The Desperate Weirdness of Project 2025

And why the Right so badly wants it to be normal

Cities are incredibly dependent on national leadership for their public greenspaces, and a lot of the support they have been receiving is under attack in Trump’s Project 2025. 

From funding and supporting grants, to protecting the environment and setting priorities that encourage others to follow suit, there is a lot of federal infrastructure that goes into helping cities implement and maintain our parks. 

Unfortunately, Project 2025 is looking to defund many of those institutions, programs, and people. Its authors methodically lay out their rationale, claiming these agencies have too many resources and too much latitude to curtail business development. Over and over, their reasoning is the same: the private market is able to respond to local needs better than local governments are.

The myth of capitalism is that private options are preferable, better, and even more equitable than public ones. Conservatives in the United States hold this proclaimed truth on high. They assert that markets must be left alone so that they can perform up to their highest potential, correct for errors, and distribute benefits fairly amongst its actors. 

But many of us can see that this is not an accurate reflection of reality. We see executives taking more and more and workers receiving less and less. Customers are taken advantage of and harmed by business models that are designed to value profit over all else. What’s more, we see that markets are actually not left alone as conservatives say they should be; they are manipulated, bailed out, and subsidized in a way that benefits the wealthiest, most powerful people. 

Conservatives are always trying to cover up these truths. They sell trickle down economics, embedding it into the belief system of how our economic and social structure works. They hold up the legend of the self-made man, a mythological figure that takes no help from anyone and rises to the top on his own merit and hard work. They push the myth that what this person earns, the work that he outputs, is equivalent to his worth as a human. 

Strategically, they intertwine these ideas into long-held beliefs about what America is and what it means to be American. What is normal.

So now, when someone says something like, “as a society, we should help individual people”, it cuts against the grain. When someone says, “people are valuable for who they are, not just what they do or what they produce,” it’s debatable. Or when they say, “the environment must be cared for as a collective, life-dependent resource,” it seems radical. 

The Right’s Project 2025, with Trump at the helm, is a desperate attempt for conservatives to cling onto these lies that have served them for so long. To show the world that, if it were just done right, undeterred capitalism is strong and valid, and by the way, ordinary. 

But it’s obviously not.

It’s clearly flawed with its destruction and inhumanity. It devalues women, abuses the working class, promotes biases, and necessitates environmental destruction. All the time, its rationale gaslights those harmed into believing this is the natural order of things and that no modern economy could function any other way. 

If there were ever a question of why today’s Republican Party is so at odds with itself, the answer is that it is having an identity crisis. They used one flawed theory as a scaffolding to hold up their party’s broken economic, social, and political structures. Even with its failures, they cling to it because they have nothing else to stand on.

And despite Donald Trump’s extreme tactics and dangerous rhetoric, the party sticks with him because he sells the idea of capitalism, champions its policies, and distracts from its downfalls. He is to Republicans, in this one aspect, a familiar comfort. 

Republicans are so entrenched in their long-outdated crusade to evangelize capitalism, that the fanaticism in front of their party seems fine, and anyone fighting for dignities denied by it seems radical. In a state of denial, they step behind a man who says that he will end voting in the same breath that he says he will deregulate businesses. As he soothes their fears of irrelevancy and validates their free market fairy tales, he casually displays all the truths about the dangers of an America synonymous with capitalism. 

I find it refreshing that people are finally seeing the oddness of these conservative contradictions. This 2024 campaign has hit the Right in its Achilles heel by calling out their policy and ideals as weird. Republicans no longer have a corner on the narrative of what is “normal” and what is “American.”

As Harris and Walz gain popularity, the ideas of prioritizing the middle class and lifting up underserved communities seem to resonate with quite a few folks. As Walz says, “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” 

Kamala Harris is speaking to peoples’ needs for connection and compassion, something that doesn’t seem strange at all but that has long been denied by a focus on top-down economics. It leaves a bunch of conservatives screaming out their old narratives, used-up lines like “drill, baby, drill,” that sure don’t hit like they used to. And, much to their dismay, it spotlights Trump and the almost ridiculous cast of characters standing behind him looking altogether weird.