CityNerd examines Agenda 47 and cities in 'And You Thought Project 2025 Was Bad'

Ray "CityNerd" Delahanty has uploaded a second follow-up to CityNerd explaining 'What Project 2025 Means for Our Cities' can drive one to drink, the first being CityNerd responds to comments on his Project 2025 video, a reaction to the general tone and contents of the bulk of the replies to the video. There was another critique that Project 2025, which Trump himself has said isn't his agenda, doing his best Sergeant Schultz impression in the process. Instead, convicted criminal Donald Trump's supporters say Agenda 47 is Trump's real platform. CityNerd decided to take this claim seriously, so he examined it, telling his viewers And You Thought Project 2025 Was Bad.

Against my better judgement, I accepted the idea that Project 2025 isn't Trump's "real" plan, and instead looked into Agenda 47, which I was assured by certain viewers was much more reasonable (and an accurate description of what Trump proposes to do if he wins back the presidency). What I found was disturbing on more levels than I can count.

As CityNerd observed, at least the writers of Project 2025 could put together coherent policy proposals, even though their ideas are bad. They're supposed to persuade Trump and the people around him to adopt them should he be elected. Since a lot of the chapter authors were members of the previous administration and would be likely to be part of the next one, heaven forfend, that isn't a hard lift. On the other hand, the individual items that compose Agenda 47 are emotional appeals that Trump himself can understand and get behind and that he thinks will appeal to his supporters, although it's not always clear who those are. They're definitely not the same supporters for every proposal, which makes them as incoherent as a whole. In that case, they reflect the candidate.

One of those proposals, "freedom cities" to solve the housing crisis, is one of the "cyberpunk villain ideas straight out of Snow Crash that are influencing Vance" I referred to in Kosta, Colbert, and Hayes react to the VP Debate. They're also influencing Trump, too, or this concept wouldn't be in Agenda 47. I wrote "They would be right on target for this blog" so expect me to blog about them.

I'm responding to the item "ending Biden's war on the suburbs" by recycling what I wrote in 'CBS This Morning' comes to Michigan to record the pulse of voters — literally.

Gayle King asking "Save the suburbs from what?" reminds me of what I wrote in Kunstler said Americans would elect maniacs.

Five years ago, I juxtaposed two quotes from James Howard Kunstler to reconstruct a prediction about American politics from the movie "The End of Suburbia."

There will be a great battle to preserve the supposed entitlements to suburbia and it will be an epochal act of futility, a huge waste of effort and resources that might have been much better spent in finding new ways to carry on an American civilization.
...
Americans will elect maniacs who promise to allow them to keep their McMansions and their commutes and that’s going to produce a lot of political friction, probably a lot of violence, probably a threat to our democratic institutions.

Kunstler was both right and wrong about that prediction, as I pointed out when I revisited that quote in my comment on Slowly, Then All at Once (ETA: this is now a dead link, as Kunstler has moved to Substack).

As for Trump, you once predicted that Americans would elect maniacs who would promise that they could keep the entitlements of suburbia. Trump has shown you to be right and wrong about that. Yes, they'll elect maniacs to protect the entitlements of suburbia, but those entitlements turned out to be psychological and social, not physical. Trump's support is more a response to threats to the social environment as it is to losing SUVs and McMansions, which with the price of oil being low right now, are not issues like they were in 2008 and 2012. Instead, it's immigration, terrorism, and "law and order."

What I also wrote, but didn't post because I didn't want to inflame Vlad, who now goes by Janos, and his fellow deplorables was a second observation.

The one thing missing from "The End of Suburbia" was any discussion of White Flight; the movement to the suburbs was all phrased in class terms, not racial ones. That's something my students from Detroit and its suburbs notice.

It's not what, it's who Trump promises to save the suburbs from. I know who and so does Governor Whitmer, which is why she called it a dog whistle, one people in Michigan have been hearing for decades. I suspect King does, too, which is why she asked.

Trump is still blowing that dog whistle and it sounds throughout all these proposals.

That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for a highlights post of tonight's Saturday Night Live as the Sunday entertainment feature.