On a Thursday morning in early June, I hopped off a train at Washington’s Union Station and walked a few blocks east to get a glimpse into the headquarters of one of the most secretive — and most hyped — organizations in America: Project 2025, tucked away inside the main offices of the Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill.

My visit came at an opportune moment: For months, journalists and liberal watchdog groups had been poring over Project 2025’s 900-page policy book — titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — which purports to be a “comprehensive policy guide” for the next Republican administration, including recommendations to restrict access to medical abortion, remove civil service protections for some federal workers and banning pornography. If you’ve heard a Democrat talking apocalyptically about Project 2025 in the past few months, this document is probably what they have in mind.

Over the course of my visit, I came to see that the emptiness of the Project 2025 offices at Heritage headquarters was a good metaphor for the project as whole. On both the left and the right, Project 2025 had been portrayed as a vast and well-orchestrated operation — either to rationalize and systematize Trumpism, according to some conservatives, or to undermine democracy and implement an ultra-disciplined reactionary regime, according to some liberals.

Instead, what I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership. Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House.

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”

    this has been a thing in writing since the 1980’s and we’ve enacted almost 75% of all the recommendations so far; it’s not the boogeyman that it’s made out to be in this election cycle.

    then again; people who buy into this strawman also tend to minimize an active genocide as nothing more than a “single issue” vote so i guess you have to create something to get them to care.