Reading the 887 pages of Project 2025, the conservative manifesto, was challenging. Some chapters were technical like those on agricultural subsidies and I read quickly. I wanted to get as broad a feel as possible on what the next administration would be based on if it were to be a Republican one. The results were frightening. It read, at times, like a document out of a Revolutionary war, a conservative battle plan to rid the country of its civil administration which it regards as corrupt and tyrannical. The language is often inflammatory "The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens" and "Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State." There was also "Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs" whatever that means. The aim would be to "handcuff the bureaucracy" and much is couched in this type of language. It does not reflect the way I believe a modern democracy should work.
Hatred and vitriol spill out of the document in a steady stream. "Environmentalism is a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals' ruthless pursuit of absolute power." The plan is to "free" government from the chains of liberal propagandists. "Large swaths of the State Department's workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President's policy agenda and vision." Clearly anyone who disagrees with a new conservative President risks being purged. Political challenges are couched in populist sensational language such as we are "at war" with China. Any governmental organization at home and abroad like WHO or UN is corrupt and we must not help fund them. "There are no programs for conservatives on PBS." Really? It's even suggested, horror of horror, that American broadcasting could be like the BBC.
An even worse organization is the FBI. Mr Hoover will be turning in his grave. "A bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization especially at the top." The DOJ ? "Large swaths of the department have been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical Left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices and components." Big Tech doesn't escape the rhetorical flourishes. It "is now less a contributor to the U.S. economy than it is a tool of China's government." Bill Gates and Tim Cook need informing of this immediately. According to Project 2025 there is very little to be grateful for and the situation throughout government is bad but a conservative President will make it all right, remove from government thousands of left wing, woke, liberal, "gender-radical," "abortion promoting ideologues" who are bent on destroying the American family!
The conservative agenda is on the side of business, large, medium and small which are now constrained by left wing bureaucratic legislation and tedious environmental, business rules from which they need to be freed to pursue the American dream. "Under the Biden Administration, the administrative state has imposed the most assertive left-wing social-engineering agenda in the agencies' history...The agencies' authorities have been abused by the Left to favor human resources bureaucracies, climate-change activists, and union bosses - all against the interest of American workers." How Biden managed to achieve all this in the last three years and get the economy to grow and improve standards of living is nothing short of miraculous. If the previous administration hadn't give so much away in corporation tax perhaps the story would have been different??
As expected Project 2025 is a political and at times a divisive document. Some of its ideas are not without merit and there are serious discussions which reflect Republican and Democratic priorities. Now and again it tells the truth, "in 2022 people who wanted to work were able to find work that paid well even as manufacturing jobs grew more slowly than service jobs." Too often it distorts or tells half the story. The last President's policies in the Middle East were not successful. The 2017 Trump Tax Law was skewed to the rich, expensive, and failed to deliver on its promises. Project 2025 though even calls for more handouts to business "To encourage entrepreneurship, the business loss limitation should be increased to at least $500,000." There's also some decidedly "loose" thinking. "Workers should be paid time and a half for working Sunday." We do have working Muslims and Jews for whom the Holy Day is not Sunday. Many of the writers are fixated with abortion but stay quiet about the fact that reproductive freedom is a woman's right in the majority of Western and developed countries. Surely we are not going to stop trading with France, Germany and the UK because of it?
Has reading Project 2025 changed my mind in any way about how I will vote in November? Quite the reverse. Rather than reflect the voice of responsible politicians in the Republican Party, it reminded me of a group of fanatics, straining at the leash, ready to send civil servants who didn't believe in their cause to the guillotine. The Republican party needs to climb out of the Reagan era, adapt itself to the modern world, develop forward looking practical solutions to the problems of climate change, mass migration, industrial and economic development. Education and planning should be the keys to the long term success of America not political rhetoric. To appeal to new generations it needs to have well informed dispassionate voices free of political diatribe, anger and invective. In November I shall be voting for a team and a philosophy which has the best vision for the future. Ripping up the playbook and destroying the government is not the answer.