Fergus Finlay: Cruelty goes unchecked as Democrats fail to get act together
Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The blueprint they have adopted, the so-called Project 2025, is cruel, heartless, and being implemented without a shred of empathy or human conscience.
I have found the last couple of weeks watching America, and America’s place in the world, really disturbing. Frightening, almost. For three reasons. Sociopathic policy making. No end to it. Feeble, disorganised, and cowed opposition.
In a column here last Saturday Mick Clifford gave a brilliant list of twenty things for Donald Trump’s first twenty days. Reading it would make your head spin. Clearly Trump and his people have been getting ready for this. And, of course, a lot of it sounds crazy. How can RFK Jr’s appointment not go wrong? How soon will it be before Trump has reason to regret the pardons he handed out to the January 6 criminals? When will someone be seriously hurt by the vengeful decision to remove protection from some at-risk Americans (put at risk by going about their jobs)?
But behind the craziness there is deeply sinister change. The kind of change that won’t just change America but the world. And it’s been driven by an entirely sociopathic approach.
The Mayo Clinic, one of the most respected health institutions in the world, says this online: “Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend" and "lack remorse and don’t regret their behaviour.” (I’ve edited this slightly.) The weird thing is I’m not talking about an individual here. I’m in no position to accuse Donald Trump or Elon Musk of being in the grip of a personality disorder or a mental health condition. But the blueprint they have adopted, the so-called Project 2025, is cruel, heartless, and being implemented without a shred of empathy or human conscience. And where it isn’t heartless enough human cruelty is brought into play.
Project 2025 is a hard read. It’s nearly 900 pages of often turgid stuff. And it’s 100% about stuff the authors hate. So it’s got an awful lot of really strong opinions, and not a huge amount of fact. You could quote dozens of examples of the way loaded language replaces truth in the document. Here’s just one, picked at random:
“(Any new appointment by the President will have to rein in organisations) such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which the Biden Administration weaponized to attempt to force covid-19 vaccine mandates on 84 million Americans through their workplaces.”
In the middle of the document there are 30 pages devoted to a full-scale attack on the United States Agency for International Development, founded by John F Kennedy. What should this organisation be doing, asks the document. Reasonable answer — it should be protecting and promoting the rights of women and children everywhere. But it can’t, because its mission has been distorted and radicalised by “gender” policies and practices; its work has been “racialised” by an insistence on diversity, equity and inclusion (the dreaded DEI), and on top of all that its progress has been distorted by “radical” climate action approaches.
They’ve even gone further than the document proposes. In Musk’s words, they are intent on feeding American’s international aid programme “to the woodchipper”.
It is beyond cruel, and utterly indefensible at any level. It will lead to worldwide increases in disease and malnutrition. And poverty. And death. The women and children about whom the authors of Project 2025 talk piously will be the ones who suffer most. At the hands of a few sociopathic billionaires.
And then there is Gaza. The word Gaza doesn’t appear in Project 2025. Neither does the phrase ethnic cleansing. They’re entirely the creation of the President himself.
We know a little bit about these things in Ireland. The phrase “to hell or to Connacht” from the 17th century is ingrained in our history, just as the memory of a people allowed to starve to death if they couldn’t find a way to emigrate on coffin ships in the 19th century is deep in the soul of every Irish person. We recognise ethnic cleansing when we see it.
So, I’m guessing, does Bill Clinton. Clinton was the US President who (reluctantly) authorised a massive bombing campaign against Yugoslavia to stop a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing, including terrible atrocities in Srebrenica and Kosovo. Trump is only the fourth President to succeed Clinton. But the first in American history to advocate ethnic cleansing. And, apparently, because he thinks he can build a holiday resort for billionaires in the homeland of the Palestinian people.
Only a sociopathic mind can develop policy in that fashion.
I could list a dozen or more things already done that aren’t just crazy but profoundly disturbing. But in a way the thing that frightens me most is that there is no effective opposition to any of this within the world’s largest democracy, the place where the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” was first uttered. And, of course, the phrase was uttered after a battle fought so those three things would “not perish from the earth”.
It had never dawned on me before (stupid me) but in American politics the side that loses the Presidential election effectively goes into hibernation. In the run-up to the election they choose a leader at a convention — Kamala Harris in this case — and that person stops being the leader the minute they lose (and in Kamala’s case disappears without trace, it seems).
We don’t work that way. We recognise that democratic and accountable politics works best when there is a leader of the opposition, taking the fight to the government from day one. In the US they have what they now call minority leaders, in the House and the Senate, but no party leader. Even though they have never needed one more.
It’s one of the reasons people feel defenseless. They rely on a media that is increasingly fractured, much of it in the control of the billionaires, more of it seemingly afraid. The only meaningful opposition is coming from a handful of late-night comedians and a few journalists. How much longer will they be able to stand up?
If the Democratic Party can’t get its act together to provide the sort of opposition the rest of the democratic world takes for granted, then ultimately the next promise to be broken will be the one Lincoln made at Gettysburg. Half of Project 2025 is about policy — but half of is about the structures of government. And its full implementation, now heavily underway every day, will mean only one thing. Government of the people by the people will perish from the earth.
