Our readers have probably heard about Project 2025, the extreme right-wing blueprint for a future Trump administration. It was created mostly by the Heritage Foundation, one of the decades old mouthpieces of the capitalist ruling class in the United States, but received support and backing from numerous other reactionary organizations, including many individual right-wing activists who were part of the first Trump administration. The document is a plan to pack a new Trump administration with loyalists to their movement who can then carry out their reactionary policies even if Trump himself isn’t interested in doing so.
It plans to “reform” Schedule F, a move that would allow new presidential administrations to fire without cause government bureaucrats who don’t go along with their plans. It would promote Protestant Christian nationalism through changes to policy as well as education and schooling. Education would become more privatized, even less subject to democratic control, and would become a tool for overtly nationalistic and religious education. Abortion and even most types of basic family planning and reproductive healthcare would be limited or banned. LGBTQ+ people and rights would be subject to further state repression in the name of “family values.” The justice system would be redesigned as a tool to punish political opponents, to crack down violently on crime, and to be completely loyal to a president and their administration. On immigration, it would push for the criminalization of many types of previously legal immigration status’, and would initiate probably the largest ever deportation program in U.S. history.
Despite all these many radical social and political changes that would please religious nationalists, it seems that Project 2025 would in no way challenge or change the basic structures of the capitalist economic system and the capitalist ruling class, which together are the root causes of most of the misery and suffering that we and our planet currently face.
The plan is undeniably dangerous for tens of millions, and would push the United States in a theocratic, authoritarian direction in which the right wing and Christian nationalist layers of the ruling class (and those capitalists simply willing to go along with them) would dominate the political structures of the state in ways that would actively try to silence or crush dissent outright. Trump himself knows how undemocratic and unpopular it is, which is why he has tried to distance himself from it. Democrats are of course portraying the plan as evidence of the evilness of the Republican Party and as a major reason why they and Harris deserve our votes.
But even though the Democrats and Harris are now warning about the dangers of the plan, where have they been for decades as the right wing has been propagandizing and spreading its untruthful, fantastical messages? More important, what have the Democrats done to help working people as our society has decayed around us? The Democrats have done nothing over the past decades that might have made right-wing lies less appealing to millions in the middle and working classes. In fact, Democratic presidents from Clinton to Obama to Biden have overseen much of the economic devastation that has made millions vulnerable to the hate filled message of Trump and his reactionary supporters.
Project 2025 is a dangerous plan that would increase social and economic pain for millions. It would also tighten the grip of reactionary authoritarian Christian nationalists around the necks of millions of working people.
But the answer isn’t to support a party that lets all those forces develop for decades as it oversees the immiseration of the working class. The Democratic Party is part of the problem too. We can’t support them any more than we support the Republicans. In fact, we don’t need either of these political parties.
We workers have power of our own. We are tens of millions, more than 62% of society. We make society run – in the schools, in the transit systems, at the construction sites, in the restaurants and the stores, and in the factories and at the ports. Let’s build our own organization and our own power, and stop supporting the parties that have overseen our oppression and immiseration.
