As it relates to our democracy, Project 2025 is a 21st-century Mein Kampf (1925), to be disregarded at our own peril. Prepared by “conservatives” (generously labeled) hostile to this country’s 1776 pronouncement of equality, Project 2025 is thereby anti-democracy and, it follows, anti-American.
Losing confidence that our impure, if not corrupted, democracy can be reliably counted on to magnify the inequalities of the day, the tyrant trainees at the Heritage Foundation are quite prepared, zealously, to dispense with democracy altogether. They promote the only presidential candidate ever to admire murderous authoritarians; a bigot himself who has promised to be a dictator on “day one,” predicted there will be no need for further elections after this one, and who was indifferent to a hanging-execution of the person MAGA voted to be VP. Truly, a thoroughly authentic civic pervert.
The bigotry is all encompassing: racism and ethnic xenophobia; class-hatred (e.g., YouTube “John McEntee’s fake money cruelty”); intolerance of non-Christian religions and secularism (e.g., science); and gender and sexual orientation animus.
Within the Executive Branch, Project 2025, anticipating a Trump re-election, proposes to replace civil service professionalism and expertise with unconditional loyalty (to Trump, of course), shrink the scope of Establishment Clause protection, reduce environmental protections, cut Medicare and Medicaid, eliminate legal protections against discrimination, terminate DEI initiatives and affirmative action, further erode a woman’s right to manage her pregnancy, harden immigration restrictions and undertake mass deportations, install more regressive tax rates, abolish the Federal Trade Commission to end anti-trust actions, weaken the National Labor Relations Board, and eliminate the Department of Education. All of these projects aim at maximizing inequality and weakening checks and balances, leaving the country even less democratic. “Institutionalizing Trumpism,” according to a NY Times article (Jan. 21).
Why? Because they’re bigots.
To those nonaligned voters and those tempted by a third-party candidate: your political inclinations have been rendered entirely indefensible by Project 2025. Also, time to abandon the illusion that when MAGA invokes religion (e.g., “Christian Nationalism”), it is a description of mandated religiously-ordained belief, rather than as it is — their perverse attempt, by choice, to dignify their hatred.
Time to abandon another illusion that when conservatives speak of “freedom” they are operationally referring to anything beyond the unfettered exercise of “property rights” to maximize the wealth of the already rich, whatever the cost to the dispossessed and the planet. Privatizing for profits, property over people.
Time also to follow the lead set in Illinois by former Republican office holders, Jim Edgar, Ray LaHood, Adam Kinzinger, and Joe Walsh, endorsing Kamala Harris.
And ultimately, it is time to fully embrace, at long last, the cornerstone American ideals of equality and unalienable rights authored by the non-observant Thomas Jefferson 248 years ago and elegantly and enduringly restated at Gettysburg by Abraham Lincoln and, 100 years after Gettysburg, in 1963 by Martin Luther King Jr.
Gregg Mumm is an Oak Park resident.