Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “ A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a 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 The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
South African divestment is the most famous, and likely most successful, global pressure campaign in recent memory. The enemy was the minority white elites who conceived, implemented and perpetuated apartheid, the incomprehensibly malevolent scheme of legally sanctioned racial separation. These racists got their just desserts when company after company, government after government, and individual after individual pulled their resources. Eventually, the South African economy strained, leaders were toppled and the country began its long march toward moral reclamation.
Except for one problem: Black South Africans, the very souls who were supposedly rescued by the international effort, also suffered. When industries fell, Blacks people were the first to lose their jobs. When the economy teetered, money for education, health care, public services and the like diminished. Even today, almost 40 years after Little Steven refused to play Sun City ” Black South Africans are still trying to catch up.
Many of my generation, me included, participated in the boycotts. I would do so again; apartheid was that deplorable. But now I go into any international development conversation with my eyes wide open. And that is what troubles me about Max Primorac’s discussion of international development assistance in “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” (aka Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration). His conservative ideas, if realized, will cost local jobs, much-needed public services and, yes, even real lives.
There are two basic problems with Project 2025’s plan for future foreign aid:
- It will result in a significant decrease in assistance to global south countries (especially if the spigot is turned down overnight), will have a devastating impact on the fragile economies of these regions, peoples’ overall health and well-being, and, in the most resource-scarce parts of the world, the very lives of the vulnerable.
- The qualification that aid is contingent on some sort of commitment to American conservative values — anti-abortion, a single conception of family, Christian-based religiosity, rejection of gender identity and so on — will have precisely the opposite effect from what Primorac and his Republican colleagues intend.
Let’s consider each in turn.
First, Project 2025 aims to reduce America’s investment abroad. Primorac refers to it as “streamlining” but it basically amounts to a neo-isolationist approach designed to whittle down budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development. “The next conservative Administration,” he writes, “should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre-COVID budget level.”
There is so much waste out there, Primorac says, that a Trump administration can refund billions of dollars to the American taxpayer just by holding non-governmental organizations accountable. The Trump administration can further reduce the USAID budget, Primorac continues, by making conservative cultural values a condition for sponsorship. The implication is that not all assistance programs will abide by right wing musts, and thus dollars will stay home.
That’s reasonable … in theory. Sure, we can all agree that reducing waste and stamping out corruption are good things. But understanding where the waste resides and the corruption plagues are not always apparent, and, in the meantime, the heavy burden of diminished aid rests squarely on local personnel whose employment options are already limited.
Don’t misunderstand me: I am not advocating for continued waste and corruption. What I am advocating for is the local nurse in Burkina Faso whose job it is to administer vaccines as part of the Gavi program, or the Turkmen engineer who is a critical partner in USAID’s Regional Water and Vulnerable Environment Project, or the thousands of native aid workers in the roughly 75 humanitarian emergency areas USAID supports each year. These people inevitably become the casualties of a decreased foreign aid budget. They just do.
Trouble also brews when the U.S. government puts too many conditions on foreign assistance. Primorac talks of the need to “deradicalize” USAID’s programs and structures, by which he means eliminate the Biden era measures intended to expand reproductive rights and improve women’s health, combat climate change, acknowledge different identities and foster democracy.
Ironically, though, the author insists on replacing the radical liberal agenda with an equally sweeping conservative one. Primorac encourages a future Trump administration to withhold aid to any government or non-government actor who “promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.” Gone then are all DEI initiatives, conceptions of family other the traditional nuclear one, support for religions that snub the New Testament, prescriptions for a healthier planet and, yes, even possibly life-saving vaccines (against measles, TB, meningitis, yellow fever, COVID-19, HIV, diphtheria, hepatitis, etc.). Vaccines, after all, are a favorite conservative scapegoat.
Enter China. Primorac is adamant that “countering China’s development challenge” is a top Trump priority. China has spent tens of billions of dollars on global south development projects in the last five years alone. They won’t stop. In fact, the People’s Republic will likely invest more heavily in Latin America, Africa and Asia over the next decade. Which leads us to ask: Which government does Primorac think will step in when the United States refuses to sponsor green energy initiatives on these continents? Which regime will pounce in Muslim-majority regions when America launches its conservative crusade? Which global power does he imagine will fill the void when the significantly reduced USAID budget forces program closures? I think the answer is pretty obvious.
In the end, a segment of the American population on both the left and the right regularly complains that we can’t do everything around the world, that our resources are finite and our altruism underappreciated. True. But the answer is not to retreat; it’s not to hibernate. Primorac is correct: We should remain vigilant and ruthless about waste and corruption. But we should also maintain and even slightly increase current funding levels. And we should certainly sheath righteous moralism. Indeed, in moments like these it helps to recall the plight of our Black South African brethren.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.