It’s election season so the truth goes into hiding. Want Proof? Watch the latest edition of the Democratic National Convention. Earlier, the GOP took their stab at forcing truth into exile at their confab, but they have the advantage of being out of power and not responsible for the donkey party’s forced death march of America to societal collapse. It accords the GOP a target rich environment, thanks to Democrat buffoonery. Yet, as it was said of the PLO’s Yassir Arafat, the elephant party will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Want proof? Look at their mad dash to nominate their weakest candidate to head the ticket, but even he has a decent shot at the brass ring given the hash that the Dems have made of the country. Making America look like California isn’t a good look. So, what do the Dems do? They distract our gaze to some shiny object – “bad Trump” – dress up misery as glory, and tar good sense as the return of Sauron. Case in point is the bombast directed at Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
The Dems’ ideological soul mates in newsrooms are quick to paste “right-wing” all over it in dark, sinister overtones (see #2 below). But what is it? It isn’t a resurrection of the Spanish Inquisition, the return of Jim Crow or Dickensian workhouses as they would have you believe. A product of the Heritage Foundation, it’s what the group has been doing since their founding in 1973 as a counterpoint to the big-government consensus among elites from the New Deal to Nixon’s surrender to the progressive Leviathan-philosophy of government (wage/price controls, founding of the EPA, etc.). As such, they produced policy proposals with intellectual heft for a burgeoning conservatism that arose around William F. Buckley that ultimately led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Think of them as one of a constellation of think tanks (CATO at times, American Enterprise Institute) making up the loyal opposition to the center-left’s Brookings Institution or the more stridently left-wing Center for American Progress.
Project 2025 has the same philosophical roots as the ideas dating back to Reagan’s ascendancy: tax cuts; deregulation; a return of deterrence; a rollback of Soviet expansionism; missile defense; real education, entitlement, and labor reform; etc. The same outlook is evident in Project 2025, but this time its suddenly and menacingly right-wing to the young babes in the newsrooms and on The View. Has Heritage moved further right, or our chattering classes further left? It’s the latter.
Project 2025 has much in common with the same outlook advanced by Heritage’s first president in 1973, Paul Weyrich. Today’s Left, however, are neo-Marxists. For them, FDR’s Keynesianism is passé. They have revolution in their sights by sanctioning a seizure of power to eradicate the evils of heteronormativity, white and male privilege, the traditional family, global warming, the rich, capitalism, and opposition to gender ideology, alongside their compulsion to shower benefits and favoritism on an ever-growing list of the “oppressed” (“To be an antiracist, you have to be a racist”, a paraphrase of Ibram X. Kendi of CRT fame).
Roosevelt’s New Dealers would be shocked to learn of the prevalent worldview among reporters occupying cubicles at places like the New York Times. The battles over pronouns and bathrooms and the smothering and now-habitual thought-smog of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxism – of the Marcuse/Foucault/Gramsci zeitgeist – would seem dismaying to the likes of Woodrow Wilson or New Dealers such as Harold Ickes, Cordell Hull, Adolph Berle, Jr., Harry Hopkins. No wonder that the consistency of Heritage appears so frightening to young cadres who’ve unknowingly jettisoned their liberal forebearers and are fully immersed in a revolution for which they have little understanding. They don’t realize how radical they’ve become.
Go read Project 2025 (see #1 below). It reads like much of the 1980 GOP platform, and that’s because it adheres to a set of universal and well-understood principles: keeping the federal government in the box of its critical and Constitutional responsibilities (protection and fostering comity among its citizens) and ensuring national safety and security abroad.
The Project’s first section is a call for elected officials to once again gain control of a sprawling and increasingly unaccountable bureaucracy. The thousands of federal civil service employees in DC, just below the appointed level, can act as a disloyal opposition thwarting an electorate’s control of their own government. Think of it, cozy relationships between reporters and civil servants result in leaks to obstruct policy initiatives. Just recently, anonymous worker bees signed an open letter opposing aid to Israel in the aftermath of a rabid, barbarically gruesome killing of 1,200 innocent Jews at the hands of a duly elected terrorist group in Gaza. The administrate state is partisan and all the efforts to insulate it from politics have only protected it from facing consequences for their partisan meddling.
The Wikipedia writer(s) castigate Project 2025 for pushing a “highly controversial” view of the unitary executive. No, it is they who have a “highly controversial” view. The mammoth Leviathan that is our modern administrative state is the unmentioned aspect of our Constitutional structure since the federal government took on powers absent from the Constitution (in Article I, Section 8, Cl. 1-18). This humungous entity is a power unto itself. The Wikipedia article is shameful.
The unitary executive isn’t some novel invention. It goes back to the founding (see #3 below). The 19th century’s civil service reforms (Pendleton Act, etc.) were meant to remove the corrupting influence of patronage, the approach to governance represented by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York City. Today, the threat comes not only from pay-to-play but from a partisan, activist base in the civil service, mostly in DC. The reformers never envisioned public employees becoming a political constituency, a voting bloc with an ability to supplant the wishes of voters across the nation in an election. If you want to “save our democracy”, how about making elections matter once more?
The rest of Heritage’s proposals range from rebuilding deterrence to ending the politicization of education, our health care, to a return to a free market/sound money economy. Vintage Reagan. Of course, the Left doesn’t like it. They never have. If implemented, Project 2025 would set the country up for a second Reaganite resurgence. The Left could be out of power till future generations forget what they did to the country in the second decade of the 21st century.
The only problem is, Republicans also show signs of forgetfulness and the corresponding need to obfuscate and lie about it. Trump is fond of saying, “I made China pay billions [in tariffs]”. No, he didn’t. His new taxes on imports were paid by American manufacturers and consumers.
Trump has a blinkered focus on the “trade deficit”. He, and most Dems, believe that they can politically engineer more American manufacturing and bring the “trade deficit” into balance or positive. For one, the “trade deficit” is only one computation in ascertaining the state of the economy. If you think about it, if a positive trade balance was such a great thing, all nations should pursue it. But if so, it’s an impossibility. Some have to be negative, but that doesn’t necessitate economic despair. That’s because the trade deficit is only one part of the account balance, which includes capital flows. Deficits in one lead to surpluses in the other. Trump and the Dems don’t think that deeply.
So, Trump sends the truth into exile, and that’s where people seem to like it. But if you want to know why manufacturing isn’t the big economic draw that it once was, we elected people for over a century who taxed and regulated the people who make physical goods nearly to death. The industries that subsequently ballooned were the ones that didn’t require them to run into the EPA, the Endangered Species Act(s), the plethora of land-use and environmental regulatory bodies at all levels that have sprouted across the fruited plain. Tech/financial services/communications firms are less likely to run into NIMBYs and greenie activists with activist attorneys to block and delay at every step of the way. Coding and an app can take place on a teenager’s laptop or a garage. Taxes advantage human capital (example: coders, analysts) and punish physical (example: machinery, factories). Manufacturers face adversarial unions who are protected by labor law. The mandates – paid leave, childcare, benefits, exotic interpretations of equity rules and laws – have pounded the dynamism out manufacturing (see #4 below).
Not a word out of Trump about any of this. He only wants to slap tariffs on foreigners. Without correcting any of the above, he’s just jacking up prices and subsidizing economic sloth. Lives don’t get better on the whole, opportunities for generations to come languish, and once again we get reintroduced to TINSTAFL: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Right now, Americans love the lie, and our political mavens are happy to give it to us good and hard. Yep, it’s election season. The Great Bamboozle is in full swing.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Project 2025: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2025” as a pdf at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
2. Wikipedia encapsulates the left’s reaction under their title “Project 2025”. No doubt, the article came from left-wing contributors. The rhetoric is jarringly of the left.
3. The notion of a unitary executive was explained by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70. A summary of it can be found at the Bill of Rights Institute, “Federalist 70 Explained | Why Does the U.S. Have a Unitary Executive?”, at https://billofrightsinstitute.org/videos/federalist-70-explained-why-does-the-u-s-have-a-unitary-executive.
4. An explication of the disadvantages of manufacturing in America are presented in “What Washington Should Learn from Tech Companies”, Dominic Pino, National Review, August issue, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/08/what-washington-should-learn-from-tech-companies/.