The Nazis didn't think of themselves as evil. Numerous studies into the Nuremberg trials have made this clear. Even when they were put on the stand for their crimes against humanity, they either outright believed that they were just following orders or they rejected the notion that they had done anything wrong. When we think of the Nazis today we think of something obviously evil. We assume that the nature of evil is within clear view, but what if it is not?
I will run you through a series of observations that I've made about Project 2025's policies. These observations are parallels drawn between Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, an essay clearly delineating what fascism entails, and Project 2025. But what is Project 2025? I liked the ACLU's description:
Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, and racial equity. Project 2025's largest publication, "Mandate For Leadership," is a 900-page manual for reorganizing the entire federal government agency by agency to serve a conservative agenda.
Project 2025 is framed as doing good by claiming that it is erasing the "Deep State". That framing makes it sound like its supporters are in favour of taking a stiff broom through the US Administration and removing anything unnecessary to free up resources, destroy corruption, and return to values that are understood by all. Those values, they insist, are found in the teachings of Jesus Christ. Why would anyone who is "good" oppose that?
It's the same logic that underlies those of novice software developers. They think that by starting over the "next" project will be much better (in terms of control, cost, and design). It never is. Rebuilding from scratch won't improve anything. What it will do is annoy your users because they can't use your product (read: essential government services keeping people alive and organised), and you lose institutional knowledge, the value of which is unfathomable to those who don't have it.
It's like deciding that your surgeon with 30 years of experience isn't a good fit anymore for the Operating Room, so you rob them of access to everything the surgeon needs to do their work. Believing that the tools, processes, and rules at play have been detrimental to the surgeon's success, you force them to play by unfamiliar rules in an environment that is no longer optimal to the skills they have gained. This is what the political right is doing to their institutions. It is painful to watch.
I do not blame the people voting for right wing leaders promising betterment. They are victims. Victims of a media apparatus created by the billionaire class that wants to consolidate power. The political right is armed to the teeth with rhetoric making sure that their targets aren't seen as human at all. We are all capable of committing atrocities when the act of violence committed to a human being isn't experienced as a human being at all, but a thing, or worse, an evil thing that must be destroyed for good to prevail. This is how you get every day people to commit atrocities and vote for policies that are profoundly anti-human. The political right has successfully targeted discontent among its populace, and is using that anger as ammunition to fund its conquest for power.
The Cult of Tradition: Life was better before
There is a pervasive thread common in the American mind that harkens back to a time that didn't actually exist. It is looked at as a time where America was prosperous, where Men wore either suits or worked the lands on mighty horses, commanded respect from their wives, had access to good homes, proper jobs that paid well, and most importantly, where the family unit was central to living well. They look upon this time as if all modern ailments didn't exist. In their minds this vision of reality is "pure" and "holy", and must be protected at all costs. This is the American Ideal.
Today's Americans are exhausted. Large groups of people have been squeezed out of the "good life" that was once accessible to them. They are angry because they feel they have been robbed. They feel the American Dream is slipping away from them. Why wouldn't they be angry? They long for a time that makes sense to them, where they could get their needs met. This is what's driving the call to tradition.
This drive towards traditionalism is strengthened by the threads of religion holding poorer states together. The Bible's teachings provide millions of Americans with a safety net against life's many challenges. Their faith grows stronger the greater their challenges. There's a growing group of people who treat its teachings as unquestionably True. It needs to be, because all their hope for America hinges on the very belief that if you align yourself with the American Ideal then the American Dream will come true for you. The further America slides towards "modernism", the less hopeful they feel that America will return to "greatness".
Project 2025 is lined with the same thread. For example, it calls for a "patriotic education" that portrays history as defined by white Christian heterosexual men. It is a call to "purity", the belief that Americans of the past have always been infallible, always the "best", fuelling American exceptionalism. It cannot be True that America's history is rife with atrocities, because a True American is a doer of good. These measures invoke an idealised past and outright reject contemporary knowledge, echoing Eco's point that under fascism "no new learning can occur" beyond fixed tradition.
The American Ideal is held sacred by the American Right. They believe that business should take precedent because that is what enables the American Dream. They have been suffering under weak economic policies, and have been told by the media that the Left is to blame for their lack of access to money and wealth. They believe that the Left wants to up their taxes even more just to spoon feed people who aren't working. They are angry that they have to work themselves to the bone, while also believing that "Others" get to live a life on the dole through their hard work. They see this as an injustice, but what they really want is a better life for themselves, and they believe that enabling business to do its thing with few restrictions is the best way to go about that. The way it was in the "before times", when life was simple and All was Good.
They abhor any talk of how business is doing harm to the world, because that feels like an attack on the American Dream, the only hope they have of living well. Project 2025 advocates for rolling back environmental protections: reopening protected federal lands to oil drilling and withdrawing regulations on industrial toxins, flagrantly defying climate science and public health evidence. Fascism rejects reason and views progress as corrupt. They reject scientific progress in the name of Business to enable the American Dream, but what they are really after is a life where they can breathe easier, where they don't have to work as hard to earn their dollars. It is a vague hope, fuelled by economic progress, that never quite arrives.
The War for the American Ideal
Fascism prizes action not deliberation. Leaders who act "decisively" are seen as better leaders, whereas those who contemplate their decisions before deciding to act are seen as "weak", even though slowing down a bit to make a decision leads to better outcomes. For people taught to value decisiveness over complexity, leaders who pause to reflect may appear weak. This disconnect of experience makes them both a threat and perceived as an outsider.
Project 2025 embodies this with proposals for sweeping executive interventions, since the Leader is considered the embodiment of Strength. For instance, it would "unleash undue force" on protesters, targeting journalists and demonstrators and dismantling legal "guardrails" on presidential power. People who value action for action's sake don't understand the long-term ramifications of unchecked power, nor the wastefulness incurred when you decide on a course of action without deliberation. It's like being convinced that an axe that hasn't been sharpened before cutting a tree will result in a superior outcome than one that has been sharpened before use.
Right-wing Americans loathe those who can't contribute to the American Dream. They aren't seen as true Americans, but as leeches and traitors who are making life harder for the True American who does good. Project 2025 explicitly proposes cutting federal support for disabled students, implying that only the "productive" citizens deserve aid. Disabled people are thus written off as "weak", burdens on society, and yet they are also portrayed as secretly powerful. They might be global bankers or liberal elites who don't understand the American Way and are thus considered a threat. Project 2025's mixed messaging about various "special interests" mirrors this tactic.
The enemy must be fought every day because if you dare relent it will destroy the American Dream and any hope you have of a good life, and pacifism is treason. They view America as always under siege, even though the rest of the world genuinely doesn't care as long as they don't intervene in their daily lives, something Americans accuse foreigners of doing to them. Their government doesn't want peace, it wants constant militant struggle to fuel the Global American Industrial Complex making billions, if not trillions of dollars, every year in war spending. I don't blame Americans, I blame their media, and more precisely, the billionaires that own them, for feeding them this nonsense.
American Exceptionalism is a Cancer
America is steeped in the mythology of exceptionalism. This elitist thread runs across all layers of society, including the military. Americans are contemptuous of the "weak". Project 2025 is no exception to this pattern. It strips away legal and social supports for vulnerable groups. For instance, Donald Trump recently signed Executive Order 14183 titled "Prioritising Military Excellence and Readiness" effectively banning transgender people from serving in the military, under the guise of perceived strength instead of actual capability. Transgender people are no less capable of serving than cisgenders. The goal is erasure. The CDC has ceased data collection on gender identity. The White House has similarly erased all mention of diversity and reversed prohibitions on healthcare discrimination based on gender identity, all in the name of protecting children, of course. Project 2025 eviscerates funding to vulnerable groups. The government has cut USAID's budget and prohibits it from funding "sexual reproductive health and reproductive rights" and "gender equality" programs, even though these programs have saved millions of lives.
Right wingers see the fight for equality as a dangerous plot to undermine America. They go one step further by equating social progress with something that is considered obviously evil. The "propagation of transgender ideology" under Project 2025's many considerations is considered a type of social contagion comparable to pornography where kids are harmed. No Good American would ever say yes to harming children, thus "transgenders" are demonised in the eyes of Good Americans, fuelling transphobia, to the despair of those simply wishing to exist in freedom. This obsession with the plot is driving real kids whose identities don't conform to the heteronormative standard set in today's America to suicide. Project 2025's goals are to weaken groups it deems unworthy of being called American. America only accepts one type of American, the White Hero.
America's history is steeped in blood. Going to war in some foreign land is seen as an act of heroism, rather than a crime against humanity and moral failing. It glorifies war to the point where if your values don't align with it, you're no longer seen as a True American and thus a traitor to the American Ideal. Project 2025 injects this ethos into its criminal justice agenda. It aims to pursue the death penalty as a deterrent but its real goal is to make it easier to kill anyone deemed "unwanted". The White House brief explicitly states that the Attorney General shall pursue the death penalty when a "capital crime is committed by an alien illegally present in this country", which is in line with Project 2025's stated goals: "Enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable." All these policy measures are means towards the same end: to celebrate death over life, to make it easier to sell the lie that dying for your country is honourable.
The driving force of all this hero worship is America's hyper-masculine roots. The Internet is rife with pictures of men and their families holding guns as a statement of strength. Project 2025 rejects feminist and gender studies as they are considered threats to traditional "morality", not just masculinity. For a man to be compared to a woman is the ultimate sign of failure, even though women outperform men by a large margin as leaders. A large-scale study of over 60,000 leaders found that women outperformed men in 17 out of 19 leadership competencies. It is not allowed to show weakness in any way, shape or form, with skyrocketing suicide rates as an indirect consequence. A man who feels and expresses his feelings is equal to a woman. There is no greater insult to an American man who believes in the American Ideal. Machismo runs deep in American culture.
If you aren't exceptional or male, you aren't American.
Evil doesn't think of itself as evil
The defendants at Nuremberg did not believe they had done wrong. They had followed orders, served their country, protected their people from enemies both internal and external. They had done what good men do. The people supporting Project 2025 are not, in the main, sadists. They are exhausted people who want a better life and have been handed a story that explains their exhaustion and points them towards an enemy. That story happens to be fascist in its architecture, as Eco's framework makes plain, but it doesn't feel that way from the inside. From the inside it feels like standing up for what is right.
This is the uncomfortable conclusion the essay has been building towards: the capacity for this kind of moral blindness is not a defect unique to Americans, or to the political right. It is a human capacity. History has demonstrated this in every culture and every century. What varies is not the capacity but the conditions: the economic despair, the media infrastructure, the deliberate cultivation of an enemy to fear. When those conditions are present, ordinary people do extraordinary harm while believing themselves to be good.
Recognising this is not the same as excusing it. The harm is real. The policies are real. The people they target are real. But if we want to understand how fascism takes root (and understanding it is the only way to resist it), we cannot afford to treat it as something that happens to other, lesser people. It happens to all of us. It is happening now. And the first question it asks of each of us is the same one the men at Nuremberg failed to answer honestly: what would I have done?