Threats to democracy and its institutions aren't new.

The right has been bent on their destruction for more than a century.

As Rick Perlstein says, the point of taking note of this isn't to minimize the danger, rather, it's to contextualize it.

⭐️The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without "interference" from democratic institutions, ⭐️
so that their power to extract wealth from First Nations, working people, and the land itself is checked only by rivalries with other aristocrats.

🔸The project of the right is grounded in a belief in #Providence: that God's favor shines on His best creations and elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is "that which leads to elite status."🔸

When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a #hereditary #meritocracy: ♦️a bloodline infused with God's favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the "good bloodline" reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty. ♦️

Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his "race realism" with mystical nonsense: "God favored me with superior genes." 💥The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn't favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.💥

👉So we should be alarmed by the right's agenda. We should be alarmed at how much ground it has gained, and how the right has stolen elections and Supreme Court seats to enshrine antimajoritarianism as a seemingly permanent fact of life, giving extremist minorities the power to impose their will on the rest of us, dooming us to a roasting planet, forced births, racist immiseration, and most expensive, worst-performing health industry in the world.👈

But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, 🔷it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory. 🔷

⭐️The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.⭐️

The right wing coalition needs to pander to
forced-birth extremists,
racist extremist, Christian Dominionist extremists (of several types),
frothing anti-Communist cranks,
vicious homophobes and transphobes, etc, etc.

Pandering to all these groups isn't easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things
– the post-Roe 🔸forced birth policies🔸 that followed the Dobbs decision are wildly #unpopular among conservatives (with the exception of a clutch of totally unhinged maniacs that the party relies on as part of a much larger coalition.)

Even more unpopular are 🔸policies banning birth control, 🔸like the ones laid out in #Project2025.
Less popular still: 🔸the proposed ban on no-fault divorce. 🔸
Each of these policies have different constituencies to whom they are very popular,
but when you put them together, you get Dan Savage's "Husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office"
@pluralistic
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/

@pluralistic

The constituency for "husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office" is very small.

Almost no one in the GOP coalition is voting for ALL of this,
they're voting for one or two of these things and holding their noses when it comes to the rest.

Take the "libertarian" wing of the GOP: its members do favor personal liberty
…it's just that they favor low taxes for them more than personal liberty for you.

The kind of lunatic who'd vote for a dead gopher if it would knock a quarter off his tax bill will happily allow his coalition partners to rape pregnant women with unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds and force them to carry unwanted fetuses to term if that's the price he has to pay to save a nickel in taxes:

And, of course, the religious maniacs who profess a total commitment to Biblical virtue
-- but worship Trump, Gaetz, Limbaugh, Gingrich, Reagan, and the whole panoply of cheating, lying, kid-fiddling, dope-addled refugees from a Jack Chick tract
-- know that these men never gave a shit about Jesus,
the Apostles or the Ten Commandments

– but they'll vote for 'em because it will get them school prayer, total abortion bans,
and unregulated "home schooling"
so they can brainwash a generation of Biblical literalists who think the Earth is 5,000 years old and that Jesus was white and super into rich people.

Time and again, the leaders of the conservative movement prove themselves capable of acts of breathtaking cruelty,
-- and undoubtedly many of them are depraved sadists who genuinely enjoy the suffering of their enemies

(think of Trump lickspittle Steven Miller's undisguised glee at the thought of parents who would never be reunited with children after being separated at the border).

But it's a mistake to think that "the cruelty is the point."

⭐️The point of the cruelty is to assemble and maintain the coalition.
⭐️Cruelty is the tactic.
🔴Power is the point

The right has assembled a lot of power.
They did so by maintaining unity among people who have irreconcilable ethics and goals.

Think of the pro-genocide coalition that includes far-right Jewish ethno-nationalists, antisemitic apocalyptic Christians who believe they are hastening the end-times,

and Islamophobes of every description, from War On Terror relics to Hindu nationalists.

This is quite an improbable coalition, and while I deplore its goals, I can't help but be impressed by its cohesion.

❓Can you imagine the kind of behind-the-scenes work it takes to get antisemites who think Jews secretly control the world to lobby with Zionists?

⁉️Or to get Zionists to work alongside of Holocaust-denying pencilneck Hitler wannabes whose biggest regret is not bringing their armbands to Charlottesville?

🔥Which brings me back to #Project2025 and its true significance.

As Rick Perlstein writes, Project 2025 is a mess.

Clocking in an 900 pages, large sections of Project 2025 flatly contradict each other,
while other sections contain subtle contradictions that you wouldn't notice unless you were schooled in the specialized argot of the far right's jargon and history.

♦️For example, Project 2025 calls for defunding government agencies and repurposing the same agencies to carry out various spectacular atrocities.

Both actions are deplorable,
💥but they're also mutually exclusive. 💥

Project 2025 demands four different, completely irreconcilable versions of US trade policy. But at least that's better than Project 2025's chapter on monetary policy, which simply lays out every right wing theory of money and then throws up its hands and recommends none of them.

Perlstein says that these conflicts, blank spots and contradictions are the most important parts of Project 2025.

👉They are the fracture lines in the coalition: the conflicting ideas that have enough support that neither side can triumph over the other. 👈

These are the conflicts that are so central to the priorities of blocs that are so important to the coalition that they must be included, even though that inclusion constitutes a blinking "LOOK AT ME" sign telling us where the right is ready to split apart.

✅To win, we need to split apart their coalition.

Perlstein calls on us to 🌟dissect Project 2025, 🌟to cleave it at its joints.

To do so, he says we need to understand its antecedents, like Nixon's "Malek Manual,"
a roadmap for destroying the lives of civil servants who failed to show sufficient loyalty to Nixon.

For example, the Malek Manual lays out a "Traveling Salesman Technique" whereby a government employee would be given duties "criss-crossing him across the country to towns
(hopefully with the worst accommodations possible)
of a population of 20,000 or under.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/

@pluralistic - The true, tactical significance of #Project2025. Like you, I have heard a lot about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's #roadmap for the actions that #Trump should take if he wins the presidency. Given the #HeritageFoundation's centrality to the #American #authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual#democracy #congress #constitution #courts #justice #civilliberties #government #hierarchy #wealth #policy #governance