The Future of Project 2025

Join IPK for a discussion on the Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025) with Joe Lowndes and Thomas Zimmer on Wednesday, September 11, at 5:30 PM. The two will discuss the development of Project 2025, its aims, and its relationship to the Trump campaign and the far right. Cristina Beltrán will moderate the discussion.

Joe Lowndes is a scholar of US politics at Hunter College, with a specific focus on right-wing politics, populism, and race. Among other publications, he is the author of From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (Yale University Press), and co-author with Daniel Martinez HoSang of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press).  Along with scholarly work, he is published frequently in public venues including the Washington Post and The New Republic.  He is currently co-editing a volume titled The Politics of the Multiracial Right (New York University Press in 2025).; and he is at work on another book, Adventures in Post-Democracy, which seeks to explain the growing authoritarian trend in American political culture through a chronicle of his ethnographic work in right-wing spaces over the last decade (University of California Press 2025). Before coming to Hunter, Lowndes was Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.

Thomas Zimmer is a historian and DAAD Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. His work focuses on the recent history of American democracy and its discontents, on the struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America, and on anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the American Right since the 1950s. He is currently working on a book project that situates the rise of Trumpism in American history. Zimmer also writes a regular column for the US Guardian on all things American democracy past and present and is the co-host of the “Is This Democracy” podcast. He has studied and written about Project 2025 extensively, including for his Democracy Americana newsletter on Substack.

Cristina Beltrán, Ph.D., works at the intersection of Latinx politics and political theory. She is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. She is the author of Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2010). From 2019-2024 she was co-editor of  the journal Theory & Event. Her next book, Racial Sensations: Essays on Latinos and the Multiracial Politics of Conservatism is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.