The truth is, many or most of the people involved with Project 2025 do know what it portends for America if they succeed in implementing it. The loss of allies, alliances, and trade; the weakening of our military stance; the deterioration of our scientific, health, and educational systems; threats to our financial stability; further deep divisions among our populace; the unraveling of the federation of states as blue states pull away to keep their modern, reality based governance over against the red states’ determination to hold on to their status as independent of absolutely anybody. Thus no trade deals, no stationing troops abroad, no oversight of medicines, food, labor practices, or voting.
What do they get out of this morass? Independence, the same game wealthy high-rollers have been playing all along: you give me the freedom to accumulate vast wealth without taxation or any other responsibility to society and I’ll let you behave any way you want, including violently. That was always the deal; in our own history, Lillian Smith wrote the allegory of the three men, two White, one Black, and how the Big Man driving the cart pit the other two men against one another along the line of race. In other societies other markers like caste, religion, ethnicity, have been prominent; but it’s always something.
So the man driving the cart knows that his strategy of divide and conquer will leave him with a crippled work force but he doesn’t care as long as he gets to drive the cart. And the White man doesn’t care as long as he bears the marker that installs him above the Black man. The Black man cares and is thus the hope of building a better day all can enjoy. That is the race we are in: can the man driving the cart succeed in dividing his work force to suck more work out of each one or can the Black man, tired of being on the bottom of the hierarchy, reach out and bind them all together? The cart driver’s success will put the cart in a ditch.
Just now I read this from Frederic Poag: “Back when I lived in East Tennessee in 2012, I saw up close the cost of voting against your own economic interests for the sake of bigotry. It’s been part of a long tradition in the South—to economically cut off your nose to spite your face.”