Transcript:
Daniella Gibbs Léger: Hey everyone, welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m Daniella Gibbs Léger.
Colin Seeberger: And I’m Colin Seeberger. Daniella, did you have a nice Fourth of July?
Gibbs Léger: I did. I was out of the country.
Seeberger: You know what? That sounds spectacular. Because in Washington, D.C., it was disgusting. It was so hot and humid.
Gibbs Léger: Oh, I know.
Seeberger: But I did enjoy seeing my mom came to town to visit, and we just had a ton of fun, ate lots of ice cream and watermelon, and I feel like all those good things that I associate with Fourth of July. So it was a great holiday.
Gibbs Léger: That is very nice. I do like watching the fireworks in D.C., so I have missed them the past two years. But my neighborhood kids are like, “Hey, you want some more? Let’s light them off all weekend.”
Seeberger: That’s always fun. There’s nothing more Washington.
Gibbs Léger: That is very, very true. Well, I am back in the country, obviously.
Seeberger: You are.
Gibbs Léger: And we are back this week. And I heard you had a great conversation.
Seeberger: I did. I chatted with historian Thomas Zimmer, and we talked about the MAGA extremist authoritarian playbook Project 2025, the urgent threat extremism poses to our democracy, and what we can learn about similar moments throughout history where we’ve seen thriving democracies actually backslide into autocracy. It was a great conversation.
Gibbs Léger: And a super timely conversation, to be sure. But first, we’ve got to get to some news.
Seeberger: We certainly do, Daniella. And just because we were off last week doesn’t mean we’re going to gloss over the mess that the United States Supreme Court left us in their final week in term.
The court really just took off the mask. And in a series of decisions on the power of government agencies as well as presidential immunity—I’m sure by now most, if not all, of our listeners have heard about the justices creating an unconstitutional de facto immunity for future presidents who act illegally.
We’ve said time and time again on this podcast that in America, no one is above the law—including a president. That’s one of the foundations of our democracy, right? Well, as much as the MAGA extremist justices on the Supreme Court claimed to be all about quote-unquote “originalism” in the Constitution, they were more than willing to throw those principles in the garbage, instead granting future presidents near-total immunity from criminal liability so long as their crimes are disguised as quote-unquote “official acts.”
Make no mistake: This decision paves the way for unchecked presidential power. Under this ruling, future presidents could be immune from liability for things as egregious as assassinating political rivals, deploying a military coup to hold onto power, or mobilizing the Department of Justice to launch investigations or crack down on political enemies.
And that last one is something that Donald Trump has already said that he would do if he’s elected. In fact, this opinion is a real gift for a leader who has authoritarian tendencies. It gives future presidents full authority to direct the DOJ and FBI to investigate and prosecute political opponents, or even individuals against whom a president has a personal vendetta.
According to this court, President Nixon shouldn’t have even needed a pardon because he shouldn’t have faced criminal liability to begin with for interfering with the FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary. It’s just deranged.
And it’s all the more scary when you consider the context: that we’re seeing a coalition of more than 100 far-right groups put out this authoritarian playbook to dismantle democracy in the United States and rest all power of the government in the control of one person, that being the president. It’s terrifying, what the Supreme Court has done.
But why stop there? According to these justices, the president could even direct federal officials to fabricate evidence for the purposes of prosecuting a criminal case against his political enemies. Again, so long as that was deemed an “official act,” they could also direct people to commit illegal acts, then grant them presidential pardons. They could even sell pardons to the highest bidder.
Gibbs Léger: Oh my God.
Seeberger: It’s such a clown show that the Supreme Court has turned American democracy into. If past actions are predicate for the future, a president already convicted of 34 felony counts, who tried to violently overthrow American democracy, could view this as a green light to act with full impunity.
Gibbs Léger: It is a terrifying prospect on its own, but it’s made even more terrifying when you consider the impacts of the Supreme Court’s rulings on federal agency power. In a series of rulings, six MAGA extremist justices just put a century—100 years—of legal precedent through the shredder, instead enforcing their own vision of how the federal government should operate, stripping public agencies of their power to serve the American people and making the courts the chief policymakers for the nation. Pretty sure that’s not how it was intended to go.
In one case, SEC v. Jarkesy, the court made it far more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming for public agencies to go after people and entities who break the law. This ruling would severely limit the ability of the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Communications Commission to protect American consumers and workers.
In another set of cases, the court struck down the 40-year-old Chevron precedent that we’ve previously discussed on the show. Chevron allowed nonpartisan scientists and subject matter experts at public agencies to reasonably interpret ambiguous laws passed by Congress. What a shock. We would let the experts actually determine these things.
Seeberger: I mean, we’ve got to say why that is, though. All they’re trying to do is reinvent things so that it works for greedy corporations.
Gibbs Léger: That’s exactly right. So, those experts who get to interpret those rules? Not anymore. Now, the courts get to decide the exact meaning of every phrase.
This decision denies agencies the flexibility and the authority to, again, protect Americans from changing technological, societal, and environmental conditions—you know, like, I don’t know, clean air, perhaps clean water.
And finally, in a case called Corner Post, the court eliminated the six-year statute of limitations to file certain legal challenges to regulations. So let me explain this: Basically, anyone can now claim a regulation is illegal at any time—whether it was put in place six or 60 years ago. So you can bet that radical, right-wing groups are going to use this to challenge any regulation that they don’t like, which is all of them.
Seeberger: The justices are literally sitting there cracking their knuckles, ready to go.
Gibbs Léger: Exactly, exactly. They open the door for like-minded radical courts to dismantle any regulations that they please. So the combination of these cases, plus the presidential immunity decision, lays a really dangerous groundwork. It gives us an overly powerful president, a judiciary ready and able to thwart policies that serve the public interest.
This court is paving the way for an illiberal democracy or autocracy where the leader—like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Xi Jinping in China—controls the courts, schools, the media, and any act of defiance against the government is met with prosecution or persecution.
Seeberger: It’s terrifying. When you put it like that, Daniella, I can’t even imagine where things could go in this country.
Gibbs Léger: I know.
Seeberger: It’s so, so scary, especially in the context of the conversation that I had with Thomas Zimmer—and we’ll get to that in just a minute. But first, we also have to talk about one other thing. I want to talk about extreme weather.
Those heat waves we discussed earlier and have been occurring over the course of the last couple of weeks that have covered huge swaths of the Southern and Western United States—they’re still facing record high temperatures. And in my home state of Texas, record-breaking Hurricane Beryl made landfall on Monday. Beryl already reached Category 5 wind speeds when it was over the ocean, the earliest hurricane to do that in the 100 years we’ve been tracking these storms.
There’s a clear link between the size and power of this hurricane and climate change. Simply put, hotter oceans mean bigger storms. The reason we typically get larger hurricanes in September is because there’s all these months during the summer where the oceans warm up as temperatures rise. And those oceans store the heat, right?
But this year, surface temperatures in the Atlantic are already, in early July, as hot as they are in typically in September. The consequences, of course, are just devastating. Beryl ripped through Houston earlier this week, knocking out power for millions of people in this country in Texas and in Louisiana, flooding and damaging highways and homes, closing oil ports, canceling more than 1,300 flights, and tragically killing at least eight people as far as we know at the time of this recording.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, it’s really sad and terrifying to think about, that this could be our new normal. I’m always telling our team to be weather alert, as a local weather girl, yes.
Seeberger: You are, yes.
Gibbs Léger: And unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more urgent as the weather gets more dangerous. Scientists at the U.S. weather agency predict that the size and power of hurricanes will continue to increase across the board and that this year, in particular, we could have a season of, quote, “extraordinary” storms.
Now, as someone whose family is from the Caribbean, this terrifies me. If we want to mitigate the impacts of dangerous heat waves and hurricanes, we need to take action to address the root causes of climate change and limit global warming as much as possible.
And yet, MAGA radicals don’t seem concerned. The extremists on the Supreme Court just made it harder for the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] to enforce clean water and air rules. Donald Trump, who has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement before, wants to do it again if he’s reelected. And the far-right Project 2025 policy playbook suggests that a second Trump term could completely gut the EPA and its climate work.
The window to avoid the worst impacts of climate change is closing, and we need to stop the car from going off the cliff, not rip out the emergency brakes.
Seeberger: But Daniella, how will Donald Trump bring in a billion dollars for his campaign from big oil companies if he doesn’t fulfill his promise to let them do whatever they want to our planet?
Gibbs Léger: Oh, I did forget that he did make that promise.
Seeberger: Yes, yes, he did.
Gibbs Léger: Yes.
Seeberger: Well, on that dark note, that’s all the time we have for today. Stick around for my interview with Thomas Zimmer. If there’s anything you’d like us to cover on the pod, hit us up on Twitter @TheTentPod. That’s @TheTentPod.
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Seeberger: Thomas Zimmer teaches U.S. and international history at Georgetown University with a focus on democracy and its discontents. He writes a newsletter called “Democracy Americana” and co-hosts the podcast “Is This Democracy?” He previously served as an assistant professor of contemporary history at Freiburg University in Germany.
Thomas Zimmer, thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Thomas Zimmer: Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for having me.
Seeberger: Absolutely. Nobody else who I’d want to chat with more about Project 2025. So, first of all, we see folks on the right, folks on the left, put policy platforms out all the time outlining agendas for a future administration.
What’s different about Project 2025? Why is this platform particularly dangerous, even more so than other policy platforms that we’ve seen put out there before?
Zimmer: Right. So I think there’s at least two things that make it stand out, both compared to the other planning operations that are happening on the right. Project 2025 is only one planning operation. There are other factions on the right that are coming up with their own plans. But also historically, compared to some previous right-wing plans or Republican plans.
So first thing is this is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, and they managed to bring together basically much of the right-wing political sphere for this project—activist groups, lobbying groups, think tanks. Currently, there’s over 100 groups listed on the Project 2025 advisory board.
And it’s honestly a who’s-who of right-wing actors that most people have heard of, like the Alliance Defending Freedom, America First Legal Foundation, Center for Renewing America, Claremont Institute, Moms for Liberty. They’re all on there, right? So they have united much of the right-wing sphere behind this project. So that really makes it stand out.
The other one is that it’s significantly more radical and aggressive than anything we have previously seen. It amounts to nothing less than an authoritarian takeover of government. They talk a lot about dismantling government, but that’s actually not what this is. I mean, that’s part of it. They want to dismantle the parts of government that can be used as a tool to make society better, fairer, more pluralistic, more egalitarian. That all has to go.
But then on the other side, they want to weaponize and mobilize those parts of governments that can be used as a tool to impose on America their reactionary vision of white, Christian, patriarchal order. And so in that sense, it’s not about dismantling. It’s honestly about, again, taking over government, turning it into a tool that only serves two purposes: punishing enemies—they’re very big on punishing enemies—and imposing this vision of white, Christian, patriarchal order—they call it the quote-unquote “natural order”—on America.
And we’ve honestly never seen anything that is so explicit and so aggressively radical as this specific planning operation.
Seeberger: Yeah. I mean, essentially, the full goal here is about controlling the American people with that vision. One of the ways that they would go about doing this—and I’m sure you’re very familiar—is this notion of wiping out the expert civil servants, right? Who are there to serve the public interest, not the president’s interest.
And I’m curious—the folks behind Project 2025, they have a list of prevetted far-right loyalists who would go in there and do the bidding of a far-right president. The government employees that they would fire—we’re talking about people who are climate scientists, medical experts, lawyers who stand up to folks who may want to push the bounds of the law, right? These are really important roles.
If they’re successful, can you help our listeners understand just how Schedule F—this idea of replacing the civil servants with the loyalists—would actually play out? And what would this restructuring of democracy really mean for their lives?
Zimmer: So it’s probably worth talking briefly about what Schedule F is. Because the question of whether or not they’ll be able to implement it hinges on what it actually is and what it tries to do. So underneath all this vision of taking over government is this idea of purging government from—they call them “woke bureaucrats” and all these leftists—
Seeberger: The deep state.
Zimmer: —yeah. I mean, this isn’t just a Trump idea, right? This is very explicit. I mean, they put out this 920-page report, which is ostensibly a policy planning report, but it reads like a right-wing culture war fever dream.
It’s all about, “Oh, the left, the woke enemy, has taken over these institutions, and we need to purge them.” This all starts from the diagnosis that what went wrong in the first Trump administration was that they were hampered by—well, A) they didn’t have any plans. They didn’t know what to do with government, and they didn’t know how government worked.
They say this themselves, by the way. The right, they’re very clear that first, Trump was a disappointment. We didn’t know what we wanted to do. But also, we were sabotaged by these woke bureaucrats in the deep state, so these people all need to go.
So, late in the Trump administration, Trump signed an executive order—that’s what that is, Schedule F was a presidential executive order—that would have turned thousands of civil servants into political appointees, which means they would have lost their job protections. Civil service comes with job protections. They’re not supposed to be fired for political reasons, right? That’s the whole point.
But what they want to do is they want—Biden, when he came in, rescinded this right away. They want to reenact it. And they talk about turning 50,000 civil servants with civil service protections into political appointees, make them fireable, and then fire them and replace them with these loyalists that they’re looking for.
Seeberger: The loyalists.
Zimmer: So this is, again, not just a—they don’t just have policy plans. They also have this vast head-hunting operation going on. They call it the “presidential personnel database,” where they’re vetting people, looking for, they call them “conservative warriors.” This is a direct quote.
So anyway, this is what they want to do. Can they do it? I mean, no one’s ever tried. So there’s a question of legality, right? This will be definitely challenged in court. No question. The Biden administration has also tried to enact new rules that would make this more difficult to do this.
If Trump comes in and wants to do it, he would have to find a court, a federal judge, that says, “Yeah, you can do this.”
Seeberger: Well, it seems like that’s easier and easier these days.
Zimmer: That’s the thing, right? That’s the thing. So yeah, that’s certainly not out of the question. Or even if they can’t, I mean, they can also just go ahead and then tell everyone, “Well, sue us.”
I think what we have found out over the past—well, during the first Trump administration, if we didn’t know this already—a lot of this stuff doesn’t run on, like, you either can or can’t do this by law. A lot of this stuff runs on norms. And if you don’t care about norms and precedent and forbearance and all that, and you just go ahead and do, you can cause a lot of harm and damage.
And it takes a lot of time for the courts to step in—or it can take a lot of time for the courts to step in and stop this. So if they go ahead with this, what does that mean? I mean, again, no one actually knows. They say they will look at all positions that are policy relevant or policy adjacent. That can mean anything.
Seeberger: Anyone. Anyone.
Zimmer: They could just say, “Oh, here’s an administrative assistant in some federal regulatory agency. Oh, well, they are enacting policy, right? So they’re out.” And right now—there’s been some reporting very recently about this—right now, the Heritage Foundation is also funding this operation where these people—they call it Project Sovereignty 2025. So it’s not directly Heritage, but Heritage is funding it. And they are basically surveilling high-level civil servants, looking for the enemy within.
And they want to make these names public. And, I mean—makes sense, right? If you want to purge the federal government, you need to know who to fire when you come in. So that’s what they want to do. They want to publish these names this summer, actually, is what they’re saying.
Seeberger: So they’re already moving on this?
Zimmer: Oh, yeah, no, this is happening. This is absolutely happening.
Heritage is, again, 100 percent open about this. I think they called it, they’re going after the, quote, “anti-American bad actors.” This is coming from the Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, who says this. Yes, he says he was very proud of this whole project in this “fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors.”
So this is a direct quote. So this is happening, right? And they want to make these names public, and they want to fire them. The thing is—two things would happen to American government. The first thing is, it would get worse. And not even in an ideological sense, I just mean in a functioning machine sense, right?
Seeberger: You need to get your Social Security issue or your tax issue addressed by the SSA [Social Security Administration] or IRS—like, good luck.
Zimmer: Climate science or anything—like, this is the whole point about the civil service, right? You want these experienced experts who’ve been doing this job, they are trying to do this job, they’ve been doing this job for a long time, they know what they’re doing.
And this would fire a lot of them and replace them with people whose sole qualification is that they’re personally loyal to Trump and ideologically conform. And obviously, this is not some sophisticated analysis. This would make government worse, right? And they just, in a functioning sense, make it vastly more corrupt and just worse.
That’s the one thing. The other thing is, though, when I say “worse,” I mean from the standpoint of wanting a government that is able to tackle the collective action problems that America faces. But that’s not what they are interested in. They’re interested in a government that is a tool to impose an ideological vision on society.
In that sense, that totally works, right? That makes government quote-unquote “better.” If you’re not trying to solve public policy problems or any kind of pressing substantive issue—and what you want to do is use this vast machine that is the American government as a tool to impose a reactionary vision against the will of the majority of the American people—well, that totally works, right? And that’s how they are seeing this. They’re not thinking about efficiency and solving public policy problems. But in practice, we don’t know, other than it would make it worse and it would turn it into an authoritarian tool.
Seeberger: So Schedule F really aligns with one of Project 2025’s larger guiding principles, and that is wrestling power away from federal agencies and consolidating that in the president. Can you talk a little bit more about what are the most fragile things at risk when you house all that power in one individual who may use it for corrupt means?
Zimmer: I mean, look, the whole idea of democracy as we all tend to think of it is that there’s checks and balances, and you don’t have someone—a king-like figure—at the top who gets to do whatever they want to do. But I mean, this is the whole point, right? So this is an operation that wants to centralize power with the president.
And I should be very clear: This is somewhat based on what is called the unitary executive theory. This has been around for a long time. Republicans love this. Whenever there’s a Republican president, and they say there are absolutely no limits to what the president can do with executive power. When it’s a Democratic president, anything the president does is a dictatorial overreach.
So this is not consistent in any way. But in the background of all this hovers this legal or constitutional theory. They don’t really care about constitutional consistency, but they will refer to it, right? But I mean, clearly this is a model that is not compatible with any sort of understanding of checks and balances and democratic control.
Most people probably don’t think a lot about what a powerful machine government—like, modern government is such a powerful machine. I mean, there’s over 2 million civil servants working for government. There’s all these agencies and departments and commissions. And Project 2025 is so interesting because in stark contrast to 2017, when they came in and they hardly knew how government worked, which is—
Seeberger: How to turn the lights on, yeah.
Zimmer: —exactly. Yeah, which is why they had to rely on quote-unquote “the deep state,” right? Because they really didn’t know who to turn to. This time, if you read this policy document that they put out, they call it “Mandate for Leadership.” It’s this 920-page report. They go agency by agency, department by department, commission by commission.
So every chapter is about a specific—one chapter about the EPA, one chapter about the Department of Education, and so on. And they tell you in great detail, “Here’s what we’re going to do with these agencies, departments, commissions.” So in stark contrast to 2017, these are people this time who understand government. They know how government works. They know what buttons to push.
Seeberger: Many of them used to be in the Trump administration.
Zimmer: Exactly, yes.
Seeberger: For Trump 1.0.
Zimmer: Yes, a lot of Trump administration alumni are now part of this project. The Heritage Foundation has very deliberately hired a lot of these people after 2020, and they are now the ones writing these chapters about, again, these departments and agencies and commissions.
And when you read it, this is not the work of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. These are people who know exactly, “OK, here’s how the Department of Health and Human Services works. And here’s how we can use that,” right? To, what they say, turn it into a “Department of Life,” which means radically anti-abortion. And again, this is the work of people who, if they get the chance, know how to turn government into a tool for their ends.
Seeberger: Yeah, I mean, we have seen this kind of authoritarian playbook before. We’ve seen it in Putin’s Russia. We have seen it in Xi’s playbook. It is—
Zimmer: Orbán.
Seeberger: Viktor Orbán’s playbook, right? What’s unique about this is that it’s here, in the United States, and we have not seen that before in the history of this country.
And I’m curious—I think for a lot of folks, they’ve been really shocked by the extent and the speed of the far-right trend of the Republican Party over the course of the last decade. And I think a lot of people could never have imagined January 6th, election denialism. They could never have imagined waking up in a post-Roe America.
Does the perception that we’re seeing about the far right in this embrace of extremism—does that ring true with you? Do you think that Republicans will continue to be growing more and more extreme in the years to come? Where do you think that Project 2025 fits into what we’ve seen over the course of the past decade?
Zimmer: So, I mean, this is the big question since Trump came down the golden elevator, right? When he was announcing that he was going to run for president in 2015. Is this a complete deviation and departure from a supposedly noble, venerable, conservative tradition, and Trump is basically an insurgency figure, and he’s coming in and he’s wiping all that away? Or is this actually just the moment when the mask slips and we see what’s been underneath all along?
So these are the two extreme ends of the interpretation of what we’re seeing here. And I think the answer is, well, it’s both. In a specific constellation there, certainly, this is not a complete departure. There are long-standing, antidemocratic tendencies and impulses on the American right. And in many ways, Trump is a manifestation more than the cause of this antidemocratic radicalization. But it’s also true that especially the right-wing mainstream, the power centers of the Republican Party, have significantly radicalized over the more recent past.
Certainly since 2008, when Barack Obama was elected, and 2020—2020 is another moment where you can tell how they are making a jump towards a more radical position in reaction to the mass protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder. And I think it’s best to think of the right as a coalition of groups and forces and ideas who range from more “moderate,” mainstream conservative ideas to openly very far-right, extremist, neo-Nazi ideas and groups.
And I think it’s important to think about how these groups have always sort of been—there’s always been a struggle. These more right, these more extreme groups have always tried to pull the entire coalition right. And they’ve always said, “We need a more radical politics. All this mainstream moderate Republicanism—it doesn’t work. We need a more radical politics.”
So the question then becomes, why have they succeeded in more recent years? They’ve always been there. They’ve always been part of the right-wing coalition in that sense, right? This is not new. It’s not new. Trump is not bringing this in and it was never there. It was always there, but it existed mostly on the margins. And now it’s moved to the power centers of the right. It’s moved to the power centers of the Republican Party. That’s what Project 2025 is telling us. Because I mean, this is the Heritage Foundation. Heritage has been founded in 1973, associated with Reaganism, associated itself with Reaganism.
This is the power center of the American right, has always been the power center of the American right. And they are all in on this, right? This isn’t Trump. They are all in on this. And I think the answer is that they feel their backs against the wall. There’s this sense of being under siege that is dominating the right. Because they understand their vision for America as a white, Christian, patriarchal nation where white Christians—and specifically white Christian men—have a right to be at the top and define what is and what is not America. That has come under enormous pressure as the country has moved away from that, mostly for demographic reasons, right? The country is vastly more diverse, less white, less religious than it used to be, than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
They understand. No one understands better than the right that if you have a functioning democratic system, but you cling to a vision of white, Christian, patriarchal order, well then you have to relinquish power because you don’t have majority support anymore. And so they have decided, “OK, what if we don’t have a democratic system, then?” Because they’re not willing to relinquish power, and they’re not willing to go away from their white, Christian, patriarchal idea of what America is supposed to be.
And so they are basically radicalizing evermore in reaction to their vision of America having come under threat, under siege, right? And that’s what they’re reacting to. And that has given these more radical, more extreme forces a chance to, again, take over the power centers of the right.
Seeberger: Can you elaborate a little bit more about how you are seeing Christian nationalism and the ideology that you just discussed embed and infused in Project 2025?
I think you’re exactly right that that is coursing through so much of what they’re putting through. But can you just crystallize for our listeners a little bit more about what are the specific areas that you think are most at risk under these ideas?
Zimmer: So I think it’s best to see Project 2025 as the American right’s declaration of war on any kind of pluralistic, multiracial, pluralistic society, as opposed to what they say America is supposed to be: a white, Christian, patriarchal nation. These two ideas have always been in conflict with each other. And this is the American political tradition, right? Very broadly speaking, these two different ideas.
And Project 2025 is so interesting because they’re not even making any—not even rhetorically are they still on board with democracy and multiracial democracy.
Seeberger: They’re post-constitutional, basically.
Zimmer: Well, it’s interesting because one of the main architects of what’s going on here, this guy Russell Vought—again, another Trump administration alumni. It’s interesting: He founded the Center for Renewing America, which is a very aggressively, openly, explicitly—he says, “What’s wrong with Christian nationalism? Yes, I’m a Christian nationalist. Absolutely. 100 percent. This should be a white, Christian nation.” So they’re 100 percent explicit about this.
So fusing a reactionary understanding of Christianity, Christian beliefs, and nationalism, right? And so this guy, he will claim to still be a constitutional conservative, but he now calls it “radical constitutionalism.” And so the basic idea—and this is very widespread among right-wing intellectuals in the right-wing intellectual sphere—is this idea that: OK, so under “normal circumstances” in a “healthy society,” being a constitutional conservative means small government, right?
Here’s where Russell Vought says, “But we’re not in a normal society. We’re not in a healthy society. We are now in a society that has turned on the ‘natural order,’” which again, they say is defined by these hierarchies of race and gender and religion and wealth. These, for them, are called natural hierarchies. That’s how the natural order manifests in those hierarchies. But since society has supposedly turned against the natural order, you can’t stick with small government anymore.
Now, under those emergency circumstances, constitutional conservatism turns to radical constitutionalism—again, these are terms that Russell Vought uses—and that means mobilizing and weaponizing the state against your enemy. So that is how they try to make sense of it. This guy Russell Vought—I mean, 10 or 15 years ago, he was all about small government, and cutting funding to government, and cutting government down, and all this. And now he is one of the main architects behind these ideas.
He is now supposedly—it’s not entirely clear—but reporting suggests that he is the one who is developing the “playbook,” the 180-day playbook which is also part of Project 2025. That is, in addition to the broader policy agenda, they also want to release this agenda for the first 180 days in power—like a bunch of presidential executive orders and all that kind of stuff. And so he is supposedly chiefly responsible for developing this.
This is not out yet. This is part of Project 2025 that’s not out yet. They’re not finished with it yet, but he’s behind this. And again, this is how he’s talking, right? So he says, “Look, I’m a constitutional conservative, but under these circumstances right now, this means defending the ‘natural order’ by radical constitutionalism.” It’s basically burning the Constitution down in order to save it, is what this is. And they’re being 100 percent explicit about this.
Seeberger: Well, that’s terrifying. And while we usually like to end on a positive note, I think given the circumstances and the picture that you have painted, just to tap your historical expertise here, I’m wondering if you can speak to some of the parallels between what we see in Project 2025 in this moment and past incidents of democratic backsliding toward authoritarianism—particularly, as many have noted, 1930s Germany.
I’ve heard folks say history doesn’t repeat itself, but that it does rhyme. What are some good historical parallels here, and what lessons do they offer us about the urgency of the moment that we’re in and what the public can do about it?
Zimmer: So I do believe there are parallels to democracy’s demise or near demise in the 1930s. By the way, this isn’t just Germany. I mean, democracy basically vanishes from almost all of Europe within a 10-year period or so, from the late 1920s through the mid 1930s.
The question is, what are we to make of these parallels? And so I will talk a little bit about this. But then also, maybe push back against the comparison to 1930s Europe/Germany.
So one thing that is striking is that the far right, they are making that comparison themselves. They are all in on this comparison. They are saying, “Oh, this is like late Weimar Germany, right?” And they mean it, both in terms of, “Oh, this is a rotten system that is ripe for the taking,” and so they’re basically salivating at the prospect of taking down this “late Weimar Germany-like America,” right?
So what is striking is that if what happened in almost everywhere where these democracies fell in the interwar period, is not that far-right parties and movements got majority support in the population. That happened basically nowhere. They tapped out at like 30 to 35 percent of the population. It’s the best they could ever do.
So in order to get power, they relied on the more established rights, the establishment conservative parties and factions, to make a common cause with them. Otherwise, the far right doesn’t get to power unless the more established conservatives decide to make a common cause with them. And they did that in the 1930s because they basically decided that the “radical left” was a more urgent, more dangerous threat—a communist left, a socialist left. And so they made a conscious decision to make common cause with the far right. And in Germany, that meant elevating Hitler to the chancellorship. But again, this happened almost across the continent.
So in that sense, you see some very concerning parallels today when you hear these more—not just the far-right fringes, but the power centers of conservatives and the power centers of the Republican Party openly say, “Oh, the biggest threat to America is the radical left.” When you hear someone like Bill Barr, right?
Seeberger: Or Bill Ackman.
Zimmer: Of course.
Seeberger: I mean, we’re hearing these kind of oligarch aspirational figures out there—
Zimmer: But Bill Barr is so interesting to me because he will explicitly say, “Oh yeah, no, Trump tried a coup on January 6th, and the guy is crazy.” And then he will also say, “Oh yeah, but I would support him in 2024.”
Seeberger: Yes, yes.
Zimmer: Right? “If he’s the nominee, I will vote for him.” And then journalists will ask him, “Wait, you just said the man is crazy and tried a coup.” And then Bill Barr will 100 percent explicitly say, “Yeah, but the biggest threat to America is the far left.”
So that’s making common cause with the far right. So, I do wanna push back a little bit against the reaching for the comparison to 1940s Germany and this analogy. Just because there is a bit of a danger in—to some extent, this can mean exceptionalizing and externalizing Trump and Trumpism and the radicalization of the Republican Party. As in, “Oh, this is so extreme and so un-American, we have to reach for something from Europe’s past to make sense of it.” When I think in many ways, the most instructive parallel or reference point in history is actually here in America’s own history, which is the moments in which any kind of racial and social progress, or even perceived racial and social progress, was answered by, followed by a radical, right-wing counter-mobilization against that.
So I’m thinking about what happened after Reconstruction. So Reconstruction, the short period after the Civil War—the first attempt to actually try, at that point, biracial democracy in America after the Civil War—and that was followed by—it was drowned in a mixture of ostensibly race-neutral laws that were not race-neutral at all, in effect, and violence, just an unbelievable level of violence against Black people and anyone who would support them.
Or I’m thinking about the 1950s and 60s when, again, this next attempt to actually turn the country into anything that looked like a multiracial democracy was answered by—again, I mean, it’s not a coincidence that what we call modern conservatism, the modern conservative movement, formed in reaction to this attempt in the 1950s and 60s to make this country into a multiracial democracy. And they explicitly said, “No, we don’t want that.”
And those who don’t want that—those who are not on board with the vision of multiracial, pluralistic democracy—they have throughout American history at some points been willing to exist and function within the system, as long as their understanding of what America should be—again, a society in which white Christians, and white Christian men specifically, are at the top—as long as that wasn’t too much under threat, as long as all this democracy stuff wasn’t undermining that too much, they were willing to kind of go along with that a little bit.
But we have seen many times where they have very clearly said, “Oh, but if this democracy stuff actually gets to undermine what I think America is—
Seeberger: “My power.”
Zimmer: —“real America,” then they have been willing to use violence or violent threat to prevent this multiracial, pluralistic democracy from ever becoming a reality. And I think those are the more direct and, in many ways, more instructive parallels to look to look to.
Now, because you said you said normally you want to end on a positive note, I do have one slightly, maybe.
Seeberger: OK. We’re all ears here.
Zimmer: Right, right. Not that I am particularly optimistic—I’m really not. But maybe I’m telling this myself as much as I’m telling you this. So, I think it is important to remember that this radicalization of the right, the radicalization of the Republican Party, it is not coming from a place of strength. It is coming from a place of weakness.
They’re not radicalizing because they feel so great and so strong. They’re radicalizing because they feel their backs against the wall, they’re feeling under siege. And they are reacting to something real. In many ways, this country has never been closer to finally fulfilling that promise, which it has never kept, but which has always been part of the American tradition—which is again, this promise of all people created equal. That means a society in which an individual’s status is not defined by race or gender or gender orientation or religion or wealth.
Seeberger: Or where you grew up.
Zimmer: Any of that stuff. Obviously, America has never been that, right? But in many ways, it’s also never been closer to that than it is today.
And so that’s precisely why these people who are so aggressively not on board with that and who think this is not just America changing, but actually “real America” being destroyed—that’s why they are radicalizing. They are giving themselves permission to radicalize because they think they’re losing, right?
And there’s something to that. So in a sense, this is my glass-half-full reading of the situation. This is a moment of world-historic opportunity. Because that type of multiracial, pluralistic, egalitarian democracy has actually never existed anywhere in the world.
Seeberger: Yeah, yeah.
Zimmer: You see a lot of sustainable democracy—like, think Sweden. But if you look at the Swedish society, it’s not super multiracial. It’s not super pluralistic religiously, right? But a truly pluralistic society—racially, ethnically, religiously—like the American society today, if that can prove to the world this can actually work, you can make egalitarian democracy work under such pluralistic circumstances, that would be of tremendous, truly world-historic importance.
And again, no one understands this better than the people on the right. They are terrified by this, and that is why they’re radicalizing. So in a sense, let’s not buy into all the bravado and the “Oh, we’re so strong.” No, they’re weak, and they’re losing. That’s why they’re radicalizing.
But that also makes them so dangerous, right? Because they truly believe they are noble defenders of “real America.” And any measure against them, regardless of how extreme, is justified in this defense of “real America.” So I’m not saying, “Oh, don’t worry about it. They’re losing. It’s fine.”
I’m saying it’s extremely dangerous, because they will not stop. They will not have sort of an epiphany and think, “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t do this.” They will never be stopped or succeed in reestablishing and entrenching this white, Christian, patriarchal order. But let’s remember that America has actually never been closer to finally fulfilling this promise of multiracial, egalitarian, pluralistic democracy.
Seeberger: And that is the perfect place to end on a positive note. Thomas Zimmer, thanks so much for joining us on “The Tent.”
Zimmer: Thank you so much.
[Musical transition]
Gibbs Léger: Well, that’s going to do it for us today. As always, go back and check out previous episodes. But Colin, our time is here.
Seeberger: What, Daniella?
Gibbs Léger: “The Bachelorette” has returned!
Seeberger: Yes. We are so back.
Gibbs Léger: We are back, baby.
Seeberger: It is totally the break that I need from reality. So I am so happy that it is back. It has been a very wild few weeks—
Gibbs Léger: Yes.
Seeberger: —to say the least. What did you think of the premiere?
Gibbs Léger: So I thought it was great. And I noticed right away, I was like, wait a minute. That’s not the mansion. I was like, where are they? It was some different place. And then they’re immediately leaving the country. I was like, “OK, Chad!”
Seeberger: I know. Australia?
Gibbs Léger: That budget, clearly.
Seeberger: Right? ABC, you are doing what? What? And Donald Trump wants to give them a tax break? Come on, what are we doing?
Gibbs Léger: So yeah, I love Jenn. I liked her on Joey’s season. I thought she was funny and likable.
Seeberger: Yeah, good energy.
Gibbs Léger: She has great energy. I thought she looked great last night. I was maybe a little underwhelmed by the guys.
Seeberger: I could not agree more. And look, I’m sorry, no offense to them, but they’re not Joey G., man.
Gibbs Léger: Joey set the bar, like—
Seeberger: So high.
Gibbs Léger: Out of reach, really.
Seeberger: Yes.
Gibbs Léger: It’s a shame for those guys.
Seeberger: I mean, just a few stood out to me. I couldn’t help but notice that one of them, Devin, is like a mirror image of Pete Davidson.
Gibbs Léger: Yes.
Seeberger: Yes.
Gibbs Léger: And he’s funny, too.
Seeberger: And he was funny.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah. That threw me for a loop. I was like, “Oh!” I did a double take.
Seeberger: Yeah, no doubt. I am going to let myself be surprised. We still have not heard much of their stories.
Gibbs Léger: That’s right.
Seeberger: So I will be staying tuned. And also I think bringing folks into a new environment right off the bat, I think may help them really get into it, building real relationships early on rather than just like, “Here, let’s do some fun play dates for a few weeks of the show. Oh, and then, hey, we start our travels and start building deeper relationships.”
Gibbs Léger: I think that’s totally right.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Gibbs Léger: But the guy who stole the other guy’s car keys, like, he needs to be gone. I don’t see how he can redeem himself—in my eyes, anyway.
Seeberger: Goodbye.
Gibbs Léger: Yeah, exactly. Well, I want to talk about the other wonderful thing about summer.
It’s the music. And as listeners of the pod know, we like to put together summer playlists. So we would love to hear your suggestions. You can hit us up on Twitter @TheTentPod. But let’s start talking about this, Colin. What are some of your songs of the summer right now?
Seeberger: So, I am obsessed with “Music Is Better,” Rüfüs Du Sol’s new song.
I got hooked on Rüfüs Du Sol because I do ride a Peloton, and Ben is one of my favorite instructors, and he’s a huge Rüfüs Du Sol fan.
Gibbs Léger: True facts.
Seeberger: And so, yeah, thanks to Ben, I got to have “Music Is Better” as one of my favorite songs this summer. I also can’t stop listening to “Please Please Please.”
Gibbs Léger: It’s so good.
Seeberger: It’s so good.
Gibbs Léger: It’s so good.
Seeberger: Yes. Yes.
Gibbs Léger: Especially that one line where she goes—we would have to bleep it out, but the chorus, I love it. I sing it in my head. It’s so great.
Seeberger: All our listeners know what we’re talking about.
Gibbs Léger: They 100 percent do. So yes, “Please, Please, Please” for me. But also, I am obsessed with Shaboozey.
Seeberger: Shaboozey.
Gibbs Léger: “A Bar Song.” It is so—if you hear that song and you don’t immediately want to get up and start dancing—
Seeberger: Yeah.
Gibbs Léger: —something is wrong with you.
Seeberger: So good.
Gibbs Léger: And you need to get it checked out because it is so good. It is so catchy, and it just makes me happy.
Seeberger: I have have heard it at a few festivals of late, Pride being one of them. Definitely heard some Shaboozey.
So, yeah, I’m super excited for the summer. Love to make our favorite playlist. So I am curious to see what our listeners send our way.
[Musical transition]
Gibbs Léger: That’s right. All right, folks. Send us your songs. We want to hear what is making you tap your foot and shake your booty this summer. And we will send out a playlist in a few weeks. But until then, take it easy, and we’ll talk to you next week.
“The Tent” is a podcast from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s hosted by me, Daniella Gibbs Léger, and cohosted by Colin Seeberger. Erin Phillips is our lead producer, Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer, Mishka Espey is our booking producer, and Muggs Leone is our digital producer. Hai Phan, Matthew Gossage, Olivia Mowry, and Toni Pandolfo are our video team. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.