Tender feelings among phony "conservatives" underlie assault on democracy

The right wing Heritage Foundation has undertaken to mobilize a broad swath of conservative academics and a goodly number of cranks to write a blueprint for a prospective Trump administration. They call it Project 2025. The document has been widely reported on; if you are a real glutton for punishment, you can download it yourself, though I doubt anyone else is much up for 900 pages of this stuff. 

European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, who is a visiting prof at Georgetown University, is closely observing the U.S. scene. He provides this commentary on the plan:

There is a nervous energy on the Right. A volatile mix of desperation and enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur and a feeling of impending doom – all of it being channeled into a feverish effort to devise detailed plans and strategies, policy agendas, personnel databases, and emergency “playbooks” for a return to power.

... reactionaries are actually united by the desire to punish their enemies, “take back” the country, and restore the “natural order” of unquestioned white Christian patriarchal rule – a unity that is indicative of a broader realignment on the Right towards an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism. ...

This tendency to embrace the coercive powers of the state as long as they were deployed in service of the rightwing agenda has escalated in the more recent past, as the sense of being under siege as a persecuted minority in their own country has radicalized on the Right. Conservative elites have always cultivated a sense of (self-)victimization, have displayed a remarkable persecution complex even while holding disproportionate power, at least politically and economically, often focused on the cultural sphere they didn’t manage to dominate.

Until quite recently, this overall feeling among conservatives of being victimized was accompanied by a sense of representing the majority will of the people – of having the infamous “silent majority” on their side. The “silent majority” idea was obviously based on a racialized conception of America’s true volk. It was the majority of only those who *really* counted the Right claimed or cared to represent – a group that was predominantly white, Christian, and espoused certain conservative values and sensibilities that were coded as authentically American. And yet, the “silent majority” chimera at least paid lip service to some notion of majoritarian government and therefore, at least rhetorically, recognized democratic principles. That’s completely gone, in theory and practice.

Conservatives have basically moved from criticizing “big government” and “activist judges” for going against the will of the “silent majority” to declaring the majority illegitimate and accusing it of assaulting the natural order as justification for their attempts to entrench minoritarian rule by whatever means.

... this would not be the same Right that came to power in 2017. That starts with Trump himself. The idea that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump, is massively misleading and obscures the rather drastic radicalization of the Right’s undisputed leader. Beyond Trump, the Right more generally has significantly radicalized. The idea that more drastic action is urgently needed has been spreading fast into the center of conservative politics. The summer of 2020, specifically, escalated this perception of imminent threat: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to view the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as supposedly irrefutable proof that “the Left” has started its full-on assault, justifying calls for ever more extreme action in response. This radicalization has found its manifestation in the Republican Party.

... The best approach to understanding the Right has always been to take seriously and actually grapple with their vision for American society. In that sense, “Project 2025” is tremendously helpful. Rightwing leaders could not possibly be clearer about the reactionary vision they want to impose on the country. They are telling us that they do not accept this egalitarian, pluralistic idea of a society in which the individual’s status is no longer determined by race, gender, religion, and wealth. They feel justified in taking truly radical, extreme measures to prevent that society from ever becoming a reality because they believe they are defending “real America” in service of a higher purpose: To restore and entrench what they see as the natural order and divine will, as it manifests in strict, discriminatory hierarchies.

The reactionary mobilization against democratic multiracial pluralism won’t stop because the people behind it have some sort of epiphany that they shouldn’t go *that* far. It will either *be stopped* or succeed in entrenching white Christian patriarchal rule – and install a system in which only they and those who reflect their image back at them are entitled to rule and be recognized as equal.

Scary stuff. As is usual when previously unchallenged dominant men let themselves be governed by fear. Also, all too much like the BS that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was peddling the other day in the arguments over whether a president should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for illegal acts aiming to stay in power.