Rick Perlstein is an American historian and journalist who has done some impressive work over the years. I keep going back to his “The Long Con” — a 2012 article in which he documents on how much of the right wing has always been loaded with con artists, scammers, and grifters. Anyone who thinks Trump represents a shift for the Republican Party fails to appreciate how much Conservatism has always been about selling snake oil.
I subscribe to Perlstein’s The Infernal Triangle. The most recent newsletter on July 11, 2024 tackled Project 2025, and brings a fresh perspective on it that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Terrifying blueprints for the next Republican Presidency are a quadrennial tradition
Some snippets:
First things first: The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the anchor of the marquee right-wing think tank’s Project 2025, is not what you’ve heard. It’s not some book of magic spells for President Trump’s minions to cast, and poof goes away every last vestige of truth, justice, and the American way. For one thing, much of it is too dumb to accomplish anything at all.
emphasis added
Perlstein has examined parts where his own expertise applies, and has consulted people who are experts on other sections. What he finds is that the whole thing is a grab-bag of conservative ‘ideas’ and obsessions that taken altogether is a mess of contradictory objectives that can’t be reconciled into a coherent plan of action. It’s as though everyone was invited to toss their own pet ideas into the mix.
Perlstein sees this a great opportunity — there are multiple places to find wedge issues to divide conservatives. Democrats are failing to take full advantage of the opportunities here. We can take it to the next level.
This misunderstanding is important. The silence, so far, on those parts, indicts us. These are great, big, blinking red "LOOK AT ME" advertisements of vulnerabilities within the conservative coalition. Wedge issues. Opportunities to split Republicans at their most vulnerable joints, much as when Richard Nixon cynically expanded affirmative action requirements for federal building projects, in order to seed resentment between blue-collar building trades Democrats and Black Democrats.
And yes, there is plenty of blunt insanity, too. But, bottom line, this is a complicated document. "Conservatives in Disarray" is precisely the opposite message from that conveyed by all the coverage of Project 2025. But it is an important component of this complexity, and why this text should be picked apart, not panicked over, and studied both for the catastrophes it portends and the potential it provides.
emphasis added
(Or — my opinion — it might be like the Bible. The apparatchiks will just pull out whatever section suits their purposes at any given moment. The only consistency they care about is getting a ‘win’ by any means. But look how many religious schisms have been fueled by fights over which parts of the Bible matter or what they really say.)
Perlstein also brings up an important point: Project 2025 is just the latest chapter in a decades-long effort by the Right to impose their agenda, one we’ve dodged several times in the past.
...I mean, what about Project 1921?
I refer, of course, to the administration of Warren G. Harding, who intoned in his inaugural address of dedicating himself to "the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business." As an ally in the project over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce put it seven years later: "A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast—a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world—the black plague is a housepet by comparison."
The Great Depression derailed that plan, but it didn’t go away. Perlstein reminds us that in 1973 Nixon was planning to move the country so far to the right, “you won’t even recognize it.” Watergate blocked that, and a good thing. Perlstein observes that Nixon was a hell of lot less liberal than he gets credit for.
...At the heart of his vision was just what Project 2025 wants to do: devastate the independent civil service, in his view a nest of left-wing conspiracists, with far too many Jews. His version of the Heritage plan was later dubbed the "Malek Manual" when it was introduced as an exhibit in the Senate Watergate Committee hearings. If it wasn’t, we might have just been living it, not reading about it.
I’m going to grab some more snippets, because they make important points. (And also because too many people don’t seem to get around to following links to the source material.) Perlstein doesn’t get much into the 1981 version — but do we really need to talk about the Reagan Revolution and how government was made the problem, not the solution, or the war on organized labor?
The Heritage Foundation didn’t create Project 2025 out of nothing — it’s been an ongoing process.
...This year’s Mandate for Leadership is the ninth edition in the series. I’ve never seen the "Mandate V" and "Mandate VI" volumes from 2000 and 2005, so I can’t say how much they contributed to George W. Bush’s own unique contributions to the deconstruction of the administrative state, the debacles of deregulation I documented back then as a blogger under the heading of "E. coli conservatism."
The Heritage Foundation’s success has been in the way they’ve worked their agenda into the mainstream over the years:
...policies and ideas from the early Mandate editions had, by the time of this publication [2005], largely become part of the mainstream debate."
The Right takes the long view while Democrats barely seem to be able to look farther than the next election. Something to appreciate about Biden’s age is that he can look back on decades of politics — he has a long view gained the hard way: living through it. (Look what FDR was able to do over 4 terms.)
Further, Biden has been able to do something Republicans never have: learn and change. Conservatives keep trying to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Or, as it has been phrased, “conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed.” Further, “They learn nothing and they forget nothing.”
But that doesn’t stop them from trying.
Read the whole thing — Perlstein is that good.
Addendum: Are we there yet?
Josh Marshall’s latest Back Channel is about Gut Checks and Decisions. He looks at reports that top Democrats in Congress are starting to urge Biden to step down [FWIW given the media feeding frenzy IMHO] but also notes:
1) the polls for Biden (and Harris) against Trump really haven’t moved that much from the pre-debate numbers after having had time to settle, or are maybe even or better. But you can’t make a decision just on polling.
2) We really can’t assume switching to Harris is the solution:
But that’s the catch. I don’t think we quite realize the scale of the shock to the system of this switch actually occurring. And here I don’t mean “shock” in the sense of something necessarily bad for Democrats. Imagine our political world right now as a snow globe and someone is about to give it 20 good shakes. Or rather, imagine it’s a snow globe where the little versions of the Eiffel Tower or Empire State building or whatever other quaint little architecture aren’t attached to the ground. Shake things all up and see what it looks like when everything has settled back down.
A whole massive part of the structure of the campaign will simply disappear. A big new part of the campaign will be Harris and her personal story. Each new engagement, the conventions, a possible new debate, will turn on totally new dynamics. The outcomes of these unknowns will compound together to produce new unknowns. My point is simple: as much as we think this is a big deal I don’t think we really realize how big a deal and how many unknowns it unleashes. Positive and negative. Even with Trump, the U.S. presidential campaign system is highly, highly structured, choreographed, bounded by all sorts of informal but highly binding rules. Something like this blows them all apart.
I’m going to add my two cents to the above by Marshall.
The NY Times editorial board finally pulled its thumb out of its collective ass, and unequivocally stated Donald Trump Is Unfit To Lead. (Full access link.) The leading reader pick in comments is succinct and nails it:
Marvelous start. Now do 192 more in the next 5 days.
If this is a shift at the Gray Lady, we will see if it ripples through the rest of the media — although media addiction to an established narrative is tough to break. (All those canceled subscriptions and angry emails and comments may be having an effect.)
IF Biden can hold on, the feeding frenzy by the press is going to exhaust itself, barring further stumbles by the President and his party. The 6:30 EDT (or 7:00, whenever) press conference tonight (USA Today streaming link) by President Biden speaking about the NATO summit is going to be watched through a microscope. Fingers crossed.
As the Republican Convention draws near, and when Trump announces his VP pick, the media spotlight is going to swing back to him. Will the press actually give him the same scrutiny they’ve been giving the President? Will he finally say something too batshit crazy, too offensive, or too obviously mentally/physically impaired for the press to normalize? Will the GOP be able to cloak its increasingly apparent descent into Fascism, or will they be able to put on a ‘reality show’ fairy tale?
If nothing else, Perlstein has given us another way to use Project 2025 against them.
Never give up. Never surrender. Forward momentum.