The right's 'Project 2025' is at least partly in response to the earlier social justice project of infusing every level of society with woke ideology. Where's Project 2012?
The right’s so-called ‘Project 2025’ seems almost karmic, a right-wing wish list for remaking America the way God, White Supremacy and Da Patriarchy intended.
Crafted very likely without input from Trump, but extremely likely with his knowledge, Project 2025 seeks to implement a real-world pseudo-Christian hellhole with the attendant contradictions we’ve come to expect with the Religious Wrong: Don’t abort unwanted babies, starve them to death after we cut money to the poor!
They’re coming for your porn, too, with updated rationales other than, “God will make your weenie fall off because He doesn’t want you looking at naked ladies.”
Their censorious methodology may sound frighteningly familiar to their sworn enemies, the woke: The New Right may define ‘pornography’ over-broadly just as the woke define their own social pet peeves to include whatever ‘offends’ their oh-so-fragile sensibilities.
Project 2025 accuses pornography of propagating “transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” for example, and may view it necessary to imprison anyone who teaches about trans people.
The porn prohibition, though, may be the document’s introduction writer’s personal opinion, rather than a real aim of the Project, which names porn only once, in the other 990-odd pages, in relation to child-specific pornography.
What is not in Project 2025, despite some online claims includes:
Banning birth control
Banning abortions without exceptions
Teaching Christian beliefs in the schools (Keep an eye on this one; they were trying to mandate this forty years ago, when I was fighting the Religious Wrong in the States, and they will want to replace ‘social justice’ and Critically Ridiculous Theory with something)
Ending no-fault divorce
Banning Muslims from entering the country (although Trump himself has called for it)
Abolishing the FDA and EPA (Trump supports both of these, and it’s been a Republican wank dream for decades, but it’s not in the Project)
To be clear: What is and isn’t in Project 2025 may be confused and conflated with what Republicans have historically desired and activated for. Which is not to say that any of this can’t be added later. Or implemented apart from it.
The Republic of Gideon it ain’t, but it’s a good start.
Project….2010? 2012? 2014?
The more I read up on Project 2025, the more I come to recognize similarities with the successful less-well-outlined takeover of American institutions by the correspondingly smug and holier-than-thou mirror competitor: Woke social justice.
If there’s a doorstop of a manifesto for remaking America in the image of a humourless, racist, misogynist, homophobic, drag queen God, I don’t know where to find it.
But it’s hard not to see the comparisons between what’s proposed in the event of a Republican victory in November, and what has already ‘successfully’ been implemented in America to remake society according to others’ vision which clearly doesn’t match up with what many Americans say they want.
Those ‘many Americans’ are the ‘Exhausted Majority’ in the middle, between the MAGAts and the social just-us warriors.
I’m going to name the woke warriors’ scheme Project 2012, because I’m not sure if 2010 or 2014 are too soon or too late.
Many others and I have already covered the ‘evolution’ of modern wokeness over the decades, beginning with French post-modernists in the mid-twentieth century. Some if its earliest elements gestated in the civil rights movement, particularly the notion that black Americans were ‘helpless’ in the face of white supremacy that was disappearing as many Americans came to ‘wake up’ and reform the racist reality faced by so many fellow citizens.
The pendulum, as my mother was fond of saying, always swings too far.
Authoritarianism breeds counter-authoritarianism, and ‘political correctness’, the earliest manifestation of the Holy Bulls that have come to police our social media speech and political expression, emerged in the early Clinton administration after twelve years of Republican White House rule. The Christian Right, which grew greatly in power, fell into disrepute with the unfolding Catholic priest scandals, the equally-scandalous sex lives of television evangelists who mandated purity for their flocks, and the dawning realization that many of the so-called pious were ‘Christians In Name Only’.
Meanwhile, on the left, no one noticed the earliest signs of Creeping Authoritarianism.
Gender, race studies, and radical fat chicks
I took a few ‘women’s studies’ classes in college in the early ‘80s. Humorless and self-serious in consonance with the times, we didn’t dissect patriarchy or misogyny. In one class we explored gender dynamics in our primate cousins based on Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s now-classic The Woman That Never Evolved. In another class, The Female Hero, we read eight books written by women about women, which is where I discovered Jane Eyre and Tess of the D’Urbervilles were awesome, and Tolstoy sucks. At least Anna Karenina did.
Women’s Studies birthed the notion that ‘the personal is political’, questioning the primarily patriarchal male views and interpretations of the world and history, and even came for the scientists, revealing a distinctly male lens through which the boys had interpreted anthropological, archaeological, and biological learnings. Women’s Studies remade those same mistakes in women’s own image: Primarily, interpreting artifacts from pre-literate times through a gendered lens when no one truly knows why our cavecritter ancestors created what they did. Are all those chubby figurines truly goddess fetishes? How do they know spirals signified eyes?
Its counterpart, Race and Ethnic Studies, developed along similar lines with an emphasis on social change, and a more in-depth exploration of what non-white women’s experiences and histories were apart from what was essentially a primarily white feminist movement. The earliest analyses of race studies questioned whether there truly were ‘races’ and the different experiences of different people, an early exploration of what is now called the ‘intersectionality’ of oppression and experience.
What ultimately emerged, though, are movements aiming for social change and justice which identified early with victimization and victimhood and which hobbled themselves with self-defeating notions of powerlessness and non-resilience.
Once the identity of ‘victim’ solidified, in the early 2000s the trans movement, quietly operating in the background post-Christine Jorgensen and Dr. Renee Richards, came out of their sisters’ clothes closets and began to agitate for a world in which they were accepted for who they were.
I see now the early manifestations of ‘social justice’ in online engagements I experienced in the 1990s. When I first joined localized computer bulletin board systems and later, the Internet, I remember being dressed down by a ‘fat acceptance’ activist for insensitive remarks I made (and they were) about fat people. She was the editor of an activism magazine for fat people and she attempted to educate me. Which she did, both in ways she intended and also did not. She was the second person to dress me down for being a fat-insensitive idiot (and I was) so I paid more attention, and ever since, to my thoughtless words. She educated me about the many reasons people are fat, not all of them because they overeat and are lazy. She was right; there were many valid reasons why fat people couldn’t always control their weight; body type and genetics being just two. Later, I made friends with a large woman with the then-uncommonly-diagnosed condition Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, with which she gained weight or stayed stubbornly where she was no matter what she ate or how much she exercised. Once she was diagnosed and put on the proper medication, the fat melted off her like butter in a saucepan.
But I experienced some cognitive dissonance with the fat acceptance lady. She made it sound like no one was ever responsible for their weight. A few years later, when I was on the then-infant public Internet, I delved into the movement when I encountered fat people who denied there were any health problems associated with obesity, which clearly was not backed by reams of medical and scientific research, and their arguments that the medical profession was just trying to make money off the obese didn’t ring true.
It was an early lesson in the self-infantilization and excuses of the many ‘acceptance’ and ‘anti-’ movements to come.
From theory to application
The French philosophers who birthed post-modernist thought never advocated implementing their ideas in real life, but in the mid-1980s social justice activists adopted many of its lessons and moved it into an ‘applied post-modernism’, embroidering it into community and society. They began interpreting the world through power dynamics and various ever-narrowing identities. The early signs of a religious, Christian-familiar framework appeared long before we critics saw it coming; capital-T ‘Theory’ as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay called it in their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Social justice disseminated The Truth, and thou shalt not question it, especially of ‘marginalized’ peoples’ ‘lived experience’, however whacky, questionable, and downright delusional they sounded. The Truth, like any other religion, turned its back on reason, rationalism, and evidence.
Its framework was that of Western culture’s: Judaeo-Christian, although now we’re seeing an Islamic framework interwoven with the Gazan protests.
The history of the long tortured evolution of woke ideology, stemming from traditional liberal thought (later abandoned) is lengthy, and the Pluckrose-Lindsay book provides the best history and analysis of it I’ve seen so far. What’s critically important is that while everyone was stressing over right-wing takeovers, the left was quietly changing society, weaving their vision into all American institutions to the point where you almost can’t escape it.
What occurred in a nutshell was the rise in power of the Regressive Left, defined by British commentator Majiid Nawaz in 2012 to describe those lefties who aligned themselves with cultural relativism and repressive Islamic theocracies. The ‘woke’ turned hypocrisy, like their right-wing role models before them, into a cardinal virtue. The primary example today is the LGTBQ supporters for Palestine, people who famously toss gay and trans people off buildings (and the rest of the Middle East, apart from Israel, ain’t any more supportive). Others include feminists who damn Donald Trump for pussy-grabbing or predators like Harvey Weinstein, but turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the terrible conditions of their Muslim sisters subjected to heinous patriarchal violence every damn day.
And, pretty arguably, if one is in favor of censorship by one’s own group, but not for your enemies, that’s about as hypocritical as it gets.
The backlash is brewing. It’s a coin toss at the moment as to which presidential team will prevail. ‘Wokeness’ has been cited by many disaffected Democrats to explain why they won’t vote for Harris. It’s not the only reason, but it’s close to the top.
The conundrum it poses for those in the middle is feeling like choosing between Stalin and Hitler. Not literally, as we don’t anticipate purges or gas chambers, but both sides of the extreme have historically demonstrated a willingness to implement both, so perhaps the fear is, “Not yet.”
Project 2025 is frightening, but so too is the woke Project we’re already mired in. As a lifelong liberal I’ve always wanted to see society remade more in accordance with liberal values, which has been highly successful in many ways—it abolished slavery, got us out of a pointless war in the 1970s, and birthed civil rights, and gave women the vote. Just because it’s gone too far doesn’t mean it’s a wholesale failure. Conservatism isn’t all bad either, and will be critically important in rectifying some of the Regressive Left’s mistakes. Biden’s open-border policy has clearly been a failure, and the hippie free-love-for-all from the ‘60s looks far more tarnished today, with male-dominated ‘polycules’ reifying the male sexual playground, which has never worked well for women. And then there are ‘divorce parties’ thrown by women abandoning their husbands and families to show that women can be just as heartless, irresponsible, and self-obsessed as some men.
The Republic of Gideon can come from either direction. The Exhausted Majority needs binocular bird vision to watch out for freedom predators. Because one has a proposed Project for download and the other has already established theirs.
It’s possible the far left was the smarter of the two, because, in the immortal words of Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
Implementing Project 2025 won’t be as easy as many imagine. But it may just need the time Project 2012 has had.
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