #6 tells us that the left directs federal policy and elite institutions, but surely Antifa doesn’t do that? Left #7 identifies the Google and Ford Foundation “organizations” as working to advance “leftist agendas,” the former surely coming as a surprise to Silicon Valley libertarians. Left #8 identifies the left with “wokeness.” Left #9 reinforces “left-of-center,” but are there any centrists who are “woke”? Why or why not? Left #10 introduces “radical leftist organizations.” so presumably there are left organiztionas that are not radical, but who are they? Antifa? The Ford Foundation? The State Department workforce? Left #11 identifies the left as thinking “they are special.” I thought all God’s children were special. Now in Left #12 we have left “activists” (antifa?) and investors (!!) “who ignore the China threat,” so presumably a portion of the left is motivated by profit. Does that make them special, or not? Left #13 identifies a “bureacratic managerial class” (presumably not, however. a “workforce”). Finally, Left #14 identifies the left as insane. Surely insanity is not limited to them? These categories are by no means mutually exclusive and exhaustive!
Liberals are the enemy too, except when they’re not. In Liberal #1, “liberal democracy” is A Good Thing (only when carried out by Conservatives, I suppose). Liberal #2 identifies liberals as opposing conservative policies, but the left does that too, so why do we have two words for the same thing? In any case, are conservative who oppose conservative policies liberals? Liberal #3 identifies “liberal non-profits” and “radical Acorn-style pressure groups,” so is the Rockefeller Foundation liberal or left? And is the Green Revolution like Acorn? Liberal #4 seems to propose that the more liberals there are in a population, the more left it is, so NPR is to the left of PBS. There are radical liberals in Liberal #5; are they NPR listeners? Liberal #6 introduces an “illiberal chill,” so apparently it is again A Good Thing to be a liberal. Or are radical liberals from Acorn to be chilled? Liberal #7 proposes that liberals in the 1970s were socialists. I suppose that’s no longer true because the socialists were replaced by anarchists? Liberal #8 proposes “bold liberalization,” A Good Thing. Liberal #9 again frames the United States as a Liberal country, which is A Good Thing, but therefore the country would oppose conservative policies, which is The Bad Thing. Liberal #10 proposes that the identifying characteristic of liberals is the pursuit of absolute power, which is ahistorical to say the least. Perhaps the difference between Left and Liberal is that the Left is insane, but Liberals seek absolute power? Which one is Bernie Sanders, the socialist? Liberal #11 again claims the mantle of liberal democracy, A Good Thing.
Radicals are also the enemy. Radical #1 proposes radicals are woke, but so are liberals and the left, so now we have three words for the same thing. Radical #2 proposes “radical equality” as A Good Thing. However, Radical #4 distinguishes between the “far left” (PBS listeners?) and “radicals in government”, so presumbly we do not have three words for the same thing. Radical #4 identifies a “radical left” so presumbly the entire left (NPR listeners?) is not radical. Radical #5 proposes that there is a “woke faction” in the country: Madison would ask what property interest drives the faction. Radical #6 identifies “radical liberals” so I suppose the radical liberals are the Bad Liberals and the liberal liberals the Good Liberals?
Marxists, Lord help us. In Marxist #1, we learn that Marxists have infiltrated the military academies; this seems unlikely to me. Marxist #2 implies that China is weak and poor (that not what they meant, but it is what they wrote). Marxist #3 says, in essence, that critical race theory would turn over control of the means of production to the working class. That’s not the mainline interpretation, to say the least. Do the reading, for pity’s sake.
Conclusion
Summarizing: Table 1 shows pervasive irritable mental gesturing on Conservative Thought.
There remains the question of whether Mandate is a blueprint for fascism. I would need to understand Project 2025’s intentions for reorganizing the executive branch, especially the civil service, to answer confidently. However, there are two reasons to think that the answer will be in the negative.
First, I’ve referred to fascism is a smorgasbord from which both parties are freely partaking. The Democrats alliance with the intelligence commmunity, whether for election interference, or, together with the Censorship Industrial Complex, for creating an information bubble for which Joseph Goebbels would be proud, strike me as being as fascist as anything today’s Republican Party has proposed or done. So neither party owns the blueprint, if blueprint there is.
Second, when I, putting on my amateur’s political hat, try to recall two parties that very rapidly and very successfully took power with “a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel” I come up with two: The Republican Party of the 1860s, and the Nazis. Both parties defined their enemies very clearly: The enemy of Lincoln’s party was the the Slave Power; the enemy of Hitler’s party was the Jews.(3) I think that Table 1 and a subsequent close reading show that today’s Republican Party has not defined its enemy clearly at all (supposing, with Schmitt, that to be the purpose of a political party)(4). We can therefore conclude that Trump’s Republican party will not have the impact that Lincoln’s party did (or, for that matter, Hitler’s). A comforting thought!
NOTES
(1) Back in 2004, Bush the Younger, having been re-elected, claimed a mandate (“I have political capital. I intend to spend it“), and the press and the opinion havers began referring to “the Bush mandate.” Google bombing was still possible then, and I Google-bombed “Bush Mandate” to the website for Mandate Magazine; the front cover, as I recall, featured a jaunty young man wearing a sailor’s cap. Happy, innocent days!
(2) The full quote from liberal critic Lionel Trilling (1950): “(T)he conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
(3) Clearly the Bolsheviks and the CCP were successful and defined their enemies clearly, but the process by which they took power was protracted.
(4) It has occurred to me that Mandate, being an aggregation, aggregates the work product of various Republican factions and groupuscles, and so we have a rich sediment of verbiage laid down by different sets of policy entrepreneurs over decades; hence liberals here, the left there, Marxists over there, “woke,” the newest, sprinkled on top, and so forth. It may be that Project 2025 will be the vehicle to unify all this, Bolshevik-style; I doubt that very much. All Republicans would then be RINOs, just as all Democrats are DINOs.
