( Tomdispatch.com ) – Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase “bread and circuses” nearly 2,000 years ago for the extravagant entertainment the Roman Empire used to distract attention from imperial policies that caused widespread discontent. Imagine the lavish banquets, gladiatorial bouts, use and abuse of young men and women for the pleasure of the rich, and so much more that characterized the later years of that empire. And none of it seems that far off from the situation we, in these increasingly dis-United States, find ourselves in today.
Although the Roman Empire described itself as being in favor of life and peace, the various Caesars and their enablers regularly dealt death and destruction in their wake. They spread the Pax Romana (the Roman Peace), including a taxation system that left the poor in debt servitude, a military that caused terror and violence across the then-known world, and a ruling authority that pitted whole communities against each other, while legislating who could associate with whom (passing marriage laws, for instance, that banned gay, inter-racial, or even cross-class marriages). The emperor in power in Jesus’s time, Caesar Augustus, was known for ushering in a Golden Age of Moral Values that went hand in hand with that Pax Romana, and it meant war and death, especially for the poor.
Fast forward millennia and that world bears a strange resemblance to the media distractions, violence, and regressive policies that MAGA and other extremists are pushing forward in our times. Whether it’s Donald Trump’s assertion that “I alone can fix your problems”; Supreme Court and state legislative attacks on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and trans youth in the name of family values; cuts to welfare, healthcare, worker’s rights and other life-sustaining programs to protect corporate interests; the militarizing of endless communities by allowing guns (especially AR-15 rifles) to proliferate, while offering only thoughts and prayers to the victims of violence, the MAGA movement is promoting culture wars and extremist policies under the banner of Christian nationalism. In doing so, its leaders are perfecting a disdain for the excluded, exploited, and rejected that hurts the poor first and worst, but impacts all of society.
And now, after decades of neoliberal plunder and the coronation of an avowed Christian nationalist — Speaker of the House Mike Johnson — to the third most powerful position in the government, the Christian Right and its wealthy patrons have their eyes set on an even more ambitious power-grab: Project 2025. Articulated through the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, it’s a sprawling plan to maximize presidential power with hundreds of newly trained and deployed political operatives during Donald Trump’s next presidency. It was seen in full display recently at the Republican National Convention and made all the more likely by the recent assassination attempt against him with (yes!) an AR-15! The nearly 900-page document outlines a plan to ramp up U.S. military might, slash social welfare programs, and prioritize “traditional marriage.” A reflection of the Republican Party today, including several Christian nationalist organizations and billionaire funders listed among its 100 institutional sponsors, Project 2025 is a roadmap for what could be thought of as a new Pax Romana.
The Formal Project 2025 Takeover
As Project 2025’s official website explains (and doesn’t this sound like it could come directly from the mouth of vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance?): “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” Although its authors unabashedly deploy the language of conservative populism — decrying wokeness and “cultural Marxists” — the plan is chiefly concerned with how to put ever greater control of both people and resources in the hands of a small minority of mostly white, mostly male, wealthy Christians.
The wholesale capture of the state is the ultimate goal of its Christian nationalist architects. Project 2025 simply clarifies just how they plan to implement their drive for power. Each of its sections — from “taking the reins of government” by centralizing executive authority in the office of the President to securing “the common defense” by expanding every branch of the military — is worth reviewing.
The longest section focuses on “general welfare” and it should be no surprise that the Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development are subject to significant cutbacks, including:
- Imposing yet stricter eligibility standards, work requirements, and asset tests to constrain access to Medicaid, even though more than 23 million Americans have been unenrolled from that program since 2023;
- Revisiting how the “Thrifty Food Plan” is formulated to minimize food-stamp allocations, while imposing onerous work requirements on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), even though most of its recipients work and/or are in households with children, elderly people, or people with disabilities;
- Ending universal free school meals by removing the “community eligibility provision,” which allows school districts with high poverty rates to provide free breakfast and lunch programs to all children in need;
- Eliminating Head Start, which has served 39 million children and families since 1965 and currently serves more than 800,000 poor families with young children, while shuttering the Department of Education;
- Ending “Housing First” programs and prohibiting non-citizens, including mixed-status families, from living in low-income public housing; and
- Imposing a “life agenda” and a “family agenda” that will restrict access to abortion and reproductive rights, and otherwise curtail LGBTQ+ rights.
Such proposals would undoubtedly be deeply unpopular. In fact, as people learn more about Project 2025, opposition is growing, even across party lines. Most Americans want a government that would provide for the down-and-out, who are a growing segment of the population and the electorate, as well as one that supports abortion rights, voting rights, and the freedom of expression. At least 40% of us — 135-140 million people — are either poor or one emergency away from economic ruin, including 80 million eligible voters. Project 2025’s social welfare cuts would, in fact, push significant numbers of people across the poverty line into financial ruin.
Even Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 as attention has moved toward its distinctly (di)visionary agenda. However, more than half of the project’s listed authors, editors, or contributors were once part of his administration — and no one doubts that his vice-presidential nominee is 100% pro-Project 2025!
The Informal Takeover Already Underway
Perhaps scarier than either Trump’s or Vance’s connection to this regressive plan, however, is the fact that, despite popular distaste for such policies, it may not take a second Trump presidency to implement significant parts of Project 2025. In this sense, it reflects the ancient world of the Pax Romana. Rather than being dependent on particular emperors, its “peace” was a political and ideological program that punished the poor and marginalized so many, while keeping all its subjects in line.
From its recent rulings, it’s clear that the Supreme Court is hastening Project 2025’s agenda judicially, both in terms of specific future policies and the executive power grab at the heart of that mandate (and now of that court’s rulings). In June, for instance, it ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, which enacted a law to fine, jail, and ultimately expel its unhoused residents. That precedent will only exacerbate the already hostile terrain confronting unhoused people, seeding firm ground to 2025’s plan to eliminate even more housing projects.
Worse yet, as the Nation’s Elie Mystal recently made clear, in just a few weeks of rulings, the court “legalized bribery of public officials, declared the president of the United States absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for ‘official acts,’ and made the power to issue regulations subject to the court’s unelected approval.” As he warns, “There’s no legislative fix for the problems the court has created… [and] they will continue to do all the things Republicans want that nobody elected them to do.”
In addition, in the legislative arena, Congressional debates around the Farm Bill echo Project 2025’s plan to cut food assistance by limiting updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, the current formula that determines SNAP allocations. For example, at the state level, a Republican supermajority in Kansas voted last year to override the governor’s veto and enact work requirements for older recipients of SNAP benefits.
Overall, various Project 2025 priorities are already being implemented at the state and local level, with reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, public education, social welfare programs, and unhoused people under serious threat in Republican-run states across the country. Since the Supreme Court decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, 21 states have enacted full or partial bans on abortion. Meanwhile, far-right groups like Moms of Liberty are seeking to capture local school boards as part of a “war on wokeness.”
There is also a multi-state strategy underway to preempt community-led efforts to implement guaranteed income programs. At least 10 states have challenged basic income programs with legislative bans, funding restrictions, constitutional challenges, and court injunctions, while four Republican-led states — Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, and South Dakota — have already completely prohibited such programs.
And in lockstep with Project 2025’s call for military expansion, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker recently released a report proposing that $55 billion be added to the Pentagon’s already humongous budget in fiscal year 2025 while raising military spending by hundreds of billions of dollars in the next five to seven years. The report, “Peace Through Strength,” revives the false idea that spending ever more on war preparations makes us safer. Not only is Wicker distorting Cold War history, but his prescriptions ignore our experience of the past 20 years of military buildup and the disastrous Global War on Terror. According to the Costs of War Project and the National Priorities Project, this country’s post-9/11 wars have cost at least $8 trillion, taken millions of lives, and displaced tens of millions of people globally, while precipitating climate chaos through their polluting emissions. If implemented, Wicker’s plan would only increase the risk of yet more destabilizing conflicts, offering a modern Pax Romana promise for yet more war and death.
Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace
While extremist Republican politicians and appointees are leading the way on Project 2025, both major parties align around building up the war economy. Indeed, bipartisan support for military aid to Israel is contributing to what the United Nations has labeled a genocide in Gaza.
Nor is this new. Every year, the Pentagon budget invariably passes with widespread bipartisan support, even if a few representatives vote otherwise. Since the 9/11 attacks, in fact, $21 trillion has been funneled into war, surveillance, policing, border control, and incarceration. In Fiscal Year 2023, nearly two-thirds of the federal discretionary budget funded the military-industrial complex and militarized spending. This year, a Democratic amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act will automatically register every male citizen and resident aged 18-26 in the selective service database. This measure has only passed in the House of Representatives, but it suggests interest across party lines in increasing the number of individuals who could someday be called up for military service. While this is not (yet) a draft, it hints at one — and it was introduced by Pennsylvania’s Democratic Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan.
The state and local counterpart to militarism is support for the police. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers seem intent on adopting “tough on crime” legislation, including hiring more police officers, deploying the National Guard more widely, expanding surveillance measures, and recriminalizing drug possession. Of course, the 1033 program allows local police forces to be armed and trained by the U.S. military.
This remarkably bipartisan consensus for a war economy shouldn’t just be considered another “issue,” but an approach to governance that relies on force and violence, rather than consent, to establish social control. And as noted above, the nation may have automatic registration for the selective service system before we have automatic registration to vote. After all, the same Congress that supports ever more resources for war has failed to stop voter suppression, expand voting rights, or adequately protect our democracy.
Jobs and Homes, Not Death in the Streets
The greatest violence of the Pax Romana was always borne by the poor, who were often ripped from their families, enslaved in back-breaking labor, and dispossessed of their land and resources. To maintain its authoritarian rule over millions of people, the Roman Empire relied on its military might and the fear inspired by its brutal army. And yet it was from the ranks of the poor that Jesus and his disciples led a non-violent revolution for peace.
Today, tens of millions of poor people in this country are on the front lines of our failing democracy and increasingly militarized society. They are the true canaries in the coal mine, already living through the violence of a society that has prioritized war and profits over addressing the pain and toll of low-wage jobs, crushing debt burdens, polluted water and land, and lives cut short by poverty, the police, and the denial of basic human rights. They can undoubtedly also foresee the drive toward an ever-deeper warfare state and the possible fallout from Project 2025 if Donald Trump and J.D. Vance win this year.
Forged in the crucible of violence, the criminalized and impoverished still call out for a true peace.
On June 29th, Reverend Savina Martin, a military veteran and formerly homeless mother, took to the stage of the Poor People’s Campaign’s Mass Assembly in Washington, D.C., and shared these thoughts:
“I am a US Army veteran and I was impacted by homelessness many years ago. Today, thousands of homeless veterans are fighting for [their] benefits, housing… navigating a complex system while sick and suffering, trying to survive the war waged against the poor. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson permits cities to criminalize homelessness by enforcing bans on sleeping outside when no shelter is available. How can sleeping while homeless be against the law? If you sleep, you get arrested?
“This system depends on us to fight their wars, but we can’t depend on [our government] to guarantee housing or healthcare? Instead, [our government] allocates $1.1 trillion to war, weapons, and a system that criminalizes the poor, leading to mass incarceration, deportations, and detentions. We want jobs and homes, not death in the streets.”
Savina was speaking of the war on the poor, the power of the military-industrial complex, and an extremist agenda that will connect her in unsettling ways with 140 million poor and low-income people in this country — and billions more around the world. As in other moments of history, the struggle of the poor for life and dignity in a world that denies them both is a struggle for the best that we can be as a society. In their leadership lies the hope for us all — not in Project 2025, a future Trump administration, or the all-too-devastating version of a Pax Americana that would go with it, but in the peace (and justice) that Savina and so many others are demanding, and will continue to push for, until it is ours.
Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes
Via Tomdispatch.com
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