Today's #ListenFirst Friday video focuses on the importance of overcoming political divides and coming together to combat climate change.
Video: #ListenFirst Friday Ellis Watamanuk
#ListenFirst Friday Ellis Watamanuk
There has long been a tug-of-war over White House plans to make government more liberal or more conservative.
Project 2025 is a conservative guideline for reforming government and policymaking during the second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross-partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased, critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025. To that end, we also amplify the work of others in doing the same.
For much of the 20th century, efforts to remake government were driven by a progressive desire to make the government work for regular Americans, including the New Deal and the Great Society reforms.
But they also met a conservative backlash seeking to rein back government as a source of security for working Americans and realign it with the interests of private business. That backlash is the central thread of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” blueprint for a second Trump Administration.
Alternatively disavowed and embraced by President Donald Trump during his 2024 campaign, Project 2025 is a collection of conservative policy proposals – many written by veterans of his first administration. It echoes similar projects, both liberal and conservative, setting out a bold agenda for a new administration.
But Project 2025 does so with particular detail and urgency, hoping to galvanize dramatic change before the midterm elections in 2026. As its foreword warns: “Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right.”
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The standard for a transformational “100 days” – a much-used reference point for evaluating an administration – belongs to the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt faced a nation in which business activity had stalled, nearly a third of the workforce was unemployed, and economic misery and unrest were widespread.
But Roosevelt’s so-called “New Deal” unfolded less as a grand plan to combat the Depression than as a scramble of policy experimentation.
Roosevelt did not campaign on what would become the New Deal’s singular achievements, which included expansive relief programs, subsidies for farmers, financial reforms, the Social Security system, the minimum wage and federal protection of workers’ rights.
Those achievements came haltingly after two years of frustrated or ineffective policymaking. And those achievements rested less on Roosevelt’s political vision than on the political mobilization and demands made by American workers.
A generation later, another wave of social reforms unfolded in similar fashion. This time it was not general economic misery that spurred actions, but the persistence of inequality – especially racial inequality – in an otherwise prosperous time.
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs declared a war on poverty and, toward that end, introduced a raft of new federal initiatives in urban, education and civil rights.
These included the provision of medical care for the poor and older people via Medicaid and Medicare, a dramatic expansion of federal aid for K-12 education, and landmark voting rights and civil rights legislation.
As with the New Deal, the substance of these policies rested less with national policy designs than with the aspirations and mobilization of the era’s social movements.
Since the 1930s, conservative policy agendas have largely taken the form of reactions to the New Deal and the Great Society.
The central message has routinely been that “big government” has overstepped its bounds and trampled individual rights, and that the architects of those reforms are not just misguided but treasonous. Project 2025, in this respect, promises not just a political right turn but to “defeat the anti-American left.”
After the 1946 midterm elections, congressional Republicans struck back at the New Deal. Drawing on business opposition to the New Deal, popular discontent with postwar inflation, and common cause with Southern Democrats, they stemmed efforts to expand the New Deal, gutting a full employment proposal and defeating national health insurance.
They struck back at organized labor with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which undercut federal law by allowing states to pass anti-union “right to work” laws. And they launched an infamous anti-communist purge of the civil service, which forced nearly 15,000 people out of government jobs.
In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned Lewis Powell – who would be appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court the next year – to assess the political landscape. Powell’s memorandum characterized the political climate at the dawn of the 1970s – including both Great Society programs and the anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s – as nothing less than an “attack on the free enterprise system.”
In a preview of current U.S. politics, Powell’s memorandum devoted special attention to a disquieting “chorus of criticism” coming from “the perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
Powell characterized the social policies of the New Deal and Great Society as “socialism or some sort of statism” and advocated the elevation of business interests and business priorities to the center of American political life.
Powell captured the conservative zeitgeist at the onset of what would become a long and decisive right turn in American politics. More importantly, it helped galvanize the creation of a conservative infrastructure – in the courts, in the policy world, in universities and in the media – to push back against that “chorus of criticism.”
This political shift would yield an array of organizations and initiatives, including the political mobilization of business, best represented by the emergence of the Koch brothers and the powerful libertarian conservative political advocacy group they founded, known as Americans for Prosperity. It also yielded a new wave of conservative voices on radio and television and a raft of right-wing policy shops and think tanks – including the Heritage Foundation, creator of Project 2025.
In national politics, the conservative resurgence achieved full expression in President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. The “Reagan Revolution” united economic and social conservatives around the central goal of dismantling what was left of the New Deal and Great Society.
Powell’s triumph was evident across the policy landscape. Reagan gutted social programs, declared war on organized labor, pared back economic and social regulations – or declined to enforce them – and slashed taxes on business and the wealthy.
Publicly, the Reagan administration argued that tax cuts would pay for themselves, with the lower rates offset by economic growth. Privately, it didn’t matter: Either growth would sustain revenues, or the resulting budgetary hole could be used to “starve the beast” and justify further program cuts.
Reagan’s vision, and its shaky fiscal logic, were reasserted in the “Contract with America” proposed by congressional Republicans after their gains in the 1994 midterm elections.
This declaration of principles proposed deep cuts to social programs alongside tax breaks for business. It was perhaps most notable for encouraging the Clinton administration to pass the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, “ending welfare as we know it,” as Clinton promised.
Project 2025, the latest in this series of blueprints for dramatic change, draws most deeply on two of those plans.
As in the congressional purges of 1940s, it takes aim not just at policy but at the civil servants – Trump’s “deep state” – who administer it.
In the wake of World War II, the charge was that feckless bureaucrats served Soviet masters. Today, Project 2025 aims to “bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.”
As in the 1971 Powell memorandum, Project 2025 promises to mobilize business power; to “champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism.”
Whatever their source – party platforms, congressional bomb-throwers, think tanks, private interests – the success or failure of these blueprints rested not on their vision or popular appeal but on the political power that accompanied them. The New Deal and Great Society gained momentum and meaning from the social movements that shaped their agendas and held them to account.
The lineage of conservative responses has been largely an assertion of business power. Whatever populist trappings the second Trump administration may possess, the bottom line of the conservative cultural and political agenda in 2025 is to dismantle what is left of the New Deal or the Great Society, and to defend unfettered “free enterprise” against critics and alternatives.
"Trump’s Project 2025 agenda caps decades-long resistance to 20th century progressive reform" was originally published on The Conversation.
Colin Gordon writes on the history of American public policy and political economy.
In some societies, there is no distinction between religious elites and political elites. In others, there is a strong wall between them. Either way, they tend to have direct access to huge swaths of the populace and influence with them. This is an irresistible target for the proto-tyrant to court or nullify.
In many cases, the shrewd proto-tyrant will pose as befriending the major religious sect or, at least, dissemble that they mean it no harm. It is extremely enticing for the leaders of these sects to give the proto-tyrant public support or, at least, studiously refrain from criticizing their regime. There is apparently much to be gained or, at least, much less to lose in terms of their temporal power and ability to continue serving their faithful.
It is supremely ironic to ask religious leaders what the price of their souls is. Yet, this is the question they must ask themselves. Power is power, whether in military uniform, judicial robes, or clerical garb. It is hard to risk losing it. But that very power carries with it the burden to deploy it in service of the good.
Your congregants—your followers—constitute a decisive segment of the populace—of the ultimate seat of political power. If you signal your support for the proto-tyrant, you are enabling and paving the trajectory to full tyranny. Your minimum obligation is to not lend the prestige of your role to support an illusion of the proto-tyrant as a defender of the faith or messianic messenger. Nor to use this illusion as a rationale for your own choices.
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Beyond that, your role becomes more delicate. There is a legitimate argument for keeping the political out of the worship service. All present deserve to be held in the embrace of the faith. Inevitably, political views will range across the spectrum. Using the pulpit to cajole for or against the proto-tyrant violates the sanctity of the worship space. If doing so becomes a drumbeat, you will literally be preaching to the choir as those who do not share your views will withdraw or find congregations better aligned with their politics.
Some will argue this stand would be a dereliction of moral duty. In the face of a widespread campaign against vulnerable minorities, doesn’t the spiritual leader have a duty to speak for the voiceless? To uphold the sanctity of all human life? This is a powerful argument.
An answer to the conflicting obligations lies in using the power of the pulpit to speak against specific immoral policies without targeting the regime itself. This may be thought to split hairs but that is the very point. One can remain a follower of the duly constituted political regime while vocally questioning egregious policies. This is the very essence of courageous followership.
To those who do not bear responsibility for a congregation, this may seem too weak a response to the increasingly abusive use of power. Yet, it may be the appropriate response for a vested religious leader; still an act of courage and, in the best case, a corrective to the autocrat who learns the limits of their “free pass” for accruing and abusing governing power.
Should the proto-tyrant fail to absorb the lessons being taught to the populace from the pulpit and continue on an egregious path toward tyrannical rule, the religious elite can follow their source of moral guidance and choose to become activists. This is the measured, latent power of elite privilege. The challenge is timing; too soon and you lose the congregation, too late and you lose the window of opportunity. Indeed, this is a time for guidance, judgment, and courage.
Chaleff is a speaker, innovative thinker and the author of “To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader.” This is an excerpt from “To Stop a Tyrant.”
March 30, 2014: A sign made up of a photo composite of Vladimir Putin and Hitler looms over protesters who have gathered in the main square in Vienna to protest Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
We’ve all heard the saying: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” We know the truth of this: we have lived it, and watch in horror as it plays out now, as it has throughout history.
February is a banner month for Vladimir Putin and his regime, marking the anniversaries of three grim and illegal maneuvers led by the Russian President.
February 27, 2014: Putin invaded the Crimean Peninsula, seizing control of that part of Ukraine and occupying and controlling Crimea.
February 24, 2022: Claiming, without a shred of evidence, he was “saving” Ukraine from Neo-Nazis, Putin invaded the country again. He announced his “special military operation,” by declaring war on Ukraine, in direct violation of the U.N. Charter.
February 16, 2024: This date marks the death of Russia’s top opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. After several previous attempts on his life by the Kremlin, he died “of natural causes” while being held in a special penal colony in the Arctic Circle. He was 47 years old.
Putin is now in his fifth term as President of Russia. With 25 years in power (including the four-year period his ‘puppet,’ Dmitry Medvedev, ruled, until Putin could change term limit laws), he is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin, and every bit as ruthless as his predecessor.
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All that is necessary to know about Putin can be found by hanging out with a willful three-year-old for an hour: he wants what he wants when he wants it. And he is willing to go to any means to get it.
Why do bullies exist? Because they can. How do bullies persist? Because no one opposes them. Finally, how are bullies stopped? Only by standing up to them. The parents or teachers of an obstinate toddler will presumably intervene to curtail their selfish actions. There will be consequences. But who dares to oppose Putin?
Just how much damage can a bully really do? A toddler: minimal. An unopposed and power-hungry leader: monumental. In Putin’s case, the stakes are astronomically high. He demoralizes, imprisons, or murders his own citizens, and attacks independent countries for the resources he wants. The entire country of Ukraine has rich farmland and vast mineral resources, and the Donbas region is one of the richest areas in the world in lithium deposits.
We need only look at recent history to see the consequences of an unleashed, unchecked bully: i.e. Adolph Hitler and the resulting carnage of World War II. An estimated 50 to 60 million people died on the European front as a result of his actions, the deadliest conflict in human history. Over a million are already dead because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The accompanying photo shows our adoption agency’s “staff” in Kharkiv, Ukraine, celebrating the adoption of our then two-year-old son. Mariana, our in-country facilitator, (second from left) employed her extended family through agency jobs, ensuring their survival in Ukraine’s tough economy. Left to right: Valencia, Marina’s mother, our cook; Dimitri, her cousin, our driver; Mikhail, her son, our “tour guide”; Igor, another cousin, orphanage coordinator; and Valery, yet another cousin, whose apartment we lived in while there.
Kharkiv, in northeast Ukraine and close to the Russian border, has been bombed mercilessly for almost three years. During the first weeks of the war, network news showed Orphanage #4, where our son was, being evacuated as bombs exploded all around.
Likely, many of the people in this photo are now dead.
Innocent people everywhere fall victim to bullies’ malevolence and greed. My husband and I have also adopted from Russia. The people we worked with there were also wonderful, and also victims of Putin’s bullying.
In St. Petersburg, we clearly saw the terror and intimidation by the government in our Russian staff. They rarely smiled, and advised us not to. Smiling marked a foreigner, or someone as daft, as there was not much to smile about. Belied by government propaganda, Russians, too, are Putin’s victims, living in continual fear of his oppressive regime.
Our current and often muddled thinking might have us believe that evil and goodness are hazy definitions. But they are not.
Evil flourishes when it is not stopped, just as bullies continue to bully if they are not opposed. Courage is called for. A world leader instigating his “oligarchy” is the first clue. We must remain constantly vigilant in our own country, and act with conviction in the world.
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Lockard is an Iowa resident who regularly contributes to regional newspapers and periodicals. She is working on the second of a four-book fictional series based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice."
Vice President-elect JD Vance and President-elect Donald Trump arrive at the 60th inaugural ceremony where Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president on January 20, 2025, in the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC.
The place of loyalty in this country’s political system has been at the forefront of political conversations since the November election returned Donald Trump to the Oval Office. Loyalty has long been seen as what the president values most in his relationship with others.
In his 2024 presidential campaign Trump did not try to hide any of that. “We love loyalty in life,” he said. “Don’t you think? Loyalty?”
And recall what he said early in his first term to then-FBI Director James Comey, “I need loyalty; I expect loyalty.” And that was no one-off; years earlier, President Trump wrote, “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy.”
Trump praised the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, who used ruthless legal tactics against his perceived enemies, calling him “a truly loyal guy. … Just compare that with all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty.”
The juxtaposition of loyalty and integrity is telling.
The kind of loyalty to which Trump refers is “commitment to a cause or a person, irrespective of the situation and change that time brings… Loyalty transcends promises and performances. It is a commitment beyond consequences - which may be favorable or unfavorable.” The loyalty that Trump seeks is what philosophers call “particularistic.” It is, focused on persons or groups, not on principles.
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Seven years ago, Michael Krusewrote: “All leaders want loyalty. All politicians. All presidents. But in the 241-year history of the United States of America, there’s never been a commander in chief who has thought about loyalty and attempted to use it and enforce it quite like Trump.”
Kruse’s analysis seems even more apt today.
News reports suggest that “Job-seekers hoping to join the Trump administration are facing intense loyalty tests, including questions on who they voted for and when their moment of “MAGA revelation” occurred.” And the acting attorney general, Emil Bove, is implementing the president’s loyalty agenda even in traditionally independent places.
He has begun screening Justice Department officials and FBI agents to determine if they can “faithfully implement the agenda that the American people elected President Trump to execute.”
Properly understood, loyalty is neither a primary personal nor political virtue. And democratic loyalty requires attachment to the principles and procedures that are necessary to a government of, for and by the people. Democratic loyalty is directed at our fellow citizens and manifests itself as a concern for the rights and well-being of others.
Democratic loyalty is, in that sense, impersonal. Indeed, in a democratic political system, misplaced loyalty can be quite a dangerous thing. It requires “us not merely to suspend our own judgment about its object but even to set aside good judgment…”
Where loyalty attaches to persons, especially to political leaders, it goes “hand in hand with royalty. Royalty does not change - it is passed down from generation to generation, whereas democracy needs an impartial decision and good judgment.”
Writing in 1974, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, New York Times columnist William Safire observed, “Men are loyal to political leaders for different reasons: Some… share a belief in a cause or hatred of a perceived danger, and they want a ticket to the center of the action. Others…care little for ideology or favor, rooting their loyalty in a need to be needed and a belief ‘in others’ estimates of the uniqueness of their qualifications.”
And President Nixon was, like Trump, obsessed with loyalty. Like Trump. He started his second term by launching a loyalty campaign.
The historian and author Michael Koncewicz recalls that, “during a meeting with his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and Special Assistant Fred Malek, two months after his landslide victory over George McGovern,” Nixon announced that during his remianing time in office, “There must be absolute loyalty.”
“The White House’s repeated clashes with executive branch officials,” Koncewicz writes, “convinced Nixon that he needed to wrangle the federal bureaucracy during his second term. At one point, he even asked for the resignation of every cabinet member, a mostly symbolic gesture that was meant to send a message across the administration. Nixon demanded that the bureaucracy would be at his disposal, particularly when it came to using the levers of government against his enemies.“
Seventy years later what Nixon said has a very familiar ring to it.
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby notes that “Nixon’s obsession with loyalty… “blossomed into full-blown, paranoid us-versus-themism’ — so much so that when a small dip in unemployment didn’t get much media attention, he became convinced that disloyal staffers in the Bureau of Labor Statistics were conspiring against him.”
Lyndon Baines Johnson, who became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and was Nixon’s predecessor, was also “obsessed with loyalty.” Jeff Shesol reports that he “brooded about it, demanded it, doubted it, and never seemed to find enough of it.”
Shesol says that LBJ once said about someone seeking a job in his administration, “I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.”
And, of course, at the height of the post-World War II Red Scare, Harry Truman issued an executive order mandating a “loyalty investigation of every person entering the civilian employment of any department or agency of the executive branch of the Federal Government.” The loyalty that Truman demanded was not loyalty to him.
Instead, Truman demanded “complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.”
Truman feared the Program could become a “witch hunt,” but he defended it as necessary to preserve American security during a time of great tension.
President Trump seems less concerned than Truman was that loyalty tests to him or the country will become witch hunts. He is determined to rid the federal government of those deemed to be disloyal, no matter what the costs in terms of the government’s ability to function effectively in serving the American people.
In the administration he is setting up, loyalty more than brains will be the coin of the realm. As Shesol puts it, “On the continuum between with-the-program loyalty and pecker-in-my-pocket loyalty, Trump clearly wants the latter.”
But maybe loyalty is not the right word.
John Bolton, national security advisor to the president during his first term, argues that “fealty” is a better one. Bolton suggests that Trump wants his appointees “to display fealty, a medieval concept implying not mere loyalty but submission.” What Trump demands, Bolton writes, “is not, in fact, loyalty; it is fealty, servility, sycophancy.“
He warns that “the kind of personalist link that Mr. Trump expects will elide constitutional obligations.” Recall Bove’s emphasis on loyalty to the president, not the Constitution.
Over two hundred years ago, Alexander Hamilton worried about the corrupting influence of personal loyalty among those chosen to serve the president. He hoped that the requirement that the president’s appointments be subject to Senatorial confirmation would “be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters…(who would be) in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”
I can’t imagine that Hamilton is resting easily today.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.