The Dizzying and Critically Important Presidential Race Gets Even More Bizarre
Biden's departure and Project 2025
(No. 41, a ±11 minute read)
Project 2025 is a danger to global peace and an insult to American service personnel.
In a week’s time the race to lead what is, for better and worse, the most influential nation on earth has been shaken to its core, again. In the summer of 1998 comedian Eddie Izzard, after discoursing on the perils of empire in British history, told the crowd at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theater, “You are the new Roman Empire, you realize that. There’s no one else going.” The audience titters uncomfortably, it’s a sobering historical identity, then — and today. He continues,
“You’re the Roman Empire so you’ve got vomitariums and orgies ahead. Let the President lead the way. ‘Cause no one cares in America and… I don’t know. In Europe we’re just watching you, going, ‘What are you doing?’”
In his reference to the President Izzard was speaking of President Bill Clinton’s lies about his sexual relations with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.1 At the time of Clinton’s affair the U.S.S.R. had crumbled and Russia was facing economic upheaval that, in the extreme, saw destitute individuals expiring in the streets of Moscow, their bodies going uncollected for days. China was was a decade out from the state violence against reformist protesters at Tienanmen Square and working to implement its “state capitalism” economic reforms. There were no substantial geopolitical threats known to be on the horizon for the U.S. anywhere in the world.
There was no one else going.
Of course that all changed on September 11, 2001 after which the U.S. spent considerable blood and treasure in misbegotten Middle Eastern wars fought by a segment of the population invisible in the popular public eye; it failed to initially regulate, and subsequently, prosecute those in control of sectors of the American economy that sent the world into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; and it continued on its merry way pursuing Neo-liberal economic policies of corporate consolidation, deregulation, and offshoring that created the largest concentration of wealth — and ruinous economic inequity — since, well, the national founding in 1776.
Comedians have a rare podium from which to speak truth to power but whether power listens is debatable, at best. Izzard’s warning of our pinnacle, and the historical precedent for defenestration from such heights, obviously wasn’t going to change damaging policy and having been warned 26 years ago is cold comfort. Hubris, it seems, is a close corollary to static power.
Today, at this paticular moment in our own influential national history could we actually be a new Roman Empire siding into decline? Without Rome’s invading Goths and Vandals of course; but with our own, unique, momentums in addition to those potentially common to Rome — political instability and corruption, economic crisis, demonization and mistreatment of minorities, religious involvement in political affairs, the rise of an Eastern power. No one can say for sure until it has or hasn’t happened.
But we know with surety American leadership has shredded the goodwill that might have been carried forward after emerging victorious from the Cold War, and after the attacks of 9/11, and in 2024 we are looking into the barrel of a violent, unpredictable national election in which a significant player is the Republican party’s administrative blueprint document, Project 2025. It’s a framework for Christian Nationalist, market-primacy governance with worldwide consequences thanks to what its implementation would mean to humankind’s facing the climate crisis.
I wrote last week of the consequences of Project 2025 relative to global warming and the environment. They will be bad. Today I want to address the military fantasy world this document presents as compared to my experience as a member of the Rim of Pacific (RIMPAC) press pool over the last month and continuing. Regardless of one’s opinion of these exercises, or the military itself, the access provided members of the press is elucidating relative to the broader hysterical contentions of the Trumpist Right.2
The section of Project 2025 devoted to the Department of Defense sets out on a dangerous premise, that “young, patriotic Americans [who] eagerly volunteer” to bear the “heavy burden” of military service are owed more than they get thanks to failures of a politically partisan military establishment which is ineffective in an “era of great-power competition,” unwilling to engage in domestic border protection, foreign drug interdiction, and dangerously “woke” with its commitment to equity and vaccine mandates.
With Russia prosecuting a territorial war of aggression in Ukraine; Iran’s continued use of its proxy Hezbollah as a disruptive force in the Mid-East; Israel’s deadly, destabilizing response to Hamas’ unconscionable attack last year; North Korean nuclear provocations; and China’s territorial advances in the South China Sea contravening international court decisions, this is a dangerous moment in world history. That is the ground Project 2025 surveys.
The hawkish American precedent Project 2025 hearkens to doesn’t engender great confidence in a stable or peaceful future — nor does its emulation of isolationist American inclinations prior to the Second World War. We are at a moment where there is a critical need for balanced American reaction to unstable geopolitical conditions; we are, after all owners of the world’s most powerful military (with China rapidly gaining ground), a misstep with such brawn always presents the possibility of catastrophe, writ large (nuclear war) or relatively small (Afghanistan, Iraq).
Residence in the most isolated archipelago on earth, its possessed of unique geopolitical strategic value, and having not long ago been subject to a “kiss your ass goodbye and call your loved ones” failure of an incoming ballistic missile warning system puts a fine point on the conflict the world finds itself in today, after the Cold War’s collapse purportedly bringing about the “end of history.” In fact, history is far from done with us.
Nowhere is there a better example of this today than Ukraine — prior to the Russian invasion Kiev was a bustling, vibrant city popular with European tourists and not unlike many similar-sized cities in the U.S. and around the world, with a robust music, arts, and culture scene. Putin’s invasion to take Kiev begun in 2021 demonstrates that bad actors in the 20th century expansionist mold are still rattling around with an ability to disrupt world food supplies and perpetrate atrocities. Taiwan, home to 63% of world semiconductor production, and all those who are its customers, took careful note of Putin’s assault.3 As likely did China to Ukraine’s allies’ response.
With a directly expansionist actions condemned by international courts darkening doors in Europe, the South China Sea, Gaza, and the West Bank, the U.S. can ill-afford retrenchment, just as it must find a foreign policy evenhandedness. Our expeditionary actions of the last 25 years demand shoring up of what might be left of our moral authority by doing right in Gaza, rather than continuing to shore up an ally that has become a pariah internationally for its devastation of Palestinian civilian populations and infrastructure and its active targeting of aid workers and journalists working the conflict. We must remember also that not only does war immiserate and take human life, it does not either favor environmental or climate progress.
These are some of the conditions in the geopolitical field. Now a look at a specificity encountered aboard the nuclear powered super-carrier USS Carl Vinson somewhere between 150–200 miles off the coast of O‘ahu. The ship is purely an industrial environment with comforts slight, and few and far between. Launched in 1980 the vessel is layers of systems renovations laid over one another, all hard edges, low clearance, ladders, and dangerous environments. And it’s loud, tremendously loud.
Transiting an enlisted sailors’ mess (that’s cafeteria to you, landlubber) I passed nearby a table with five sailors engaged in an animated conversation, their USN work duty uniforms cleaner than they had a right to be given the intensity of the tasks I saw aboard. Catch is here that these sailors were Latino, conversing in the Spanish of Americans who often speak Spanish in the home; likely first or second generation immigrants from Latin America. The ethnic and gender diversity I saw aboard ship was that of a big, coastal American city. The Pew Trust published the following five years ago:
“Today’s active duty military is smaller and more racially and ethnically diverse than in previous generations. The gender dynamics also have changed over the course of the past 50 years, with more women serving in the military – and as ranking officers – in 2017 than ever before.”
2022, the most recent year of demographic data available, saw 49.6% of active duty personnel identify either as Hispanic/Latino or as a racial minority group.4 This will likely exceed 50% when 2023’s figures are in, based on year-on-year trends. In 2015 the Rand Corporation undertook a survey finally published in 2018 indicating that 6.1% of the U.S. military’s active duty personnel identified as some component of the LGBTQ spectrum. This is the first (and so far as I can find last) assessment of LGBTQ service people after the repeal of Clinton era so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” legislation in 2011.5 In the spring of 2023 the magazine Social Work Today wrote, “The number of LGBTQ+ young adults and adolescents is increasing. As many as 1 in 5 people in Generation Z identify as LGBTQ+, and 1 in 20 identify as transgender alone.6
These are the people Trumpism rails against.
And this is today’s demographic reality, this is the landscape the U.S. military must navigate. In one of its many residences in a demographic past that never existed in the U.S. — ethnic minorities and queer people have never not been a part of the fabric of the country — Project 2025 would have the Department of Defense “Codify language to instruct senior military officers to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.”
Additionally the Republican blueprint would have the DoD, “Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.” I understand the infinitesimal size of my survey but I was privy to an educational presentation made to about 30 midshipmen aboard the supposed Karl Vinson. In it I neither saw, nor heard, any Marxist ideas — and I would recognize them — rather it was a session glorifying the heroism of river patrol boat sailors of the Vietnam era. Karl was decidedly absent in its jingoistic portrayal of the slaughter of actual North Vietnamese and Viet Cong communists.
And as if to illustrate the fragility of Trumpist fears, Project 2025 specifically calls to “Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.” That same Rand study identified 0.6% of service members with trans identities, falling at the extreme low end of academic studies seeking to quantify the U.S. trans population at large.7 These sorts of pronouncements in the face of the perceived demographic peril of a diversifying nation are in keeping with Project 2025 mindset’s a-historical, poisonously nostalgic, white, and paternalistic point of view. Its goals represent the social fears and panic-responsive world view of a Christian Nationalist minority in the U.S. These goals are dangerous.
But they are not as potentially broadly dangerous as the documents’ drive to escalate the nuclear arms race. (“The United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal” — including battlefield-deployable nuclear weapons.) The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has categorized our present moment in history as a “time of unprecedented global danger,” saying, “The war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear weapons increase the risk of nuclear escalation.”
The nuclear escalation Project 2025 would have us engage in increases the chance of considered and accidental nuclear war, and subsequent execution of “dead hand” responses coming from any of China, Russia, or the U.S. in the aftermath of a first strike eliminating that nation’s command structure. Dead hand nuclear retaliations guarantee the prospect of a world-wide nuclear winter. What is there to lose if all is already lost?
And then there’s the bit about the nation’s special operations forces which Project 2025 would use to “Make irregular warfare a cornerstone of security strategy.” That worked so well in the Cold War, presumably we could make it work as well again as it did in Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, or perhaps Chile? Our historic secretive attempts (and “successes”) to violently influence the domestic policy of other nations feared to be turning socialist or communist still echo in current affairs and politics. That the future use, by people of similarly hubristic mindset, would somehow deliver unqualified success seems to be fantastical thinking on the part of rightist hawks.
Those who would “reform” our military and military policy by way of instituting Project 2025 would also create an American “Iron Dome,” install offensive weapons in space (in violation of a treaty codifying space as a place free of military weaponry signed in 1967), and generally rattle sabers in a time of calamitous geopolitical threat and global warming upheaval. In short, no matter what your perspective on the military and war-making, Project 2025 would create for us a more unpredictable and dangerous world while working at destabilizing the military’s existing ranks with mass deportations from immigrant communities and scapegoating or discharging queer service people.
All of this as Project 2025 actively disallows progress on global warming, a phenomena the military has called a “threat multiplier” and which Joe Bryan, the Defense Department's chief sustainability officer, says is “impacting our readiness and our ability to meet those demands while imposing unsustainable costs on the department."8
Project 2025 talks quite a bit about what we owe our “young, patriotic service members.” Having spent more time since the end of June with American service personnel than ever I have, I am certain that we owe the members of our military, who are working with consummate expertise and professionalism, and plenty deadly (I’ve seen that deadliness first-hand), the assurance that they won’t be cut down in their prime in deceitful, unnecessarily provoked or prosecuted wars, such as so many of their predecessors have been in my lifetime.
Like it or not (and I don’t like it but do live in present reality) we need some sort of military, just as we need cops. Whether we need either in the forms they inhabit today is a legitimate discussion, but we need them nonetheless. Living almost within sight of Pearl Harbor and familiar as I am with the history of December 7, 1941, there is no doubt in my mind that my island home, if not occupied by the U.S. military, would come to be occupied by another.
We Americans owe the world — especially after so many deadly, costly, and malign military misadventures since, and including, Vietnam — a leadership that can begin the process of living up to the U.S.’s professed ideals at home and abroad. An election that empowers the authors and ideas of Project 2025 is no way to undertake that difficult task. In the last 50 years we’ve dug ourselves a hole, this document will deepen that pit, and with grave consequences.
It’s up to us to prove Eddie Izzard, as much as I like them, wrong.
At the time Izzard was performing his show Clinton had recently admitted on national television that he had an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky.
Which is not to say that the fear the American Right feels isn’t genuine, such is the nature of hysteria; a disproportional reaction to a stimulus is no less individually powerful for its being exaggerated relative to that stimulus’ threat.
Taiwan also makes over 90% of the world’s smallest semiconductors. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/03/06/taiwans-dominance-of-the-chip-industry-makes-it-more-important
Racial minority includes Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Multi-racial, and Unknown. https://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Infographic/2022-demographics-active-duty-members.pdf