Project 2024, Agenda 47, and Conflicts Within the Right

by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles

It would be wrong to assume  that Donald J. Trump’s distancing himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-produced “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”, is only an electoral ploy. It is true that the Project 2025 playbook and plan for an incoming “conservative” administration to hit the ground running has become a target for Democrats, and a potentially-damaging target on Trump’s back, as many of the proposals it puts forward are widely unpopular with broad swaths of the public, not just Dems or independents.

But in fact there are serious contradictions within the Project 2025 proposal itself, and between it and Trump’s official “Agenda 47,” which has taken the place of an official Republican Party platform for the presidential campaign, a far cry from when Newt Gingrich’s “Contract on America” served as a rallying cry for a GOP takeover of the House of Representatives. The Republicans in the House, despite having a razor thin majority, have been engaged in internal warfare, papered over only by their fealty to Trump. Trump is also genuinely piqued about Project 2025’s critique of his tariffs on China, which they say did nothing to restore manufacturing jobs generally in the US, or to rebuild the US steel industry.

It’s important to understand the fault lines within Project 2025 itself, as well as between and among the various elements of Trump’s base and coalition, especially given the possibility that Trump will regain the presidency with all the additional power the office continues to accrue with the backing of the Supreme Court and the obeisance of the GOP.

It’s also vital to understand that the Democratic Party is no bulwark against fascism. As Project 2025 itself points out, many aspects of Trump’s first term agenda, including tariffs and a trade war with China, the militarization of space, and restrictions on asylum and immigration, have been continued under Biden.

What has come to be called “fascism” has been baked into the US settler colonial, white supremacist state, economy and society from the start, including all the key aspects, such as hyper-nationalism, glorification of war and violence, slave labor, targeting of unions and the left, and genocide. Yet that is a system in perpetual crisis, and in an irreconcilable contradiction with the planet and with the people it exploits.

Different factions within the corporate parties, whether Democratic or Republican, will inevitably contend with each other over the best way to overcome the decay and decline in US hegemony and imperialism. We need to strengthen the forces of liberation, equality, peace and justice through independent political action. This includes self-determined struggle and service to the people. We need political education and dialogue that unearths and exposes the true nature of the system we live under with an eye towards dismantling it.

We must expose Trump’s and Vance’s commitment to the “deep state” of counter-insurgency, endless war, and privatized cradle to grave surveillance through such corporate entities as Palantir, owned by Vance mentor and bankroller Peter Thiel. That can’t be done from the vantage point of the Democratic Party, which is also in the pocket of similar interests.

Similarly, critiquing the Dems’ majority support for genocide and rearming US cats-paw Israel cannot let the Republicans off the hook for their similar crimes, including Trump’s recognition of the illegal Israeli annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights and moving the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem.

Some of Trump’s supporters see the Heritage Foundation as the right wing of the “globalists” trying to control and trim Trump’s “America First” inclinations, no better than the supposedly left wing globalists in the Democratic coalition. This is an echo of the Nazi and neo-Nazi “third position” politics that claim to denounce both communism and capitalism.

Yet there are also points of convergence between Trump’s official “Agenda 47” and the Heritage prescriptions in Project 2025, including concessions to the white Christian nationalist culture war on “woke,” the scapegoating of migrants, and the intensification of a war footing against China. While paying lip service to the general GOP opposition to regulatory agencies, Heritage’s Project 2025 simultaneously maps out how an incoming “conservative” president can use them to pursue his policy goals.

This is particularly evident in Project 2025’s explicit attack on Pacifica radio (as well as NPR and PBS), calling on the next president to appoint an FCC chair and commissioners who will not only defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but use its power to strip Pacifica and other stations of their non-commercial educational licenses. The aim is to end the last vestiges of a commons in the broadcast spectrum, forcing all stations into the privatized commercial marketplace to seek advertising support and merchandise their content.

Similarly, the Project 2025 attack on the FBI has nothing in common with the left’s exposure of COINTELPRO, or the FBI’s role in actually forming and running chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Their proposal is to give the political appointees in the White House direct control over the Justice Department prosecutors, the FBI and other aspects of the carceral and national security state apparatus. They propose for example that the new administration should explore direct “contacts” between White House staff and DOJ and FBI officials below the level of the Attorney General. This aspect of Heritage’s “unitary executive” approach no doubt appeals to Trump even if some of his followers condemn it.

Members of Pacifica radio’s governance and management (including the author of this piece, as I am interim General Manager of KPFK) are conducting a serious and lengthy study of Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47 that is open to participation by anyone prepared to do some serious study. Here is the website with the PDF for the 900 page compilation of policy propositions that is put together as PROJECT 2025. It is being discussed in chunks over the this month, and includes an examination of Trump’s “Agenda 47” as well. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Here is the zoom link to the discussions: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89656332562?pwd=BNMLWn0fs0hQpkbmX1Ww0lWro5IVab.1

This is the remaining schedule of the study and discussion sessions:

Sunday, August 4th at 9 AM Pacific pp.153-253

Tuesday, August 6th at 6:30 PM pp.253-283

Thursday, August 8th at 5:30 PM pp.283-417

Sunday, August 11th at 5:30 PM pp.417-517

Monday, August 12th at 5:30 PM pp. 517-657

Friday, August 16th at 5:30 PM pp.657-765

Sunday, August 18th at 5:30 PM pp.765–to conclusion

Trump chose the Agenda 47 title because he would become the 47th president if he is returned to the White House in the November election. But it might better be thought of as trying to return the US to 1947, when it ruled the roost as the sole global superpower, integrated Nazi intelligence operatives and rocket scientists into the CIA and NASA, and accepted what Malcolm X described as a lateral pass from the European colonial powers to assume neo-colonial power over Africa and Asia along with Latin America. Or perhaps 1847, on the eve of the invasion and conquest of half of Mexico and the vast expansion of slavery and the US continental empire.

If we are to shape a different, humane and sustainable eco-socialist future by 2047, a generation from now, we must build our capacity to resist, to create alternative social, political and economic arrangements that meet human needs and protect the planet, and to deepen the contradictions within the reactionary, racist and fascistic movements, driving wedges between them and the base of identification with and complicity with empire that characterizes many people in the US, whichever of the capitalist parties they identify with.

Comments and discussion welcome at [email protected].