Against a Liberal Project 2025
The election was apocalyptic, and the DOGE-days that follow frighten even those of us who predicted them. In the dozens of conversations I’ve witnessed in which anti-MAGA advocates process and grieve our new reality, a rhetorical question persists: where was the Left’s Project 2025? Humbly, I discourage us from this line of inquiry.
What impresses you about Project 2025 that you hope to replicate for the so-called Left, I surmise, is how long it was in the making. Yes, the tenets that culminated in the now-widely circulated policy document represent flourishing vegetation from seeds planted before I was born (I accept your quip that that wasn’t so long ago). The minds behind it embraced generational planning, to be sure.
You’re also astounded by how well-funded and comprehensive the plan surely is. Billions of dollars coordinated so strategically does stand out to those of us who work to mobilize philanthropy.
More precisely, it worked. T***p won, and his team exercises their new-found authoritarianism on the daily. Indeed, as an abolitionist, I admit to some perverse encouragement from the real-life demonstration of the possibility to dismantle entire systems - I might’ve done to the Department of Defense what they plan for Education, to be fair.
But all of this is irreplicable for the Left. We will never match the coffers the Right boasts because there is no such thing as a leftist billionaire. Extreme wealth is antithetical to the policy positions any leftist espouses because wealth represents excess, and excess represents exploitation of workers. I admire and support the progressive voices calling philanthropy to account in this moment: do increase your payouts, etc. But it will never reach MAGA levels.
Implicit in the preceding point is this one, which really seems to be the rub: the Left does not exist. I restrain myself from a full tirade against the left-right binary (and the two-party system) and how it lurks behind everything we call an obstacle to progress, but suffice it for now to argue that if you identified an exemption to the statement that no progressive billionaires exists, you’re thinking of a Democrat. What Democrats want, I contend, is a slightly more regulated and diverse capitalism that leaves their own power intact. Racial capitalism cannot be reformed - it must be dismantled. Socialists and abolitionists don’t want a less harmful empire: we want liberation of the oppressed.
It’s the one thing no one says in any of these zoom calls, because nonprofit regulations preclude partisanship, but all signs suggest that those who aspire to a Liberal P25 place their hopes in the Democratic establishment to muster the courage to resist MAGA. I am afraid you have hitched your wagon to a dead horse, or, rather, a zombie horse that helped chauffeur MAGA to the White House, however deranged it may have been.
Furthermore, we do not want a liberal Project 2025 because the actual version does not represent the poor and working-class voters who found themselves in the GOP line for want of any policies that benefited the material conditions of their lives - the Right is also a myth. Most conservative voters don’t even know what Project 2025 is, much less were they organized inclusively to inform it. For the sake of our intellectual and ethical integrity, we ought not reproduce such elitism in our alternatives. Anything we offer instead should be led by the communities most directly impacted by systemic oppression and present-day manifestations of enslavement and colonization.
As such, you do not want Ezra Klein nor any other cis/white/male policy wonk (including me) at the helm of your long-term strategy, as some have suggested Abundance could represent. Fortunately, it is inherent to Indigenous activism all over the globe to organize for generations in advance while meeting the material and spiritual needs of kinfolk in the present. Block and Build seems new jargon for a longstanding organizing model. And we do not need the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, to paraphrase Audre Lorde. Documents depicting strategy for organizing in solidarity with poor and working people against capitalism and imperialism proliferate (here’s a new one, for example) - you are either unaware of them, disagree with them, or otherwise refuse to back their progenitors.
I mean no sarcasm when I describe these days as apocalyptic - I’m sort of a theologian, after all. This is the end of a world. And a new one is on its way. No optimism here, but I take some comfort in the knowledge that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have been surviving apocalypses for millennia. I can only hope to ingest the wisdom they’ve accumulated along the way.
This article originally appeared as a LinkedIn post on April 17, 2025.
