“An ambitious man who may have the army at his devotion, may step into the throne, and seize upon absolute power.”
~Samuel Bryan, “The Address and Reasons of Dissent of the Minority of the Convention of Pennsylvania to their Constituents” (December 18, 1787)“If strong and extensive Powers are vested in the Executive, and that Executive consists only of one Person, the Government will of course degenerate (for I will call it degeneracy) into a Monarchy — A Government so contrary to the Genius of the People, that they will reject even the Appearance of it.”
~George Mason, draft speech, June 4, 1787“It was, he said, the fundamental principle of a free government, that the people should make the laws by which they were to be governed: He who is controlled by another is a slave; and that government which is directed by the will of any one or a few, or any number less than is the will of the community, is a government for slaves.”
~Melancton Smith, speech (June 20, 1788)
Since President Joe Biden brought public awareness to it, Project 2025 has received much media attention. But of course, that was a self-serving partisan maneuver because it’s campaign season, though strangely it wasn’t mentioned earlier. Project 2025 has been known about for a while now, as the Heritage Foundation put out a massive 920 page report on it (Mandate For Leadership: The Conservative Promise); and that was more than four months ago. Yet Democratic leadership had been initially silent about it, for whatever reason. Why the reluctance to bring up possibly the most damning piece of evidence about the GOP’s right-wing plans in recent decades? Donald Trump having been elected and now seeking re-election has put some fire under the backside of the DNC elite and their backers. But why do Democrats typically seem so slow and weak in their responses? Even now, much of the talk about Project 2025 is superficial, offering little context, not really hitting the message home. So, before we get into the meat of the topic, let’s make clear what is behind it and what has led up to it, the kind of info you’re not going to find in news reporting.
We’ll start with the right-wing hero worship of the American Founders glorified as religious figures akin to Abraham and Moses with the U.S. Constitution idolatrized as a divinely revealed and infallible Holy Scripture to be treated like the Ten Commandments. When present day right-wingers espouse ‘Originalism’, they take their inspiration from the most hardcore ‘Federalists’; well, actually anti-federalists (i.e., nationalists or imperialists) since they sought centralized, rather than decentralized, power (hence, why the term ‘federalism’ has become largely meaningless). Leading (pseudo-)Federalists, such as Alexander Hamilton, hated democracy and the last thing in the world they wanted was for the American people, all the people, to govern themselves; with blacks, Native Americans, etc not necessarily even considered citizens, much less legal persons or moral persons or maybe even fully human. This is why the ‘Federalists’ used a covert coup to push the U.S. Constitution (in unconstitutionally replacing the original constitution, the “Articles of Confederation”). The second constitution at first allowed less voting rights and for fewer Americans (3–6%) than the colonists had under British imperial rule; with most white men disenfranchised as well. It took generations of Americans fighting for their rights to slowly gain a semblance of democracy, with women and various minorities having had to struggle under oppression for more than a century to even get basic freedom from under WASP patriarchy.
It’s true that Hamilton would sometimes almost sound authentic in his supposed federalism, such as: “The nation that can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” One might take that as an attempt to inspire brave struggle against any master. But that phrasing is a bit fork-tongued. When one thinks about it carefully, it’s not obvious what conclusion he was offering and which option he was recommending. Given he ultimately sided with the masters, maybe the real take away is he decided Americans were too disgraceful to be allowed freedom. Neither did Hamilton’s Federalist fellow traveler, John Adams, have much faith in the American people or really any people anywhere. Adams wrote, “Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. Those passions are the same in all men under all forms of government, when unchecked produce the same effects of fraud. Violence and cruelty.” Sounds like modern rhetoric that caricatures democracy as collective oppression of minorities (i.e., ‘mobocracy’), inevitably ending in disaster and misery; and so scapegoating the victims for their own oppression while rationalizing the power of their oppressors.
With Adams, there was no mincing of words and no pretense. If nothing else, he was a straight shooter in his conventional thought, as he preferred his dominance hierarchy simple and to the point (as such, he was slow to join the fight against the British imperialism he favored, until the conflict was unavoidable). Many right-wingers were more bluntly honest in the past, as they hadn’t yet honed their political apologetics and propaganda, nor did they have as many reasons to hide in having had far less challenge to their power and privilege. Yet such words describe what ultra-right elites still believe. And the uncouth bluntness of former President Trump has helped them to, once again, become more honest in stating the quiet parts out loud (e.g., Trump’s having shared on social media videos calling for a “Unified Reich”). Such blatantly anti-democratic ideology is what many Republican politicians, reactionary Supreme Court judges, right-wing media hosts, and alt-right influencers mean when they claim authority upon the ‘Founding Fathers’. It’s what is motivating the now infamous Project 2025 that came out of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank (a.k.a., a propaganda mill) and the old stalwart pillar of what the journalist Anne Nelson calls the radical right-wing’s ‘Shadow Network’ (see Paul Weyrich). As a side note, contrary to Trump’s recent denial of knowing about Project 2025, “Trump campaign officials acknowledge that it aligns well with their own ‘Agenda 47’ program” (Michael Hirsh, Inside the Next Republican Revolution).
About right-wing authoritarianism of this past century, we should look to the history of how it came to hold so much sway and, importantly, against what kind of alternatives. Hamilton and Adams represented only one faction of the revolutionary debate. The other side was voiced by the most inspiring voices of that era, Thomas Jefferson with his radical “Declaration of Independence” and Thomas Paine with his numerous pamphlets that caught on like wildfire. Those idealists and visionaries, firebrands and rabblerousers later on were called the Anti-Federalists. But before they had a label (or rather a mis-label) and a party (Democratic-Republicans), they were simply the heart and soul of the American Revolution, without whom we Americans would probably still be British citizens; admittedly, it might’ve been a better deal in retrospect (e.g., slavery could’ve ended sooner and without civil war). Though these others were the strongest defenders of principled federalism, it was Hamilton who claimed his own party as the ‘Federalists’ and so, oddly, the defenders of actual federalism got slotted with the opposing name (the complication that Howard Schwartz, as discussed further down, may have alluded to in noting there is no ‘federalist’ rhetoric in Anti-Federalist Jefferson’s Declaration). As so often happens, left-wingers lost the rhetorical battle in how right-wingers will, when given a chance, deviously steal rhetoric, labels, symbols, tactics, and anything else that is useful; so as to add camouflage to their shells like a decorator crab.
When one talks of ‘Originalism’, it really depends on which founding documents and other early texts one is referring to — that is to say: Whose Original Intent? As mentioned, the original founding constitution was the “Articles of Confederation,” having been as devoutly (small ‘f’) federalist as was possible at the time, with there having been numerous presidents under the Articles prior to George Washington. And the most original founding document of them all was the “Declaration of Independence,” of which further complicates matters: “The Declaration itself, by contrast, never envisioned a Federal government at all. Ironically, then, if one wants to see the political philosophy of the United States in the Declaration of Independence, one should theoretically be against any form of federal government and not just for a particular interpretation of its limited powers” (Howard Schwartz, Liberty In America’s Founding Moment, Kindle Locations 5375–5378; see Dickinson’s Purse and Sword). He has a point, in that the Declaration was written by someone who would later identify as an Anti-Federalist (i.e., one opposed to a dominance hierarchy of concentrated and centralized power, of any variety). About federalism more broadly and in the term’s original usage, before being usurped and altered, the original meaning was that of a freely consensual confederation of autonomously and locally self-governed nation-states; a meaning that was quickly lost, unfortunately. In any case, the Declaration was written before the Articles and so was pre-confederation, as it was defining independence against the then dominant forms of authoritarianism (imperialism, monarchism, aristocracy, plutocracy, corporatism, and theocracy), rather than positing precisely what should replace them.
As for the Articles, that wasn’t the first radical constitution in American politics. For that, you’d have to look to Roger William’s Rhode Island secular experiment that he described as ‘democratical’, such that even Native Americans had civil rights, including freedom of religion. On a related note of radical political organizing, what might be fit into the category of living constitutionalism, think of Thomas Morton’s disreputable Merrymount where European settlers, freed blacks, and Native Americans cavorted freely together — how scandalous! Even the Quaker William Penn’s egalitarian and laissez-faire governance of the multicultural Pennsylvania Colony was quite subversive for it’s time. Those three examples were from the wild and wooly 17th century that, amidst not only Enlightenment thinkers but also religious dissenters, inspired the English Civil War and Bacon’s Rebellion. As such, this radicalism was already a long established Anglo-American tradition. In fact, writings from the English Civil War, during which the king was beheaded for his political corruption, were a direct inspiration to the later American revolutionaries (Spirit of ‘76). It might’ve also been the precedent for the French revolutionaries to behead their own king. To emphasize the extended history, it was not long after the Norman Invasion of England that the entire Western world had already broken out into egalitarian demands and revolutionary class war as far back as the 14th century with the Peasants Revolts, the prototype for modern revolution.
Of Paine and Jefferson, the latter raised, trained, and educated as a cerebral aristocrat was the moderate. And yet even Jefferson was, in some ways, so radical as to have been to the left of today’s Democratic Party; his old school bigotry aside. Like Paine, he supported a democracy that was direct and majoritarian where self-governance was as close to the people as possible. When Federalists argued that only landowners (i.e., rich white men) should be allowed to vote, Jefferson amusedly conceded their point and then proposed that every citizen, upon reaching voting age, should be given land as freely distributed from the Commons. He was serious when advocating what today right-wingers would falsely caricature as ‘communism’, but he was also calling the bluff of right-wingers by cleverly reframing their demand for authoritarian rule and dominance hierarchies. Anti-Federalists were also in favor of progressive taxation and various other forms of redistribution and reparations (e.g., Paine’s Citizens Dividend paid for by land taxes, as all privatized land is theft from the Commons), albeit to be decided democratically. It’s hard to imagine even the furthest left Democratic politician right now risking even quoting an American founder to that effect. The American Dream, or one of them, was once a profoundly radical vision that continues to retain it’s damning critique of corrupt structures of power and privilege, wealth and class.
The real and full history of early America is what you have to keep in mind when the reactionary right goes on with their historical revisionism, nostalgic fantasies, and invented traditions. Your BS detector better be set on high. They want to complete what the Hamiltonian Federalists began, not what the revolutionaries began. Kevin Roberts, leader of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, was surprisingly blunt when he declared that, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” It will be ‘bloodless’ as long as the American Left, which includes the left-liberal supermajority, gives up without a fight and doesn’t in any way seek to defend their democratic rights of freedom and liberty. But otherwise it will be a violently bloody coup d’etat, with January 6th a mere dress rehearsal. It’s a similar argument the Nazis made in telling the Jews to be peaceful and everything would be fine, when they first rounded up the Jews to be put into ghettoes. It’s a compelling argument, if and only if someone is pointing a gun at your head and at your family, friends, and neighbors. Indeed, one of the agendas of the Project 2025 is to put the military at the disposal of the president, in the way President Donald Trump tried to use it against left-wing and liberal protesters, of course so as to do anything the imperial president pleases without legal recourse or consequence. How could anything go wrong?
“Madison and Jefferson ought to be spinning in their graves when they see how much power they want to concentrate in the next president’s hands. And if that president happens to be Donald Trump, then it’s a kind of a nightmare for the country, given the way he’s misused power in the past,” said Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute President (Steve Herman, Playbook for controlling government bureaucracy prepared for Trump). That is an understatement. It’s not only the imperial presidency (i.e., dictatorship). Anti-Federalists also feared a strong Supreme Court that was ideologically-driven and partisan, and so warned of judges who had the power to interpret the Constitution anyway they pleased, which is precisely what Republican-aligned Supreme Court judges have done in fundamentally altering the meaning and purpose of the constitutional order without due process of amendments or a constitutional convention. Right-wing constitutionalism is highly suspect, as it seems to mean whatever is convenient to them in the moment, anything that increases their despotic power and decreases everyone else’s democratic rights. Their ‘Originalism’ is a flexible construct of moral relativism or rather immoral relativism.
To get down to the actual Project 2025 document, Mandate For Leadership, the difficulty of reading these kinds of right-wing documents is twofold. First off, like any propaganda, it’s not meant to make sense as a rational, logical, and evidence-based argument in defense of a principled ideological system that is consistent and coherent (C.J. Hopkins, Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works). It’s purpose is mostly to offer up talking points, manipulative narratives, and rhetorical frames. The most effective propaganda, first and foremost, targets the elites and influencers (i.e., the wielders of Jaynesian authorization and Althusserian interpellation). As spelled out in the propaganda, the precise language and pseudo-arguments will be repeated in lockstep across the right-wing sphere of politicians and media personalities. It doesn’t matter if any of these people believe what they say or even grasp what it really means but that they’ll say it, that they’ll be willing to publicly humiliate themselves by repeating complete nonsense. It’s a purity and loyalty test to demonstrate submission, conformity, and obedience. Then the ideological groupthink trickles down to the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) followers and from there out into the general population, with the ambition of having it take hold in the public mind like a mind virus.
The point is to get everyone talking in unison to reinforce the message or the appearance of a message, along with the additional purpose of manipulating and managing public debate by controlling the terms of debate, with the intent to force even your adversaries to argue at their own disadvantage (e.g., obfuscating public debate over federalism by falsely claiming the ‘Federalist’ label so that actual federalists are defined by a negative). But most basically, it gives true believers the right language to repeat to demonstrate their ingroup membership. The reality is that few people will ever look at the text that is behind it all, much less read the whole thing. Even those who directly act on behalf of the agenda (politicians, think tank hacks, media elites, etc), they’ll typically hire other people to read and summarize what’s in it or else they’ll be given notes from their employers, handlers, and funders. As for the average RWA follower, they simply lack the attention span and reading comprehension to even try to read such an unwieldy difficult tome, not that they’d care to try. If they had that capacity, they’d likely also have the higher intelligence and critical thinking skills to see through the Machiavellian lies, deception, and manipulations. But then they wouldn’t be RWAs in the first place. [Even this long-form essay is more than the average American can handle, much less comprehensible to the average RWA. Like right-wing propagandists, those of us countering propaganda realize that influence initially flows outward from a small number.]
To be fair, whatever one might think of the Federalists, they do demonstrate that present authoritarian and dominator politics of right-wing reactionaries do ground their case in actual ‘Originalism’, if ignoring numerous other American Founders who opposed such an ideology. It might only be selectively true, but there is an element of truth. That is how the best propaganda works. It cherry picks factual information and then mixes it with disinfo, lies, and spin, using it all to build claims that seem compelling until one scrutinizes and interrogates them. Nonetheless, any given detail might be accurate and any given claim valid. For example, the leader of this particular propaganda campaign, Kevin Roberts, “referred listeners to Alexander Hamilton’s 1788 essay Federalist №70, which speaks of the need for a “vigorous executive”” (Flynn Nicholls, Project 2025 Leader Promises ‘Second American Revolution’). “We’re in the process,” he added, “of taking this country back.” Yes, Hamilton really did use those words. But the second part is debatable. Taking it back from who? Taking it back from the Anti-Federalists Founders who were the leading voices and and among the main actors of the American Revolution and who warned against the Hamiltonian Federalists? Taking it back from We the People, the democratic republic?
In looking further into Project 2025, I was hit by the brazen dishonesty and what could accurately and fairly be called evil, as seen with a sleight of hand switch in using anti-authoritarian rhetoric to promote authoritarianism, to undo the freedom that so many generations of Americans have shed blood to win. Or to put it in more neutral terms, Jeanne Sheehan Zaino said that, “the tensions and contradictions you’d expect abound” (Project 2025: A perspective from Europe). Thomas Paine was less sanguine, as he put it in Age of Reason: “Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. […] Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?” Still, Zaino strives to see the silver lining in the dark foreboding clouds. In this context, she quotes James McGregor Burns who wrote that, “Jefferson had no desire to work with the Federalists, rather he hoped and expected that the Federalist Party would die […] [H]e had [a] far bolder strategy […] [H]e would seek to draw moderate Federalists away from their conservative, ‘monarchical’ leader” (The Power to Lead: The Crisis of the American Presidency). Sadly, the Federalists didn’t die. They mutated into a more virulent strain. In his optimism, he underestimated the persistence of authoritarians (RWAs) and social dominators (SDOs).
[As a side note, with the stakes being high, the Hamilton musical whitewashed, if unintentionally, his dark legacy as the authoritarian enemy of Jeffersonian or more broadly Anti-Federalist democracy; such that, according to a 7/11/24 YouGov poll, 44% of Americans have favorable views of Hamilton with only 9% unfavorable. That reinforces how much Americans need historical education.]
Zaino points out that some of the authors in the Project 2025 manifesto admit that conservatives disagree on major issues, including those that are central to the case being made by the Heritage Foundation. So, credit is due for that bit of honesty, but for critics and opponents it’s useful info, particularly as an admission. This is an opportunity, she advises, to use Jefferson’s tactic of divide and conquer by drawing away the support of moderates. That is a valid approach, since many of the vulnerable marks who might be persuaded by this propaganda campaign wouldn’t agree with the actual agenda, if it were stated openly and directly with no quibbling and misdirection. Following Jefferson’s example is fine and maybe necessary as ideological self-defense, but there is a potentially fatal flaw, if one isn’t careful. This tactic can be used by the right-wing as well, and in fact history has proven them to often be far more talented at cooptation in undermining the other side. One can find multiple examples in this text where deceptive rhetoric is used to steal the enemy’s thunder in order to subvert any criticism and weaken any counter-argument. For example, repeatedly the reader comes across anti-authoritarian idealism that, when one reads closely, is used to prop up authoritarian agendas. It’s smoke and mirrors, a sleight of hand switching one thing for another.
This is how the reactionary right, long known for its authoritarianism, somehow formed an alliance with libertarians. Worse still, they created a whole movement of pseudo-libertarians, such as the sad phenomenon of authoritarian ‘libertarians’ in getting major reactionary right figures, leaders, and influencers (Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Thiel, etc) to coopt the very label of ‘libertarian’. If origins and original intent are so important, we should clarify and emphasize that libertarianism originally referred to anti-statist socialists who were part of the late 19th century and early 20th century European and American workers movement that included socialists, communists, Marxists, Trotskyists, anarchosyndicalists, etc. Their left-libertarian principles were that of self-determination, self-rule, and self-governance; equal and mutual liberty for everyone, including women, minorities, the poor, laborers, immigrants, etc; not only ‘liberty’ for the privileged and powerful. The far right will sometimes go so far, in their deviousness, as to symbolically recruit radical left-liberals, social democrats, and proto-libertarians like Thomas Paine, as Glenn Beck attempted to do in one book when he was still employed by Fox News during the astroturf Tea Party ‘movement’. But while Project 2025 proposes the president be king, Paine declared, “Where … is the King of America? In America the LAW is king.” He’d likely add that the People are the LAW, as they freely choose it (and understand it: natural law) for otherwise it has no public mandate. Paine worried about elitism, not mobocracy.
That is to say ultimate authority resides under representative government by way of democratic consent of the governed as determined by liberal proceduralism; the details of which were so important to the Anti-Federalists. Everything that Anti-Federalists so loved the American Far Right fears and hates. This is the problem with the totalizing usurpation of the entire founding generation, under the broad sweep of a supposed singular ‘Originalism’. It’s not enough to claim their ideological forebears among the extreme fringe of Hamiltonian Federalists. They want to lay sole proprietary rights to and ownership of the whole swath of early American history, as it can be contorted to fit inside the tiny confines of their shriveled hearts and minds. Like Beck with Paine, at the Heritage Foundation website, Mike Gonzales dares to seek aid and support from Thomas Jefferson with a quote: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical” (The Left Is Right To Fear Our Plan To Gut the Federal Bureaucracy). About such ideological theft and mimicry, the problem for any honest, informed person is that they’d realize and acknowledge that Jefferson was an Anti-Federalist who opposed most of what the modern reactionary right advocates. When he talked about compelling a man, the context is that Jefferson was explicitly arguing for direct majoritarian democracy of local self-governance; and in terms of a broad and inclusive suffrage, Paine went even further. The deceitfulness of the far right knows no bounds. It’s amazing and shocking to watch it in action.
Now let’s move on to specifics by doing a close reading of some quotes and passages from the Mandate For Leadership. At the beginning of Section One: Taking the Reins of Government, the author(s) in their projections unintentionally and ironically but accurately describe themselves and the threat they pose: “Just two years after the death of the last surviving Constitutional Convention delegate, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln warned that the greatest threat to America would come not from without, but from within.” That could’ve been written by an Anti-Federalist warning of the Federalists, the political ancestors of today’s Republican Party. Not only that the threat would come from within the country but within the government and the broad elite, the actual and aspiring masters. It’s amusing that it’s contextualized by the names of Madison and Lincoln. Madison later saw the threat of Hamilton and so saw the error of his ways in having supported Hamilton, partly through influence of Jefferson who earlier understood Hamilton’s motives. As for Lincoln, he was elected president when his party was referred to as the ‘Red Republicans’, since they included radical labor organizers, economic populists, proto-progressives, suffragists, abolitionists, civil libertarians, social liberals, libertines, free love advocates, etc. In Lincoln’s administration, there was an open Marxist who had taught Lincoln the Marxist labor theory of value and who, as an American newspaper editor, had hired Karl Marx as the lead foreign correspondent and had published more of Marx’s writings than any other publication at the time; by the way, this was a nationally distributed Republican newspaper that was read daily by Lincoln.
Following that, it states that, “Article II of the Constitution vests all federal executive power in a President, made accountable to the citizenry through regular elections.” So, how do Republicans take that as a justification for their anti-democratic voter suppression in shutting down polling stations, using voter purges, and gerrymandering; much less Trump’s attempt to steal an election. They can’t justify it because they care about elections no more than they care about equal rights for all: men and women, straight and LGBTQ+, whites and minorities, WASPs and ethnics, native-born and immigrants. That is to say they don’t. To continue: “Our Founders wrote, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Accordingly, Vought writes, “it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies,” not their own. Yet the federal bureaucracy has a mind of its own. Federal employees are often ideologically aligned — not with the majority of the American people — but with one another, posing a profound problem for republican government, a government “of, by, and for” the people.” There are two things to keep in mind. Read not only the Federalist Papers but also the Anti-Federalist Papers. There was a lot of debate at the time over the mere existence of a executive (as it potentially came so close to that of a monarch), with it not having been an issue of debate at all the proposal of an imperial presidency that could override the authority of every other part of the government — that was simply out of bounds of acceptable thought, not even Hamilton willing to go that far. It’s pure malignant psychopathy and Machiavellianism that right-wing social dominators make a claim over the mandate of the American majority while attacking majoritarian democracy of self-governance. They’re giving we the people a shoulder rub and telling us what a nice guy they are, while holding a knife to our throat. Why do we Americans tolerate those acting with such harmful duplicitousness and allow them to hold political power over us?
Now for a longer selection from the same Section One but at the end of it: “It is crucial that all three branches of the federal government respect what Madison called the “double security” to our liberties: the separation of powers among the three branches, and the separation of powers between the federal government and the states. This double security has been greatly compromised over the years. Vought writes that “the modern executive branch…writes federal policy, enforces that policy, and often adjudicates whether that policy was properly drafted and enforced.” He describes this as “constitutionally dire” and “in urgent need of repair,” adding: “Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake. When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state. Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan “experts,” who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink, insulated from American voters.” That sounds fine in theory. But throughout the larger text, it’s made clear that Project 2025 would eliminate various aspects of separation: between executive and civil services, agencies, and the military; between church and state; et cetera. These Machiavellian plotters want to dismantle the centralized administrative state in order to eliminate the last traces and protections of democracy, only to put in its place a centralized imperial presidency and one-party state. Freedom is not their end game, and neither is democratic accountability.
Next, from the introductory material of Section Two: The Common Defense, it’s written that, “While the lives of Americans are affected in noteworthy ways, for better or worse, by each part of the executive branch, the inherent importance of national defense and foreign affairs makes the Departments of Defense and State first among equals. Originating in the George Washington Administration, the War Department (as it was then known) was headed by Henry Knox, America’s chief artillery officer in the Revolutionary War; Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, was the first Secretary of State.” Did you catch that? That is sneaky rhetoric, something that would slip by someone who didn’t have broad historical and cultural knowledge. The first among equals is an old reference to the pre-Norman kings in Britain. So, it’s a nostalgic reference to ancient monarchy, a desire to reverse all of modernity back to a simpler and cruder time when elites had total power over those they ruled. The idea behind being the first among equals is that all of the ruling elite were equals in the sense of being above those ruled, but the king was most equal of all among that ruling elite. The author then, once again, slides in some names of Founders, as an indirect and symbolic appeal to authority. But Jefferson, who was familiar with such rhetoric and its consequences, would’ve been appalled by his reputation and legacy being used toward this despicable ideological agenda. He was born into aristocracy and under monarchy. He saw the moral rot from an inside perspective, having personally observed how it operated in America, England, and France. His hope was to dismantle all such systems of elite power, yet Project 2025 seeks to re-create it.
There is one area that exemplifies what is intended for this imperial presidency, as a fully partisan apparatus and as part of a one-party state. It’s detailed in multiple chapters in Section Two: The Common Defense. The president would have direct and total control of the agencies, such as specific control over national funding of states and national funding of foreign countries (Ken Cuccinelli, Chapter 5: Department of Homeland Security; & Kiron K. Skinner, Chapter 6: Department of State). The argument is that the whole government should be aligned with the president’s agenda, even to the point of usurping the authority and power of Congress (e.g., declaring wars). To that end, most agencies should be eliminated or consolidated toward unifying the government under the rule and control of the imperial presidency. The remaining larger and more powerful agencies would then be headed by hand-picked partisan actors who would do the president’s bidding and would be staffed by partisan civil servants hired according to the president’s demands in order to enact his commands (Derek W.M. Barker, Project 2025: The Schedule F threat to democracy). The idea of independent agencies and neutral civil servants has long been a pillar of American democracy, a protection against authoritarianism and a method of maintaining continuity of the political order. In the past, civil servants in both agencies and the military were considered acting in service to the country, to the government, and to the American people, but never in submission and obedience to the president as if he were king or emperor.
Combined with immunity, such an imperial president would have total power, and so there would be nothing to stop him from eliminating even the facade of democracy, including free and fair elections, and nothing to stop him from altering the Constitution at whim or simply throwing the constitutional order out the window, as no other official or system would hold legal and enforceable authority over the president who would effectively be a dictator above the law and courts. Anyone who disagreed with him could be punished by a weaponized Supreme Court and police state, by the president’s control of the military to be sent anywhere in the country with Americans being helpless to resist, or by the president simply withholding funds for essential services, programs, and infrastructure to cripple any non-compliant cities or states. As part of their original intent, all of that is what the American revolutionaries, founders, and framers fought against, what they carefully excluded from and prohibited in the founding documents, a set of issues about which both most Federalists and most Anti-Federalists agreed, that is to say Real Originalism. For example, the founders made it undeniably clear the president would have no constitutional immunity for his actions (Craig Farrand, The Supreme Court, Project 2025 and our future). If Republicans, the Heritage Foundation, and the right-wing Shadow Network has doubts about this issue, there never was a doubt among the Anti-Federalists nor among the moderate and principled Federalists (James Madison, John Dickinson, etc).
If much of the U.S. Constitution is vague and ambiguous, as is easily argued, this fundamental principle of culpability and accountability within the constitutional order was largely unquestioned until quite recently. It was President Richard ‘I’m not a crook’ Nixon who asserted that, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Nixon sought to use firebombing and possibly, according to Daniel Ellsberg, assassination of U.S. citizens or to otherwise ‘incapacitate’ them. Some Machiavellian masterminds on the far right seem to have taken Nixon’s moral evasion as a bit of wisdom to be made political reality, by any means necessary. And sadly, it’s not even the earliest precedent, of which occurred right at the start of the nation. “The second US president, John Adams, criminalized dissent and sought to prosecute his critics. The number of these prosecutions was vast. The most recent research on the subject identifies 126 individuals who were prosecuted. These cases were not just based on the hurt feelings of a thin-skinned president (although they were partly that). They came in response to reports that Adams’s party was attempting a kind of self-coup, not unlike the events of January 6” (Corey Brettschneider, Trump’s dangerous attacks on rule of law have US historical precedent). All of this was in retaliation for investigative journalism that had exposed Adam’s party’s plan to not count the electoral votes of the opposition party, the Democratic-Republicans. Who does that sound like? If in the same spirit, if not the same party, President Andrew Jackson sought to suppress the hope for democracy, while having “called for violence against his pro-Reconstruction opponents in Congress.”
But for the most part, these were exceptions to the rule and course corrections were quickly made to bring the presidency back under a constitutional order as a moral order. Jefferson, in his presidency following Adams, allowed the Alien and Sedition Acts to expire, instead of using it against his own enemies; and so the Anti-Federalist Spirit of ’76 survived a little longer. Other presidents have acted similarly to pull back overreach, such as President Barack Obama eliminating aspects of the imperial presidency initially established under President George W. Bush. Fortunately, cooler minds and more moral souls eventually prevailed in most such cases. If imperfectly and not always fully, some semblance of democracy was repaired and maintained, or at least the ideal and aspiration was kept alive as ever new generations fought for greater rights and freedom. Yet for every time we’ve taken a step back from the precipice of authoritarianism, there has been several steps forward over time. How much closer can we get until what happened to Germany’s Weimar Republic also happens to us? So far, both of the major American parties have usually felt compelled to pretend, if nothing else, that they support and defend democracy. But what happens when we lose even the illusion of democracy, when the banana republic metamorphizes into open despotism, when cynicism and despair, apathy and resignation finally causes Americans to lose all hope? What is the final step too far that brings us to the breaking point?
Addendum
Some comments from an old post, Axial Age Revolution of the Mind Continues:
Thomas Paine is the Anti-Federalist that always comes first to mind, as he had the courage of his convictions and seemed fearless in loudly speaking truth to power. A more divided figure is Thomas Jefferson, but in a way his insight and understanding is more important for the very reason he experienced slaveholding aristocracy from within the structures of power and privilege. His criticisms are all the more potent for this reason.
If I could get all Americans to read one text by a founding father it would be Jefferson’s 12 July 1816 letter to “Henry Tompkinson” (Samuel Kercheval). It surely is among the first detailed explanations and strong defenses of full democracy in American politics, specifically in describing why the constitutional order that was established was a failed democracy from the start and couldn’t have been otherwise, except in that the demand for democracy remained alive in the will of the people.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-10-02-0128-0002
Still, I like to go back to the rough-and-ready message before modern politics and ideological rhetoric. There is a purity and rawness to premodern invocations of Axial Age idealism. That is why I’ve specifically written about the English Peasants’ Revolt and English Civil War. The religious language from those centuries is full-throated in its confrontation.
Unlike most on the political left today, those prior rabblerousers did not pull their punches. Nor did they back away from the powerful who accused them of impossible utopianism. Everything is impossible until it happens, and then it’s reality, the reality we create. Everything about modernity once was considered impossible. The simple truth is that the demand of the impossible has always been the engine of progress.
I have no certain answer about what Jefferson was responding to, but there definitely was an ongoing public demand for greater suffrage. Keep in mind that women could vote in New Jersey until an 1807 law forbade it. In the early decades of that century, there was an expansion of voting writes as the property requirements were eliminated or became less restrictive. Still, I’m not sure what Jefferson thought of such things. As I said, he was a divided figure. It’s easy to judge him, though, in retrospect. For example, he couldn’t free his slaves, even if he had wanted to. Because he was in debt, any attempt to free his slaves would’ve simply meant they would’ve been confiscated and sold to pay off those debts.
More generally, one can sense the context of the times when he was writing in 1816. Because of volcanic activity, it was called the Year of No Summer that involved low temperatures and crop failures. It put many Americans in an apocalyptic mood. This followed several years of warfare with the British, Canadians, and Native Americans. But, maybe most relevant to Jefferson, that was the conclusion to James Madison’s two terms in office. Madison’s 1809 election to the presidency began when Jefferson’s administration ended, which coincided with the death of Jefferson’s friend Thomas Paine (and the birth of Abraham Lincoln). This was the winding down of the era when Anti-Federalists had much influence.
Let us talk about Madison, as the Jefferson was also writing to him at the time. Like Alexander Hamilton, Madison was a bit younger than Jefferson. So, one might excuse his relative youthfulness for his lack of caution, circumspection, and wisdom; which initially went along with a lack of radical and principled idealism. Hamilton and Madison decided to keep the One Ring To Rule Them All, instead of destroying it by throwing it into Mount Doom. It seems Madison would come to regret that action and his association with the likes of Hamilton, but earlier on Madison had no such qualms. Before we get to the Madison that Jefferson was writing to later on, let’s consider where he began his political career.
About Madison and Hamilton, these two nationalistic pseudo-Federalists used covert means to implement a constitutional coup in having had unconstitutionally overturned the Articles of Confederation (Madison mentioned this allegation in a letter, but denied any nefariousness). In the Constitutional Convention, their only public mandate was to revise and reform the Articles and not to replace them, yet they had other intentions that they didn’t publicly state. And, as one historian noted, few voting citizens might have chosen them as representatives at the Constitutional Convention, if they had known their true intentions.
“It is an unsettling but inescapable fact,” wrote Woody Holton, “that several of the principal authors of the U.S. Constitution, which has served as a model for representative governments all over the world, would never have made it to Philadelphia if their constituents had known their real intentions. There is more. If the various proposals to create a new national government drafted in the spring of 1787 had been made public, several state legislatures might have joined Rhode Island in steering clear of the convention altogether” (Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution).
By hook and crook, the (pseudo-)Federalists won that battle and were able to replace the imperfect democracy of the Articles with a successful autocracy of the Constitution. This was part of a larger reactionary and counterrevolutionary backlash that curtailed suffrage, snuffing out democracy in its crib. After the Constitution was signed, only 6% of Americans could vote or hold office (with even many white men having lost such rights), a much lower rate than existed under British rule, not to mention taxes that were higher — taxation with representation? And, of course, others were even worse off. Slaves that fought with the American colonists remained enslaved, whereas those on the opposing side gained freedom. What kind of ‘revolution’ was that?
Madison, to be fair, was far more principled than Hamilton; as the latter was an out-right cynical power-monger. Already during the Constitutional Convention, Madison began to sense the danger of Hamilton’s agenda, if it was maybe already too late to grow a conscience or, to put it more kindly, gain wisdom. He did help get the Bill of Rights passed, maybe through the cajoling of Jefferson. But this appeasement of Anti-Federalist fears remains unclear as to having been a net benefit or a net harm.
Some Anti-Federalists thought it undemocratic to so narrowly constrain the protection of civil and human rights, as so many more important rights were left out such as universal suffrage and fair representation, and that it would be assumed any rights not explicitly stated would be excluded and denied. Even before the revolution had started, there had been strengthening movements for abolition of slavery and the rights of women. With sad irony, the initial success of the revolution meant the death knell of revolutionary change. And the Bill of Rights did not remedy that failure of morality and corruption of democracy.
As a side note, Rhode Island refused to join the Constitutional Convention. That is partly what made it unconstitutional. The Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the confederation of sovereign states (as opposed to nationalism and imperialism), explicitly stated that no changes could be made to the Articles without unanimous agreement from all of the signing sovereign states for, otherwise, it would be a denial of their sovereignty and essentially a declaration of war on their sovereignty.
The rationalization for this unconstitutional and undemocratic coup by kleptocrats was that the Confederation under the Articles had already failed. That was dishonest or misleading since it fulfilled the purpose it was designed to serve. It was a practical, even if temporary, alliance of sovereign states in fighting a common enemy and seeking mutual benefit. That purpose was never that of military-enforcement of a centralized nation-state, much less an empire to replace British rule. This is the reason, under the Articles, the sovereign states maintained their own separate armies and self-taxation.
The worse that was likely to happen with the possible breakdown of the Confederation was for the sovereign states to form into two or three new confederacies, as many predicted and as Madison agreed, where interests were more naturally shared (discussed by Joseph Ellis in his book American Creation). At the very least, this would’ve meant the splitting apart of slave and free states, which would’ve prevented the Civil War. And it would’ve made for a much more interesting American experiment in line with the revolutionary ideals of the founding.
Though an anti-majoritarian, at least initially, Madison came to see the error of his ways. He grew a jaundiced eye toward the political and moral corruption to which he had hitched his youthful ambition. Increasingly, he admitted that he had been wrong, that the criticisms and warnings of the Anti-Federalists had been prescient. This was likely an influence of Jefferson, as the two often corresponded from 1780 to 1826, one of the longest friendships among the founders.
Consider the letter he wrote Madison in 20 December 1787, shortly after the Constitutional Convention had ended and before it had been ratified. In it, he did advocate for a bill of rights; as long as it upheld the principles of democracy, majoritarianism, and sovereignty. Specifically included were the retention of the principles of the Articles, such as no taxation without democratically and directly elected representatives, along with some severe constraints on military and corporate power.
This is what John Dickinson, the author of the first draft of the Articles of Confederation, had earlier spoken of of as “purse and sword”, in his opposition to centralized and undemocratic power which is to be avoided by separating the powers of taxation and military, not to mention maintaining these as close as possible to citizen control and accountability. These were old Anti-Federalist concerns, although shared by some more freedom-loving and genuine Federalists like Dickinson. Here are Jefferson’s words on these matters, from that letter:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0210
“I like the power given the Legislature to levy taxes, and for that reason solely approve of the greater house being chosen by the people directly. For tho’ I think a house chosen by them will be very illy qualified to legislate for the Union, for foreign nations &c. yet this evil does not weigh against the good of preserving inviolate the fundamental principle that the people are not to be taxed but by representatives chosen immediately by themselves. […] I will now add what I do not like. First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies [.]”
He reinforced his views of the latter quoted part in another letter written the following year, 31 July 1788.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-0147
He stated his hope, “to abolish standing armies in time of peace, and Monopolies, in all cases”. Then he went on to say that, “The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14. years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression. If no check can be found to keep the number of standing troops within safe bounds, while they are tolerated as far as necessary, abandon them altogether, discipline well the militia, & guard the magazines with them.”
The fear of corporations and monopolies was well established in the minds of many, not only strong Anti-Federalists. After all, it was the primary reason the American Revolution had happened at all. The corporate monopoly of the British East India Company had been given special privileges in the colonies that were harming the interests of the colonists, as part of an unfair system of taxation without representation. Many of the early states legally limited corporate charters to only serve the public good and to a limited period of time, typically within a generation (i.e., about 20 years). At the time, corporations were not yet conflated with private enterprise, as few businesses back then had corporate charters. Yet this once central fear of privatized and plutocratic power has mostly been forgotten.
About the purse and sword, even Hamilton nodded to its significance in The Federalist Papers №78, published months earlier on 28 May 1788: “The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever.”
But what he conveniently overlooked is that, if democracy is lacking as was the case with the constitutional order, then all three branches would be controlled by the same ruling elite, not beholden to the public. The real constitutional divide, it turns out, was between the rulers and the ruled, the powerful and powerless; in the way Hamilton intended. The Articles expressed the complete opposite intention, by keeping power as close to the people. As Dickinson argued, once purse and sword were both placed within a large centralized national government, it was game over for democracy. It’s the difference of most power democratically residing in either European nation-states or non-democratically in the European Union. Europe, so far, still maintains this kind of sovereignty; whereas the US government has renounced it.
As with Brexit, the issue of secession is an old one in the US. Even before the American Civil War, some leaders in the New England states had talked of it. And it was a very real possibility at the time. Dissatisfaction with the Constitution was strong. The Civil War, by the way, never really was about secession but about violent insurrection and slavery. If the majority of Southern voters had supported secession, and if Southern leaders had not advocated the terrorist attack of a Federal military fort, there would have been no public opposition to their seceding and there would have been no political will to stop it. The unfortunate consequence is that the last trace of sovereignty was eliminated when the idea of secession, as with states rights, became tainted in its association with the authoritarianism of slaveholding aristocracy.
The dangerous consequences of Hamiltonian imperialism didn’t pass by Madison without notice. In the following decade, these two Federalists found themselves on opposing sides with Madison taking a decidedly Anti-Federalist stance:
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/james-madison-on-the-necessity-of-separating-the-power-of-the-sword-from-the-purse-1793
“A spirited debate ensued between “Pacificus” (Alexander Hamilton), who believed the President should be able to make or break treaties and declare and wage wars (much like traditional monarchs) without Congressional authorization, and “Helvidius” (James Madison), who argued that precisely because making treaties and declaring wars were “monarchical powers” they had been separated in the American republican constitution of 1787. Madison argued that a declaration of war meant in practice “repealing all the laws operating in a state of peace” and hence grossly overstepped the bounds of the “executive” function, namely “executing” the laws passed by Congress. Furthermore, he raised the “quis custodiet ipsos custodes” argument, i.e. “who will guard us from the guardians”, if those who will wage the war also have the power to decide if and when to declare war.”
By 1792, Madison was already sounding like a radical. In Dominion of Memories, Susan Dunn writes that, “Madison would make an about-face, distressed when he realized that Alexander Hamilton, spouting plans for a national bank and for vigorous industrial development, sought to turn the nation into precisely the kind of consolidated powerhouse that the antifederalists had feared. Madison even began to echo Patrick Henry as he wrote a series of articles in the National Gazette in 1792 warning against “a consolidation of the states into one government.”” Let us end with one longer passage from Dunn that gives a sense of what was going on in the 1810s, although the events described happened in 1819, a few years after Jefferson’s 1816 letter to Kerchival:
“What most troubled [Spencer] Roane was the Court’s assertion of the primacy of the federal government over the states and its expansive formulation of “implied powers.” Surely the word “necessary” (in the Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause) restricted the meaning of that phrase, Roane argued.
“Jefferson was elated to read Roane’s “Hampden” letters. Like Roane, he disputed the Supreme Court’s claim to serve as the final arbiter of constitutional questions, either within the federal government or between the federal government and the states. He, too, lambasted Marshall for spearheading a movement designed to transform the American government into one “as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” Jefferson even took strong issue with Marshall’s way of delivering court opinions as if they were unanimous, rarely recording minority opinions and thus virtually silencing any dissenting members of the Court. “An opinion is huddled up in conclave, perhaps by a majority of one,” Jefferson wrote, “delivered as if unanimous, with the silent acquiescence of lazy or timid associates, by a crafty chief judge, who sophisticates the law to his mind, by the turn of his own reasoning.”
“The sweep of the McCulloch decision dismayed Madison, too. While the case had obviously called for a judicial decision, Madison wrote to Roane, it had not called for such a broad and expansive interpretation of the “necessary and proper” clause. Marshall’s opinion in that case, Madison added, had the ominous effect of bestowing on Congress a discretion “to which no practical limit can be assigned.” The Court’s decision had simply empowered the “ingenuity” of the legislative branch to exercise any and all powers-including unconstitutional ones. The danger was that such judicial rulings might lead to a complete transformation of the federal system, converting “a limited into an unlimited Government.”
“Madison found himself even sympathizing with his old foes, the antifederalists. Many federalists, he ventured, would have joined forces with the antifederalists in rejecting the Constitution, had they suspected that the Court would impose such a “broad & pliant” construction of the Constitution.”
Marmalade 
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