- Joined
- Jun 18, 2018
- Messages
- 81,160
- Reaction score
- 86,051
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Progressive
For all its nihilism, Project 2025 is much more than a guidebook to government demolition. It is just as concerned with reconstructing the state as deconstructing it: in its pages, we find the outlines of a far-right theory of state power in which the most “paleo” forms of personal, autocratic rule rise from the scorched earth of economic libertarianism. Trumpism would revolutionize the world in order to reinvent the most archaic social structures, a lost world of racial, sexual, and class subordination. Like every project of revolutionary conservatism, it needs a new constitution and a new epistemology. Constitutional interpretation is brushed aside in favor of outright fabulation. Experimental knowledge is treated as an existential threat to power, to be replaced wherever possible by theocratic dogma and presidential edict (witness Trump’s extraordinary attack on the life sciences).
Just as surely as it wants to incapacitate the redistributive and social protective arms of the state, Project 2025 wants to exploit its vast bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport. And it intends to consolidate these powers under the personal authority of the president. The report recommends the suppression of abortion drugs and the decriminalization of protests outside abortion clinics. It calls for the militarization of the border and a dramatic expansion of migrant detention centers. It demands that ICE be allowed to use “expedited removal” against undocumented migrants throughout the country. With the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, we have confirmation that Trump is prepared to go much further.
Trump’s attack on the federal security complex is the most chilling sign yet of his authoritarian intent. By purging the Pentagon and FBI of its senior officials and replacing them with concentric circles of loyalists, Trump is seeking to take personal charge of the state’s monopoly on violence, leaving him free to unleash its fire power on anyone he singles out. In short, he is attempting to build something we can genuinely call a deep state—a windowless echo chamber, as desolate as a Mar-a-Lago bathroom strewn with classified documents and inhabited by a lunatic.
...The late Keynesian social state, with all its contradictions, has been replaced by the neoliberal antisocial state—a state that has downsized its redistributive functions, converted much of its welfare arm into punitive and carceral functions, privatized or outsourced as many of its services as possible, and multiplied its guarantees to private operators. This is a state form that abandons the low- and non-waged to self-care yet still includes them within its nets as permanent debtors and generators of income such as toll fees, rents, utility bills, and interest on student debt. In its most inclusive “third way” form, the neoliberal state creates “social markets” as a substitute for social insurance: that is, instead of underwriting and equalizing the risks borne by everyday citizens, it incentivizes private insurers or asset managers to operate these services at a profit.
Link
Excellent analysis on where's we're headed.
Just as surely as it wants to incapacitate the redistributive and social protective arms of the state, Project 2025 wants to exploit its vast bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport. And it intends to consolidate these powers under the personal authority of the president. The report recommends the suppression of abortion drugs and the decriminalization of protests outside abortion clinics. It calls for the militarization of the border and a dramatic expansion of migrant detention centers. It demands that ICE be allowed to use “expedited removal” against undocumented migrants throughout the country. With the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, we have confirmation that Trump is prepared to go much further.
Trump’s attack on the federal security complex is the most chilling sign yet of his authoritarian intent. By purging the Pentagon and FBI of its senior officials and replacing them with concentric circles of loyalists, Trump is seeking to take personal charge of the state’s monopoly on violence, leaving him free to unleash its fire power on anyone he singles out. In short, he is attempting to build something we can genuinely call a deep state—a windowless echo chamber, as desolate as a Mar-a-Lago bathroom strewn with classified documents and inhabited by a lunatic.
...The late Keynesian social state, with all its contradictions, has been replaced by the neoliberal antisocial state—a state that has downsized its redistributive functions, converted much of its welfare arm into punitive and carceral functions, privatized or outsourced as many of its services as possible, and multiplied its guarantees to private operators. This is a state form that abandons the low- and non-waged to self-care yet still includes them within its nets as permanent debtors and generators of income such as toll fees, rents, utility bills, and interest on student debt. In its most inclusive “third way” form, the neoliberal state creates “social markets” as a substitute for social insurance: that is, instead of underwriting and equalizing the risks borne by everyday citizens, it incentivizes private insurers or asset managers to operate these services at a profit.
Link
Excellent analysis on where's we're headed.
