MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. That’s the bumper sticker on my friend’s pickup and that’s what I hope for. I like evidence and data, and I detest TV talking heads, “alternative facts,” and political zealots of all stripes. I want people to think about policies and how these will affect them.

Many of my rural upstate New York neighbors plan to vote Republican in November. Their reasons vary. Most express dismay at high food and gas prices. Many say they pay too much in taxes. Some have a chip on their shoulder about “elites,” “city people,” and educated snobs who look down on them and lack “real” skills but somehow seem to make money anyway. A handful subscribes to outlandish conspiracy theories.

Few, if any, have perused or even heard of Project 2025, the policy recommendations for a second Trump Administration that the Heritage Foundation and some 100 conservative lobbies and think tanks designed and that critics view as a blueprint for a far-right authoritarian regime and unbridled corporate rule. Project 2025 aims to deepen the swamp by replacing civil servants and expert technocrats in every government agency with MAGA loyalists — a corrupt spoils system, in other words. Trump, of course, says that he has “no idea” who is behind Project 2025 and that he knows “nothing” about it. He also remarked that he “disagreed” with some of the things in it, which he slammed as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. If Trump knows “nothing” about Project 2025, which several of his leading advisors and more than 100 former staffers authored, how can he “disagree” with some of the “ridiculous and abysmal” things in it?

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN about how Project 2025’s prescriptions will impact my neighbors’ concerns. I shop for my family, so I know food price inflation is significant, even if it is slowing and even if prominent affluent pundits pooh-pooh it. Much of the problem relates to extreme concentration in the food and grocery industries and to corporations locking in pandemic-era price surges and staging stock buybacks to jack up share prices for their directors (Project 2025 on p. 696, in a typical pro-corporate segment, recommends repealing the stock buyback excise tax). Food system (and other) monopolies deny consumers the lower prices of a genuine, competitive market system. Maybe we should think about antitrust prosecution for giant grocery chains or in meat and poultry packing. Regulation, after all, is just law enforcement for corporations, which is why Project 2025 wants to do away with it.

Ask yourself who works in meat and poultry packinghouses and doing stoop labor in the fields. Do you think that deporting 20 million undocumented people — the actual number is almost certainly much less — will make food prices go up or down? Do you think that eliminating most agricultural subsidies, including those for crop insurance, as Project 2025 recommends (pp. 295-97), will make food prices go up or down? Do you think slapping baseline tariffs on all imports, as the GOP Platform promises, will make your cost of living go up or down? While we’re at it, let’s think about who does much of the grunt work in construction. Thirty percent of the construction workforce are foreign-born, many probably undocumented. Will mass deportations make housing prices go up or down? Will we Americans, with our historically low 4 percent unemployment rate, immediately step in and fill all those jobs cutting up chickens, harvesting lettuce, and installing flooring?

And gas? Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. Gas prices peaked in July 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They were very low in 2020 during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic because nobody was driving anywhere. Very few market actors, apart from the largest oil companies and the Saudi royal family, have enough heft to influence prices. And the US is now producing more petroleum than any other country in history and is largely self-sufficient. Whether or not that’s good for the climate is another question. But let’s THINK before eating up whatever the talking heads feed us.

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN about high taxes. Trump’s sole legislative accomplishment during his first term was a package of tax cuts that mainly benefited the mega-rich and that added $2.5 trillion to the national debt. When the rich and corporations don’t pay their fair share, you and I must pay more. When tax bases dwindle, communities spiral downward and provide fewer and worse services. Is that what you want? Maybe those tax giveaways to the rich weren’t such a brilliant idea.

Few of my neighbors who are allergic to taxes are aware that flows of federal funds to rural areas greatly exceed the taxes that those areas pay. This obliviousness to the invisible subsidies that we receive reinforces the fantasies of self-sufficiency and individualism that so many of my neighbors embrace and to which Trump deftly panders. Like it or not, we are partly living off the teat of high-income urban taxpayers.

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN about those pesky “city people.” Yes, many look down their noses at smalltown and rural America. If you don’t believe me, read White Rural Rage, a much-discussed holier-than-thou bestseller that purports to explain benighted white country people to self-important urban elites. Like Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, it is mostly a blaming the victim book. The victims of rural deindustrialization, corporate looting, financial restructuring, and the demise of Main Street businesses, that is, though it doesn’t analyze these forces much.

Let’s MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN about Project 2025. Do you really think it’s a good idea to eliminate the Department of Education (p. 319) when so many of our young people must acquire knowledge and skills for navigating the complicated twenty-first century and when so much of our population lacks media literacy and is easily taken in by crackpot conspiracy hucksters? How about dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration? LET’S MAKE AMERICA THINK about whether that Project 2025 recommendation (pp. 133-34) will make us safer in today’s conflictual world. With an aging population, do you think it’s a great idea to cut Medicare funding, as Project 2025 also recommends? If you hope to have a dignified retirement, do you think privatizing Social Security (p. 605) will raise or lower your benefits?

There’s so much more in Project 2025 that AMERICA OUGHT TO THINK ABOUT AGAIN, as well as in the Republican Party’s 2024 Platform, a document whose 20 key points are so disconnected from evidence and data and so calculated to produce fear and anger that they inspire astonishment in anyone who hopes to MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN. Project 2025 and the GOP Platform are a masterplan for undermining reproductive rights, women’s rights, labor rights, voting rights, civil rights, immigrants’ rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, and freedom of speech, assembly and thought. In plain view, they aim to entrench corporate domination, despoil our environment, decimate our schools, and ruin our health. That’s not MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, is it?

I’m optimistic, though. A lot of people around here like to say, “Do your own research.” Mostly they just mean googling stuff and reading the first few links their personal algorithm serves up. But if they begin to THINK just a little bit more and dig a little bit deeper, I’m confident they’ll see through the smoke and mirrors, the snake oil salesmen, and the bread and circuses. If they don’t — and if we don’t MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN — we’ll be in for a hard ride.

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This article first appeared in The River Reporter and it is republished here with the author’s permission.

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Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

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Cite as: Edelman, Marc 2024. “Make America Think Again” Focaalblog 1 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/01/marc-edelman-make-america-think-again/