Why Is It Always ‘Fascism’ and ‘Theocracy’ with These People?

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

 

Have you heard about how Project 2025 will end American democracy as we know it?

 

The Left’s answer to the focus on President Biden’s debilitated state is — to paraphrase the old gibe about Rudy Giuliani’s tendency to bring everyone back to September 11 — a noun, a verb, an overheated adjective, and Project 2025.

 

The debate about the extent to which the Heritage Foundation–crafted agenda speaks for Donald Trump aside, the attacks on it are hilariously irrational and unhinged.

 

California representative Jared Huffman, creator of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, calls the agenda “a dystopian plot” and “an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism.”

 

According to the New Republic, Project 2025 sets out a “Christian nationalist vision of the United States,” and, if implemented, centers of government power “would all be marshaled to ensure our acquiescence in this dictatorial male supremacist society.”

 

Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has fulfilled her professional obligation to warn that, via Project 2025, “Christian Nationalists will trample the wall of church-state separation and upend our democracy.”

 

No less an authority than Seth Meyers warned, “Donald Trump and his allies have a deeply deranged plan for a far-right authoritarian government that will jail opponents, wage a full-scale war on reproductive rights, and dismantle American democracy.”

 

It’s not clear which of the agenda’s items would threaten democracy, although those making that charge tend to point to proposed changes in civil-service rules to enhance the power of the presidency over the bureaucracy. What we are talking about here, then, is an elected president taking more control over the unelected bureaucracy. So, the critics in this instance fear too much democracy.

 

In this connection, the Independent newspaper says Project 2025 will “gut checks and balances to give Trump unprecedented, concentrated executive authority over federal agencies.” This is constitutionally illiterate, of course. The executive-branch bureaucracy isn’t its own branch of government set up to check the president of the United States.

 

As for Christian nationalism, that allegedly has to do with the social policy outlined in the agenda, which is relatively mild. It urges an emphasis on the traditional family in policy-making and the implementation of various regulatory changes to shift federal policy in a pro-life direction and push back against gender ideology. We aren’t talking about radical changes — many of them have to do with the terms used in federal rules and the focus of federal studies and research.

 

Much of this is aimed at rolling back fairly recent changes, but the Left’s Brezhnev Doctrine holds that no territory that it has gained, no matter how tenuously or recently, can be reversed without allegedly creating a theocracy.

 

After cataloguing the various pro-life and other social-policy proposals, the New Republic concludes that Project 2025 is “one of the right’s most open admissions that they aim to install an authoritarian ruler and roll out a twenty-first-century American fascism.”

 

It always has to be the F-word with these people. They can never say, “We hate Donald Trump and his allies because they support policies we strongly oppose,” or “They are putting at risk all the new ground we won the last several years.” No, the GOP always has to be a slouching beast out of 1930s Germany.

 

The contemporary progressive version of the cliché “First, they came for the Jews” is “First, they insisted on the gender binary.”

 

On top of its hysteria, the Left is also incapable of looking around corners. It apparently hasn’t occurred to anyone opposed to Trump and his agenda that the Supreme Court decision on Chevron deference will make some of the agency actions contemplated in Project 2025 more difficult to enact, or that the Court’s immunity decision might benefit President Biden if he loses the election and is pursued by the Trump Justice Department or other Republican prosecutors.

 

That said, no matter how a second Trump administration plays out, and no matter what comes next in the GOP after Trump’s victory or defeat, we can be certain of one thing — it will portend the onset of “fascism” and “theocracy.”