by the Editorial Board
The Presidential Transition Project, also known as Project 2025, represents the reactionization of the bourgeois state in the most open manner. It did not come from thin air nor the delusions of grandeur of Donald Trump, but rather it places on its front page the process in which US democracy has been decomposing for decades. The Plan itself has its precedence established by the Democrats, specifically by the labeling and handling of the reactionary January 6th riots improperly dubbed “insurrection.”
Classifying the reactionary riots of January 6th an insurrection opened the floodgates to all manner of reactionary maneuvers on behalf of the ruling party, bringing back the sedition charges of former times, and bolstering up the repressive response to large demonstrations. The juggernaut created now simply threatens to pass hands into those who are far more open about their desire to use them. The right uses fascists and other reactionaries to press Democrats into fortifying the repressive apparatus of the state, one which they are poised to inherit. All of these enhanced means of repression are ultimately leveled at the left.
Project 2025 is not new. It is already several years old and rooted in a long history before its formulation. In 2022, the project was established by Kevin Roberts, the president of the ultra-reactionary Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation hails from the 1970s and was comprised of monopolists seeking to control public policy to a much larger degree. They were dissatisfied with the political co-operation among the ruling class and sought fiercely bolster its most conservative elements. Chief among the foundation’s “pro-business” anti-worker policies was and still is anti-communism.
The Heritage Foundation saw its first big success under the Reagan administration during which massive amounts of arms and funds were diverted to anti-communist death squads and fascists groups around the world. Since Reagan, the Republican administrations that followed had the main part of their foreign policy dictated by these reactionaries. In 2022, Roberts, as head of the foundation, developed Project 2025 in response to government officials not going along with some of Trump’s most flagrant policies. He was interested in creating an ideological basis for concentrating extreme power to the executive branch combined with collecting a database of people loyal to Trump who could be selected in this interest.
Project 2025 is transparent about the process of decomposition in the US and it openly embraces the direction this decomposition is taking. For years The Worker and other proletarian publications have warned of the process of reactionization in which power is concentrated in the executive branch combined with presidential absolutism. This is not a novel phenomena historically; it has been exemplified by Degaulism in France, for instance. What may appear shocking is how openly this anti-democratic trend is embraced. Cunning representatives of the imperialist ruling class would often prefer tact and subtly in following the same plan—however, Trump is anything but subtle.
Presidential absolution over the executive branch would mean that the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, among many others, would cease to have any independence, centralizing the power of the ruling class more and more into the hands of one individual who presides over the entire state. The anti-democratic organization of the US state from its very onset has been marked with this trajectory, and with the development of capitalism into imperialism the speed in which the state follows this path has been advanced. This process has reached new speeds in the current imperialist crisis.
Trump is far from the first to represent the desire to absolute power; in fact every president before and since him has increased the reactionization, more and more ruling with decree. For his part, Trump still maintains that he has his own transitional policy and has sought to distance himself from Project 2025. However, much of the open reaction in the project is derived directly from Trump’s own plans and his closest conspirators have designed the plan with him in mind. This makes it probable that in the event of a Trump victory the project would be carried out as much as possible.
Democratic Party opposition to Project 2025 is equally false, as they too represent this trend. The way US imperialism accumulates wealth and has to maintain a global military presence to hold onto its domination means it can no longer embody the democratic principles of early capitalism, which in the US sense even then was far less democratic than its counterparts. Nonetheless, the Biden campaign is sure to utilize the fear of Project 2025 as a specter to generate voters. Biden’s previous election victory was based solely on the fact that he was not Trump. His time in office has proven that he is no less reactionary than Trump: attacks on the workers, support for genocide, police killings, deportations and incarceration have not gone down under his rule but instead have gone up. The next election promises to be even more absurd than the last, when Biden will again present his only argument of not being Trump as a way to gain votes, while both parties seek to generate spectacle in a feeble effort to legitimize the illegitimate elections.
The difference between Reactionization of the Democratic-Liberal Bourgeois State and Fascism
Fascism is the method of government that the imperialist accepts to prevent losing control during a revolutionary crisis, especially when there is a plausible threat from the left. It is a forced consolidation of class power into the hands of the most terroristic and anti-democratic forces. As such, reactionization and fascism can look almost identical; yet there are some critical differences.
Under fascism, corporativization takes place in combination with the lack of democratic rights. Large scale privatization of industry and forced corporate merger are used to bolster the state. These artificial monopolies destroy the small businesses and do not resolve the contradictions among the capitalists, but seek to end national competition between them. They are unstable—whether or not they are owned by the state they require a large cumbersome militarized state and aggressive invasions and domination of the third world. Under fascism, the unions of workers are banned or merged with the corporation or the state itself, basing itself on “national interests.” Fascism exists among the governments of the third world oppressed nations as well, but that is a different question.
Under monopoly capitalism it is competition and the economic dominance which causes merger, nonetheless there it is not a question of governmental decree. The ruling class already utilizes white terror—it is how they maintain political power—and without going to fascism the ruling class is capable of even the most extreme forms of white terror. As for democracy, imperialism withers away democratic rights on its own, still choosing to maintain its class power by gaining the consent or at least the complacency of its population by maintaining some democratic rights. Under fascism the ruling class itself loses democratic rights in the sense that its factions can no longer criticize one another or compete politically. This too adds to fascism’s instability.
When revisionism seeks to utilize the minor distinctions between the ruling class parties to generate support for their preferred representatives of imperialism, they resort to invoking the word fascism, misidentifying it and the threats it poses. US society is increasingly reactionary, from its ideological trends to its politics, themselves all expressions of its economic foundation. Communists and class conscious workers reject this process and fight against it. One manifestation of this fight is the tactic of boycotting the ruling class elections, acting on the ideas of the majority of working people and turning their abstinence from voting into a conscious and organized boycott of the farce itself.
Insurrection acts, the consolidation of power to the executive branch, and presidential absolutism are all signs of the ruling class’ weakness, evidence that they cannot rule in the old way, and that they live in fear of mass unrest, which itself indicates that the people cannot live in the old way. This was expressed by Lenin as requirements of a revolutionary situation. What is glaringly absent from Lenin’s formula is the existence of the Communist Party, which alone can weld the steel of history into rifles, while the ruling class seeks to weld it into chains. This is the problem that revolutionaries must resolve today.
photo: Two-time Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks with the Heritage Foundation, 2011, Roshan Nebhrajani, Medill News Service
