Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.
It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.
The SEDM explicitly works to:
— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty,
— Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color,
— Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,
Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function,
— Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping taxes on […]
This attempt was long before Reagan to take our the United States with Republican philosophies and desires. It actually began in the 70’s when a huge group of like-minded ultra-conservative Republicans met to discuss how they could get lower class people to become Republicans—they brought up family values! Abortion, same sex marriage, gays, guns. Since then, the list has increased to be against transgender, to be against teaching our real history, not a cleansed version of it minus slavery, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and other thinking that harms the American democratic way. Democrats have weakly sat by and hardly raised a voice, so these
ridiculous, undemocratic ideas have proliferated in all kinds of media and state governments. Until the Dems get as strong as the diehard Republicans, this kind of thinking will continue to exist and keep Democrats out of power.
It actually started with Nixon. I was a part of that administration and walked away from a career in government because I could not always tell the good guys from the bad guys, and could see the growing corruption. After I finished my part in the transformation of the military, in which I had served, from an elitist conscription system to an all-volunteer, gender and race neutral system. I just resigned and left.