56
votes
'Project 2025' and the 'Mandate for Leadership'; the conservative plan for America
Link information
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- Title
- The GOP Has a Master Plan to Criminalize Being Trans | Dame Magazine
- Authors
- Brynn Tannehill
- Published
- Aug 14 2023
- Word count
- 1345 words
I don't generally like to post "doom" content, but I think this is a very important topic for anyone of voting age who cares about our democracy to understand -- this is the conservative agenda for 2025 if they win the election, but more importantly, as the product of close to 50 right-wing think tanks, you can truly take this as "The Conservative Promise" for any future in which conservatives are given power.
This is why, in my mind, "both sides" is no longer a suitable defense for the legitimacy of conservative philosophy. We are reaching the end result of what conservatism produces, they are spelling it out explicitly and the warnings of fascism have not been exaggerations. GOP think tanks have outlined a plan to grant outsized power to the head of the executive, eliminate the independence of the justice department, dismantle the EPA and industry regulators, criminalize LGBT people, and purge the deep state of anyone who will not go along.
Additional sources and analysis:
[1] Salon article detailing plan to purge upwards of 50,000 federal employees
[2] Humanist Report (video analysis)
From the Dame article (emphasis mine):
So my question is: What is the Democrat's counter to the 2025project?
At this point, "Not having the 2025 project" isn't good enough. There needs to be a clear, decisive alternative. I need to tell people what to vote for, not what to vote against. An alternative plan that properly casts the Republican party for what it is and properly neuters this 2025 plan, rather than just postponing it to 2029.
You can't just vote against fascism. You have to take a stand against fascism.
I feel like the "stand against fascism" these days usually gets called radical or overreactive by centrists. I'm 100% percent with you on wanting to vote for something, but even the watered down build back better was seen as edgy. The one thing that seems to be catalyzing young voters is climate change, so maybe start there?
Semi-joke of a response but how about a platform that covers a bunch of bullshit that just sounds like conservative points. Like banning conversion therapy on the premise groups now are attempting to convert kids to be gay (a weird conservative fear) while the real target is the actual conversion therapy camps.
I'm sure there are more examples of ways you could twist GOP hypocrisy to dunk on them, I'm just out of ideas here.
Edit: how about an "attack helicopter" bill banning people from identifying as attack helicopters but the actual meat is granting rights for trans people to change gender on ID or something else like that.
Move the conspiracy whack jobs to the other side of the spectrum? That could work if your goal is simply to win an election.
Maybe not the conspiracy nuts, but banning conversion therapy would create some interesting debates. It would put you in a position where you can either twist an opponent's words or force them to expose their own bigotry.
I worry that neither of those things seems to matter. Look at the things republicans say and do: things that should be abhorrent to many conservatives. Yet they win. They thrive on bigoty. Exposing it would probably help them.
I think this is the kind of thinking that gave us trump in the first place. The idea that trump wasn't bad enough to vote against, and that people should have been given a reason to vote for Clinton. Setting aside the myriad of reasons people should have had for voting for Clinton, the largest among them was that she was not donald trump. When a political party tells you in no uncertain terms that they are planning vile and heinous shit, it doesn't matter what the alternative says or does. As long as it isn't the evil shit, you have a moral imperative to vote for them. Anyone who doesn't do everything they can to stop them, the bare minimum of which is voting for their only alternative, is culpable in all the bad shit they do.
My point is that "not being X" does not inspire people to vote the same way as "being Y" is.
Democrats have a serious problem with this. It means that any less-than-the-worst Republican has a chance at winning because of voter apathy. The greatest risk of loss isn't 3rd party voters, it's the 40x larger apathetic nonvoters.
I'm challenging Democrats to actually do better than the absolute bare minimum. I've been pleasantly surprised by Biden's presidency TBH, but that in itself is not enough to campaign on. Especially when facing a potential fascist takeover.
I read through enough of Project 2025. It's pretty good at its stated objective: Provide a unified vision for how conservatives will overthrow democracy if they win in 2024 elections.
If the Democrats can't put out an equally compelling counter-document on how they'll be defending against fascism, their ineptitude means the fascists will win. If not in 2024, almost certainly in 2028.
My membership in the Democratic party is a formality. I'm not a Democrat. They only have my vote insofar that they are not-republican. And because of that, my apathy level is much higher than I'd like. If the status quo were much closer to what it was circa 2012, I'd certainly be voting 3rd party again.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. If voting against fascism isn't the most motivating thing for a voter, I can't imagine what would be. The only thing a democrat needs to do to earn my vote in an incredibly motivated way is not being a fucking fascist. Everything else is really just a bonus. And the fact that this is some sort of unpopular opinion is the entire reason we're in this mess.
And that's to say nothing of myriad of ways the democrats have absolutely earned votes. Pretty much no matter what a voters legislative priorities are, the democrats have made meaningful progress at some point in the last few years. But for some reason it's popular to shit on them when the alternative is literal fascism.
Because I've seen this song and dance before. Because every time legitimate criticisms are brought up, they handwave them away and say 'but the alternative is worse'. "Vote Blue no matter who."
The Republicans will inside of 2 years make 20 years of long term damaging policy. Democrats will take 4 to undo 10 year's worth of damage.
The modern state of the Democrats is much closer to 90s republicans than I'd like.
Sure, no real argument here, but if someone attacks you with a knife and all you have in the moment is a fist, you still use the fist.
I've answered my own question: Biden must pack the Supreme Court now. While the Democrats still hold a slim majority in the Senate.
Don't mince words about it, don't hide from it, every Democrat stand proud and campaign on it: The members of the Supreme Court whom were placed by the treason president can't be trusted to judge in unbiased manners as intended, and thus their power must be weakened by expanding the court.
Please explain how? It's never been done, but neither the constitution, nor any amendments list an explicit number of justices. It's part of the US Code, but that can be changed by any passage of legislation.
FDR's legislative attempt failed to gain the traction it needed, but at worst this is untested.
If you can explain your plan to her manchin and sinema on board with a supreme court expansion, I'll concede that they should do it. Because otherwise claiming them have the votes needed to do this and are just choosing not to is, at best, disengenuous. It definitely needs to be done, but it is quite literally impossible at this point in time.
I'll clarify:
If they can't find the votes to do this, with the stakes as they are, either through their party or grabbing a few supposed moderates from the republicans, then democracy is already dead and we're just poking the corpse with a stick.
TBH the fatal blow was probably in 2000, but it took this long to fall over.
First they came for the porn consumers, and I did not speak out—because I was not ... wait what? Hey!
They have already successfully gone after women's rights when it comes to abortion, but you're not wrong that they're likely to continue going after even more women's rights after they're done with us queers.
And that's not just hyperbole. American social conservatives have finally gone full masks-off, and calling them fascists isn't even slightly an exaggeration anymore. Any Americans still using bothsidesism when talking about Democrats vs Republicans this next election needs to STFU and actually read the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Especially since it isn't written by some random nobody. The Heritage Foundation is incredibly well-funded, remarkably influential, and has its hands in politics and politicians the world over.
I think it's more of a smash and grab situation; when someone robs a store they'll break out the windows, turn over displays, break open the safe etc. because they aren't there to manage the store even though they're standing behind the cash register, they're there to pillage and, when necessary, dip out and leave everyone else to deal with cleaning it up. Conservatives don't really have a loyalty to the place they live, they only care as long as they can extract what they want from it.
The thing in the US is they rob us, but then they show up the following week and we let them in again to break the new register. And they get away with it because they claim it was "some black guy I think" or "I saw a mexican robbing the till.", "Maybe if we ban lgbt people from the store it'll stop happening". Even though they're on literal video camera stealing.
This cannot be emphasized enough. If Republicans win the Presidency again, that will be the end of democracy in the US. Frankly, democracy has been teetering on the ragged edge since, at least, the "Citizens United" ruling by SCOTUS ...
The demographic writing has been on the wall for decades, and too many people (myself definitely included) have underestimated just how far the racist white minority is willing to go to maintain their positions of control and authority.
And sadly, the fatal flaw of a two-party system is now ever more apparent, as the Democratic platform, more and more, is simply "vote for us or get stuck with Them".