"Republicans still don’t like the idea of expertise." Excerpts and Experts
A continuing essay series examining the conflation of politics and religion.
I had hoped to be able to finish my planned essay for tonight earlier today, but unfortunately “life” got in the way, which is something I am sure many of you can understand all too well, because, well, life has a way of doing that.
So for the interim I am going to take this time to discuss in a casual and brief manner some of the things I have been researching with regards to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 20251 and the America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) America First Transition Project2.
Each of the two projects named above has the same goal, the preparation of a ready-made administration of vetted, preferred, committed, conservative individuals to get right into the work of creating conservative policies; policies that have as an ultimate objective the removing of as many possible liberal/democratic individuals and policies from their current positions or places anywhere within the federal government.
Much of the chatter and numerous writings about these ideas has understandably been of great concern in light of the sweeping reforms that have been asserted as planned or even more concerning have been the outright fascistic goals now being vocally presented by Donald Trump or his number one fan boy Stephen Miller.
It all sounds so frightening and these proposed ideas most certainly should be cause for alarm for anyone who understands just how actually threatening they are to the liberties all Americans enjoy due to the liberal consensus that has so greatly benefited every citizen.
The problem for these would-be-autocratic policy-maker agendas is that what they are proposing really is not that easy to implement, especially if a conservative candidate actually won the presidential election, but was not accompanied by a congressional majority in both houses of congress. With this in mind I would like to share a few quotes from a recently published article from the Politico News Magazine (online) it is a lengthy article and does a very good job of covering a great deal of ground about the issues I have just mentioned, and as such provides a very focused look at these things, so much so that I will recommend it to everyone as a good place to start if you really want a detailed explainer of the objectives of the projects named above.
The quotes I have selected will demonstrate the perceptions of some individuals who have a genuine expertise when it comes to commenting on these “plans” and some of the quotes will even be from individuals who are actively involved in making these plans work. I expect that you might be both surprised and relieved to read some of the things that are reported in this article.
The first third of the article discusses some of the history and people behind the plans, the second third then delves into the active development of relationships between all the various interested candidates and the planners, the final third focuses on the question of the actual viability of these plans; can they actually be accomplished?
So as mentioned previously I now present some quotes for you to think about; at the end of this simple report you will find a direct link to the article being quoted, and I do strongly suggest that if you really want to be better informed about these things then please by all means take some time to read it.
In the meantime I will continue to work on my next upcoming essay to be posted asap during the next few days.
The big deal:
a 1,091-page manifesto of conservative governance titled A Mandate for Leadership. “That book really became the bible of the Reagan Revolution. That’s kind of what we’re working from,” says Dans, a tall, MIT-educated lawyer who is leading a team of former Trump officials preparing a new “America First” agenda for the next Republican president — whether it’s former President Donald Trump or not.
The other team:
“It’s not just about 2025. It’s about ’29 and ’33 and ’37,” adds Brooke Rollins, Trump’s former domestic policy chief, who is now CEO of the Trump-endorsed America First Policy Institute. Rollins, like Dans and others who consider themselves aligned with the goals of Project 2025, believes the training program amounts to a new front in the conservative movement. In the past, she says, “the business of governing and process was not our strong suit.”
The dilemma for both teams:
While they have a willing vehicle in Trump — not to mention the support of most of his primary opponents — many conservatives recognize they will have to compensate for Trump’s built-in liabilities. If they truly want to dismantle the “deep state” they believe they have to create, almost from scratch, a workforce that won’t sacrifice competence to Trump’s obsession with loyalty above everything else.
Apparently someone might actually understand some realities:
Dans and others involved in Project 2025 concede that their assault on the “administrative state” is not going to focus on politically delicate entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Veterans Administration programs and retirement plans, unemployment compensation and agricultural price support programs — all of which amount to about half the $6.3 trillion federal budget. “That is not going to be on the front burner,” Dans says.
Some people actually understand it is not really that easy:
Dans is somewhat vague when asked about specific efforts to inject Project 2025 into the GOP presidential race. He and others want to avoid getting entangled in the ugly war of words on the Republican campaign trail.
And now some people’s position might actually become clearer:
Project 2025 has also reached out to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who’s been hinting at an independent run, as well.
Ah, but there is trouble ahead in paradise:
Two key figures involved in Project 2025 were both recently indicted along with Trump in Georgia: former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who’s head of the Conservative Partnership Institute; and Jeffrey Clark, who is working for one of the groups aligned with Dans, the CPI-launched Center for Renewing America.
In the context of speaking about defunding the Justice Department and taking control of classification responsibilities from the experienced employees who keep America’s information safe:
All such efforts, Vought insists, would respect the principle of checks and balances and restore constitutional order as the Founders intended. “It’s more trying to get back to the Founders’ understanding of the executive branch,” Vought says.
This of course is where the true crux of the matter really rests.
Indeed, the irony of all this — and it’s a bitter, almost unresolvable irony — is that both sides of the political spectrum are now holding up the “Constitution” as the thing they most want to preserve, and yet they remain utterly opposed about how to do it. For Democrats it’s about holding Trump accountable under the Constitution; for Republicans, it’s about taking down the unconstitutional administrative state they believe is after Trump. No negotiations between the two sides are planned.
This conservative adventure into the unknown would not be complete without the input of Trumpism’s conservative thought leader, Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin D. Roberts:
“What we’ve never gotten right in the modern conservative movement, even under Reagan, was having a network of right of center professionals who were ready to go,” says Roberts. “To get 10,000 to 20,000 names into this database who are not only submitting their resumes but also being vetted to some extent, and who, depending upon the classification of the position we think they’re suitable for, are going through these training modules — that’s the part that’s never been done before.
“Do we have conservatives who are experts at killing bureaucracies?” Roberts says. “No. The conservative movement has not developed this capability. But we’re going to as a result of Project 2025.”
As the article’s author notes:
“Little of the Project 2025 agenda is likely — even remotely likely — to happen, of course.”
Now for some reality checks!
Some conservative scholars and government experts say that Project 2025’s grand plans to transform the federal bureaucracy are often comically naïve. Not only are they unworkable, critics contend, but if they’re implemented they will likely only render the federal government even more incompetent than conservatives now say it is. And certainly more chaotic and amateurish than in Trump’s first term.
Really?!
The deeper problem, Kabaservice says, is that “Republicans still don’t like the idea of expertise. They actually seem to believe all you need to know about running a country that underpins the global order is something you can know by being a mom.”
Again reality rears its beautiful visage:
But the project’s authors are the first to admit that implementing most of it will require enormous political power that they do not currently have. “Yes, this is daunting, there is no doubt about it,” says Roberts. “It requires not just a plan and it doesn’t just require the personnel. This requires controlling not just the White House but both chambers of Congress.”
Then of course there is always the problem of money:
Another challenge will be training and vetting the right people to do what conservatives have traditionally hated to do — deploy the power of the federal government — without themselves becoming the new enemy. “That’s the most expensive part,” says Roberts. “It’s probably 75 percent of the costs of this project — building the conservative ‘LinkedIn’ as we like to call it. There is vehement agreement that this is the most important part of the project.”3
The remainder of the article carries on with further discussions about various perspectives and aspects of the plans. As mentioned earlier it is a lengthy article, but certainly worth the time to read; for as the article brings up in closing the problems that have given birth to this new conservatism and its enthusiastic goals is not going to just disappear if a Democratic presidential candidate secures the White House in 2024. No, the current brood of conservative vipers in this adventure for creating a conservative friendly federal government is here to stay and will keep on trying until the liberal consensus finally puts a lid on the poison bottle named conservatism.
“Inside the Next Republican Revolution: Whether Trump wins or not, the GOP plans a renewed assault on his nemesis, the “deep state.” Can conservatives train enough loyalists to actually get the job done?” Politico Magazine
I hope this simple report has intrigued you and perhaps more importantly has help to alleviate some of the concerns and fears these disingenuous plans have instilled into the minds of many good citizens. While as noted these plans have a great many difficulties ahead of them in order to actually become realized, that does not mean that we should rest easy. No, the conservative agenda is in reality getting more and more desperate as time marches on and Americans become more sophisticated and smarter about the plays, plots, and ploys of the conservative agenda and its numerous wealthy benefactors who are more determined than ever to retain control of the economy, for their own greed-filled ends.
Robert J. Rei, November 19, 2023
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." -Aldous Huxley
“Presidential Transition Project” Heritage Foundation, https://www.project2025.org/
“America First Transition Project” America First Policy Institute (AFPI) https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/the-america-first-transition-project-introduction
“Inside the Next Republican Revolution” Michael Hirsh, September 19, 2023, Politco Magazine, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/19/project-2025-trump-reagan-00115811 (All quotes from the article sourced here)
Unfortunately, the margin of error in electing “conservative” vs. “democratic” politicians is very small, perhaps amounting to a few hundred thousand voters, or even tens of thousands at the State level.
That said, any elected conservative president can monkey wrench governmental functions to effectively cripple enough administration activities to render them ineffective while blaming the dysfunction on the prior regimes.
FEDSOC provides a blueprint that took only 40 years to incrementally cripple the Federal judiciary and SCOTUS through the efforts of one unelected individual, Leonard Leo. Unelected Leo has now embarked on a mission to eliminate or cripple the entire Federal bureaucracy.
With only a few tens of thousands of voter margin America is at risk of losing everything.
Keep in mind that Hitler won control of Germany with less than a third of the votes then turned on all of the German citizens with a vengeance.
It can be said “desperate times call for desperate measures.” (Hippocrates). At the moment, both sides, conservatives and democrat liberals, likely feel desperate tensions. Some amongst the conservative side have shown to respond with chaos (The House Freedom Caucus), some with deep diligent planning (the organizations and people interviewed in the Politico article), and some with reckless abandon (TFG). The democrat liberals fall into two camps - five alarm fire, the we better wake up now and deal with what’s staring at us in the face realists and the complacent old schoolers. As a follower of the fire suppression thinking, it’s somewhat reassuring to read Robert’s essay, but I’m surprised at the candor that’s being expressed in the Politico article quotes. Can we trust or believe what they say? Is it colored to give a false sense of complacency? I tend to agree their goals are so wide sweeping that complete implementation will be difficult, but are we then to die the death of a thousand cuts? The legality of many of their goals and methods are questionable, but many federal judicial positions have been compromised, filled by those with a right-wing agenda. How much does the Third Branch now protect us? MSM is full of bias, surviving on a lifeboat of advertiser money and oligarch ownership. The big irony, is the swamp they so desperately want to drain will only be flushed and filled with their corrupt cronies, dismantlers, naive incompetents, and fascists. One bureaucracy of their disliking replaced by either the loyalist bureaucracy of a totalitarian or the eventual vaporization of a regulatory state which was developed for the common good, to be replaced with a free for all Wild West. A small simple government agrarian nation of four million in 1787 is a far stretch from an economic behemoth of 330 million people in 2023.