The Absolutism of Trump Republicans

                                                        By David K. Shipler  

            Democracy thrives on shades of gray. Few public issues actually divide themselves starkly into black and white. And even when disagreements are unyielding, a government “of the people” needs to embrace a variety of views, accommodate differences, and include a supple give-and-take. That’s the ideal, essential to a pluralistic political system in an open society.

Yet that is not the ideal of the Trump Republican Party. Instead, in a corruption of yesterday’s refined conservativism that preached smaller government, it plans to transform government into a powerful monolith imposing ideological absolutism on many areas of American life—private as well as public.

This can be seen most vividly in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Donald Trump has disavowed, although the most extreme provisions were written by his administration’s former officials who are likely to serve with him again if he’s elected.

The agenda is invasive. Women would be required to give their reasons for having legal abortions, and doctors would have to report the information to their states, which would lose funds if they failed to collect and relay the answers to the federal government. The data wouldn’t have the women’s names, supposedly, but the very demand would trespass into personal zones of intimacy.

States where abortion is legal would have trouble making it accessible, because any clinic that provided abortions would be denied Medicaid funds for anything, including providing other health services, thereby putting most of them out of business. While federal law prohibits payment for abortions by Medicaid, which covers low-income Americans, clinics can be reimbursed for other health care. This would be a back-door way of virtually banning abortion nationwide.

Immigration authorities could reject a court’s jurisdiction and “not honor court decisions that seek to undermine regulatory and subregulatory efforts.” Undermining the independent judiciary has been a tool in the playbook of authoritarian leaders abroad.

Head Start and other pre-school programs would be eliminated in favor of “home-based childcare,” and federal funding would prioritize traditional families—a husband and wife—not single-parent households or gay couples. Indeed, a Trump-led federal government would not invoke civil rights law to protect gay and transgender Americans against discrimination.

The Department of Education would be abolished, but Washington would use its immense financial and legal authority to censor secondary schools’ history courses by denying funds and lodging racial discrimination suits “against entities that adopt or impose racially discriminatory policies such as those based on critical race theory.”

Trump Republicans would increase federal oversight of local school curricula by administering a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” effectively giving a few conservative (or liberal) parents leverage to police teachers. A new Trump administration would thereby adopt into federal policy the most extreme academic distortions imposed by Florida and some other Republican-led states.

 The education concepts are more “white Christian nationalism than traditional political conservatism,” according to a study by the Brookings Institution. It cites scholars Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, whose book The Flag and the Cross describes white Christian nationalism as being “about ethno-traditionalism and protecting the freedoms of a very narrowly defined ‘us’.”

  And so on, through nearly 900 pages of very detailed, mechanically specific methods, in which former (and probably future) Trump agency officials get down in the weeds, familiar as they are with how their departments work. Some provisions would need legislation by Congress, unlikely without Republicans holding 60 Senate seats. But many could probably be implemented administratively by highly politicized functionaries.

With few exceptions, the aim is to remake government in a right-wing president’s image, to snuff out debate and discussion, and to obliterate the nuances and contradictions of reality. That methodology has even more significance than the specific policies, for its effect can be durable, undermining the nonpartisan expertise required to govern in a complex, highly technical and fast-moving era. What “conservatives” don’t seem to get is that someday the changes could also be turned against the right by what Heritage calls “the Left” with a capital L, which is not always pure in its devotion to robust disagreement.

              To the extent possible, a Trump administration would convert large swaths of federal bureaucracy from an administrative entity to an ideological, highly-politicized one. That requires finding, training, and placing extreme rightist functionaries to take key jobs immediately after the 2025 inauguration.

Heritage is already laying the groundwork for this invasive politicization of agencies. In the first step, the foundation seeks to create political dossiers on large numbers of federal employees by filing thousands of Freedom-of-Information-Act requests to mine digital files of memos, emails, and texts for key words such as “voting,” “climate change,” “transgender, “pronouns,” and “DEI” for diversity, equity, and inclusion, ProPublica reports. The demands have gone to more than two dozen agencies, including the departments of State, Homeland Security, Interior, and Defense, plus the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Trade Commission, and others. Where agencies have balked in turning over the files, Heritage has sued.

              Identifying employees who are supposedly on “the Left” is a prerequisite to dismissing them and substituting so-called “conservatives,” who are not conservatives within the usual meaning.

To that end, Heritage is recruiting and training people with right-wing beliefs as potential workers to fill positions that Trump plans to vacate by removing civil service protection from some 50,000 career employees through an executive order known as Schedule F. Trump issued the order before leaving office; Biden rescinded it.

Former Trump officials are candid about their objectives. Russ Vought, who headed Trump’s Office of Management and Budget at the end of his term, writes in the Heritage plan that the National Security Council, for example, which is typically a collection of experienced military and intelligence specialists, be driven by officials “who are selected and vetted politically.” Senior officials should “identify, recruit, clear, and hire staff who are aligned with and willing to shepherd the President’s national security priorities.” In other words, no debate, no variety of perspectives. (This was very much the practice in the Soviet Union.)

The OMB, Vought says, should be run by political appointees, “not the careerists,” who work “in pursuit of the President’s actual priorities and not let them set their own agenda based on the wishes of the sprawling ‘good government’ management community in and outside of government.”

              The result would be to undermine the nonpartisan expertise of the agencies that issue regulations implementing laws made by Congress, and that administer federal funds granted by Congress in annual budgets.

              Trump’s only saving grace during his first terms was that he didn’t know how to govern. He didn’t know how to pull the levers of power—indeed, he alienated the military, the intelligence community, and the FBI, the agencies of brute force that could be turned to oppression in the wrong hands. But now he has lined up a deep bench of potential officials who would be skilled at manipulating government to their liking. And Trump “is fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country,” his former chief of the joint chiefs, Gen. Mark A. Milley told Bob Woodward for his new book.

This entire situation could probably be characterized as pre-totalitarian, because it envisions unanimity and political policing of government employees, the pervasive intrusion of an unquestioned ideology at many levels of society, and punishment for dissent—at least in government—by the loss of your job. It doesn’t propose imprisoning those who disagree, as a true totalitarian state would, although Milley told Woodward he was afraid being called back into active duty and court-martialed.

When Trump Republicans undermine the people’s faith in elections, the touchstone of democracy, when they fabricate horror stories about immigrants, when they admire foreign dictators and flirt with the idea of prosecuting their Democratic political opponents, they are taking a step toward a dark and dangerous place. The Heritage plan is a nuts-and-bolts blueprint for undermining the spirit of factual honesty and civil debate that keeps democracy alive.

By peppering the public with so many wild lies and conspiracy theories, they disconnect people from truth so profoundly that belief in obvious truth itself is eroded. This fits what the great thinker Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, observed:

            “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

The Year of Moral Loss

 

By David K. Shipler             

              The deep paradox in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the immorality of each side’s moral certitude. Each is convinced of its righteousness.

But the high ground of righteousness has been completely flattened in the last year, beginning with the intimate atrocities of October 7 by the Palestinian movement Hamas, then with the remotely inflicted atrocities by Israel. The only shred of morality left is whatever attaches to victimhood.

              Not that wars are moral enterprises. Not that this conflict has ever been ethical or conducted within Queensberry rules. Since modern Israel’s founding in 1948, the struggle has been nasty, grinding, and brutalizing. Still, it respected certain boundaries. Forty years ago, the Palestinians had not yet adopted suicide bombers as a standard weapon against Israeli civilians, nor had they sexually assaulted and tormented young Israeli women. Israel had not sent tanks and fighter jets against Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank, nor had Jewish settlers so systematically driven Palestinians from their West Bank villages. And non-Arab actors such as Iran had not directly attacked Israel.

              But now, as Tom Friedman has said, so many red lines have been crossed that “you kind of get used to it. And at the end of the day, there are no more red lines. And when that happens, watch out.”

              Both Israeli and Palestinian societies are diverse and fluid. Neither is monolithic; both contain moderate citizens embracing coexistence. Yet the most radical and hateful among them have been propelled into power by decades of strife. Palestinian leaders see all Israelis, including children, as potential soldiers. Israeli leaders in the current government—the most extreme in Israel’s history—conflate all Palestinians in Gaza with Hamas, one reason that Israel is willing to bomb whole buildings and kill many civilians to get one commander. On both sides, those at the top seem to have no moral brakes.

              Their military tactics have been devastating to non-combatants. Abhorrent methods of warfare have been normalized: sadistic killings and hostage-taking, food deprivation and massive bombings, indiscriminate rocketing, assassinations, exploding pagers designed to murder and maim even while innocent bystanders suffer. Hamas has embedded its fighters among civilians in their homes and schools and hospitals, using innocents as human shields. Undeterred, the Israelis have fought through those so-called shields, mostly with air strikes and artillery, killing and wounding tens of thousands, impeding food supplies, and shattering medical facilities.