(MENAFN- Asia Times)
For much of the 20th century, efforts to remake government were driven by a progressive desire to make the government work for regular Americans, including the New Deal and the Great Society reforms.
Those efforts met a conservative backlash seeking to rein in government as a source of security for working Americans and realign it with the interests of private business. That backlash is the central thread of the Heritage Foundation's“Project 2025” blueprint for a second trump Administration.
Alternatively disavowed and embraced by President Donald Trump during his 2024 campaign, Project 2025 is a collection of conservative policy proposals – many written by veterans of his first administration. It echoes similar projects, both liberal and conservative, setting out a bold agenda for a new administration .
But Project 2025 does so with particular detail and urgency, hoping to galvanize dramatic change before the midterm elections in 2026. As its foreword warns:“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right.”
The standard for a transformational“100 days” – a much-used reference point for evaluating an administration – belongs to the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Bill in Washington on Aug. 14, 1935. Photo: WikipediaSocial reforms and FDR
In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression , Roosevelt faced a nation in which business activity had stalled, nearly a third of the workforce was unemployed, and economic misery and unrest were widespread.
But Roosevelt's so-called“New Deal” unfolded less as a grand plan to combat the Depression than as a scramble of policy experimentation.
Roosevelt did not campaign on what would become the New Deal's singular achievements , which included expansive relief programs, subsidies for farmers, financial reforms, the Social Security system, the minimum wage and federal protection of workers' rights.
Those achievements came haltingly after two years of frustrated or ineffective policymaking . And those achievements rested less on Roosevelt's political vision than on the political mobilization and demands made by American workers .
A generation later, another wave of social reforms unfolded in similar fashion. This time it was not general economic misery that spurred actions, but the persistence of inequality – especially racial inequality – in an otherwise prosperous time.
LBJ's Great Society
President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs declared a war on poverty and, toward that end, introduced a raft of new federal initiatives in urban affairs, education and civil rights.
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