What Project 2025 Really Is and Why It’s So Dangerous
Charlie Neibergall
Today we’re going to discuss Project 2025, what it is, how dangerous it is, and increasing severities of democratic collapse.
by umair
How Dangerous is Project 2025?
We’ve been talking about Project 2025 for a while. And suddenly, something interesting’s happened. It’s becoming a point of national discussion. People are becoming aware of it, learning about it, and understanding that this sort of weird, sinister thing exists.
That’s in part because it’s become an attack line—a successful one—for the Democrats. Even Trump’s trying to distance himself from it, though his “Agenda 47” is more or less precisely the same thing, and do you see how weirdly Soviet these names are getting, by the way?
So. How dangerous is it, really? By now, you should know that it proposes to deport tens of millions of people. What does that do to a society? Are everyone’s papers going to be checked? But I’ll come back to that, after we learn a bit more about it.
The best summary by far comes to us from the Center for American Progress, and I’m going to quote it extensively, because nobody much can be expected to read a 1000 page document, even if it’s a plan to destroy a democracy, and part of the plan is that nobody will read it. So instead let’s rely on a very, very good, and concise, summary.
Project 2025 would consolidate power in the presidency by weakening the independence of public agencies, preparing to replace tens of thousands of civil servants with far-right loyalists, and gutting the system of checks and balances.
First, Project 2025 calls for reclassifying tens of thousands of civil servants as political appointees, seeking to strip them of civil service labor protections and enabling a president to replace them with political loyalists.
Project 2025 includes a database to help the president replace these independent civil servants with people who have pledged their loyalty to one political ideology instead of to the American people as a whole.
Second, Project 2025 would end the independence of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, weakening the rule of law.
Even worse, Project 2025 would give the president the power to use all the resources of the federal government to investigate and prosecute whomever he or she wants.
Project 2025 would not stop with politicizing law enforcement. The plan eliminates the independence of agencies that protect consumers and ensure businesses can compete fairly in the economy, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It even proposes using the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a surveillance network to monitor abortions nationwide in order to restrict reproductive freedom in states where abortion is currently legal.
Project 2025’s far-reaching agenda would strip away fundamental rights, affecting everything from reproductive freedoms to civil liberties. The plan would take away freedoms that Americans rely on by implementing nationwide bans on abortion and contraception, curtailing LGBTQ rights, and increasing corporate control over workers. It would redefine personal autonomy and freedom in America. Most alarming, the Project 2025 agenda blatantly disregards individual freedoms in favor of political and ideological control.
Project 2025 and the legislation and budgets it has inspired would directly raise costs on the middle class to give the wealthy and corporations billions in tax cuts. One proposal would let companies stop paying overtime; another would cut Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age.
Even all of that’s barely a beginning. But it’s a pretty good summary. And already, there, you should see plenty that, well, alarms you.
This is about as dangerous as plans to shred democracies get. But why, exactly?
What Project 2025 Really Is
So what is Project 2025? Or “Agenda 47,” which is just the same thing, under a different name, more or less?
It’s a blueprint for a totalitarian society. We’ve discussed that before, but it’s sort of important to say it again, now that this plan is entering public consciousness.
Let’s think about how many of those aspects work together. Deporting not even millions, but tens of millions of people. How’s that going to work, exactly? Or…a national ban on…forms of contraception? People’s lives are going to be fundamentally changed. Papers will have to be checked. Want to get rid of that many people? You’ll have to enter every home, business, and firm in the country. You’ll probably have to stop people on the street, on trains, on the streets, in cars.
And to do that, of course, you’ll need to do more or less what the Nazis did, which is create Gestapos and SSes. And again, here the elements of the plan work together, because hey presto, the President now directly controls the FBI and Department of Justice, or, more to the point, has the powers to create any new sort of enforcement agency he sees fit.
Which will be made of loyalists so extreme they’ve signed pledges to him, personally, and there’s a database of such fanatics just waiting to be recruited into these new forces.
That’s a pretty extreme scenario, and it might seem outlandish to you, but this is exactly how democratic collapses usually proceed. It’s what happened in any number of countries, from Iraq to Iran to East Germany to Soviet Russia and beyond, and of course, as Weimar Germany became Nazi Germany. History gives us little comfort on this matter.
A Blueprint for a Totalitarian Society
All of this is how you build a totalitarian society. Often, we use the words authoritarianism, fascism, and totalitarianism interchangeably, at least colloquially, but they’re not quite the same thing.