The 2024 elections are probably the most consequential in our lifetimes, especially the presidential election. The election is generating a great deal of hope that our developing movement for rights and democracy can push back the far right, allowing our fight for a better world for all to flourish. We know this means it’s crucial to keep Trump—and the Project 2025 plan he represents, plus his own “Agenda 47”—out of the White House. But this is not an endorsement of the Democratic Party. We have been driven backward over many years by both Democratic and Republican administrations, and growing millions are now saying they will not be driven backward any further. And we don’t have to be.
Project 2025
A lot has been written about Project 2025 so we won’t elaborate much on it, but it’s a 900-page plan for transforming the federal government and our society in such a way as to hobble the government’s ability to help those in need, further enrich the billionaires, limit or do away with protections of basic rights and freedoms, and complete the process of abolishing democracy in this country. A few of Project 2025’s proposals would:
- Abandon strategies for dealing with climate change, including by repealing regulations that curb emissions, downsizing the Environmental Protection Agency, and abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
- Roll back civil rights protections, including cutting diversity, equity, and inclusion-related programs and LGBTQ+ rights in health care, education, and workplaces.
- Limit access to federal food assistance.
- Eliminate the Head Start early education program.
- Ban abortion nationwide.
- Remove civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal employees and replace them with people personally loyal to Trump.
- Further privatize Medicare and stop efforts to lower prescription drug prices.
- Further restrict legal immigration (and Trump’s Agenda 47 calls for carrying out the largest mass deportation operation in American history).
- Give employers even more power to hold down wages, prevent Americans from forming unions, exploit child labor, and lock people into lower-paying jobs.
- Abolish the Department of Education, control what local schools can teach, and ban certain books from the classroom.
Though Trump claims he has no connection to Project 2025, Juliet Jeske of the Decoding Fox News podcast reports that 76% of Project 2025’s authors and 54% of its contributors worked for Trump, and the word “Trump” shows up on 194 pages of Project 2025. It’s clear that the far-right creators of Project 2025 see Trump as their instrument for completing the elimination of democracy and workers’ and human rights in America, and consolidating the grip of the billionaires on our country.
Keeping Trump Out of the White House
Again, this is not an endorsement of the Democratic Party, which has continued to fail the American people in numerous ways, but rather a call to defend what little democracy remains in the U.S. by, at this moment, keeping Trump and Project 2025 out of the White House. If Trump loses, then the people will have a little more maneuvering room to wage the various fights they are engaged in, and to broaden and unify a potential movement of tens of millions of workers in this country.
Focusing on stopping Trump does not mean we stop applying pressure to the Democrats on our issues, such as ending the genocide in Palestine, stopping global warming, adopting a humane immigration policy, securing voting rights and reproductive rights, ending homelessness and poverty, racism, police killings, and so on. It simply means that when we vote, we vote to defeat Project 2025.
Without preserving the little democracy we have, it will be even harder to wage the struggle to build a real democracy. A broad movement against corporate power and for democracy, peace, justice, equality and prosperity for all is rising up in America. It will not let anyone stand in its way as it pushes forward to secure our vision of an America that is a free society that nurtures and protects all of its people.
