"Postmortems are a recurring motif among Democrats, who have long "interpreted every loss as an utter rejection of their party and a signal that they needed to make major changes in the way their party was run, what it stood for, and how it picked candidates," as the political scientist Seth Masket writes. But Donald Trump's reelection has prompted an especially frantic round of soul searching."
"Rather than producing a clear consensus, the diagnoses and prescriptions that emerge from these reports tend to bear uncanny similarity to the preexisting political views of the specific authors and the organizations commissioning them. One point of convergence since Trump's win, though, is how often the reports, and news coverage of them, have invoked Project 2025, the right-wing plan that has become a blueprint for the Trump administration, as a sort of model. One effort to reshape the party has even christened itself " Project 2029.""
"This got my attention because I wrote a book about Project 2025. Democrats didn't seem to understand the project during the election; their elected officials weren't ready for Trump's second-term blitz, even though they had two years to prepare; and now the people citing it as a political model misunderstand the authors' goals on a basic level. Project 2025 starts with a deeply held ideology, and approaches policies and politics only as a means of turning that ideology into practice."
Democratic postmortems have repeatedly interpreted defeats as total rejections necessitating major party changes. Donald Trump's reelection intensified this soul searching. The resulting reports often reflect the preexisting political views of their authors and sponsoring organizations rather than producing consensus. Many reports and news coverage have highlighted Project 2025 as a model, and some reform efforts now adopt names like Project 2029. Democrats showed limited understanding of Project 2025 during the election, and many elected officials were unprepared for a potential second-term agenda despite having two years to plan. Project 2025 prioritizes a coherent ideology and treats policies and politics as means to implement that worldview.
Read at The Atlantic
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