Colin Gordon, University of Iowa

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.

But they also met a conservative backlash seeking to rein back 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.

Social 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, education and civil rights.

These included the provision of medical care for the poor and older people via Medicaid and Medicare, a dramatic expansion of federal aid for K-12 education, and landmark voting rights and civil rights legislation.

As with the New Deal, the substance of these policies rested less with national policy designs than with the aspirations and mobilization of the era’s social movements.

Resistance to policy change

Since the 1930s, conservative policy agendas have largely taken the form of reactions to the New Deal and the Great Society.

The central message has routinely been that “big government” has overstepped its bounds and trampled individual rights, and that the architects of those reforms are not just misguided but treasonous. Project 2025, in this respect, promises not just a political right turn but to “defeat the anti-American left.”

After the 1946 midterm elections, congressional Republicans struck back at the New Deal. Drawing on business opposition to the New Deal, popular discontent with postwar inflation, and common cause with Southern Democrats, they stemmed efforts to expand the New Deal, gutting a full employment proposal and defeating national health insurance.

They struck back at organized labor with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which undercut federal law by allowing states to pass anti-union “right to work” laws. And they launched an infamous anti-communist purge of the civil service, which forced nearly 15,000 people out of government jobs.

In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned Lewis Powell – who would be appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court the next year – to assess the political landscape. Powell’s memorandum characterized the political climate at the dawn of the 1970s – including both Great Society programs and the anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s – as nothing less than an “attack on the free enterprise system.”

In a preview of current U.S. politics, Powell’s memorandum devoted special attention to a disquieting “chorus of criticism” coming from “the perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

Powell characterized the social policies of the New Deal and Great Society as “socialism or some sort of statism” and advocated the elevation of business interests and business priorities to the center of American political life.

Building a conservative infrastructure

Powell captured the conservative zeitgeist at the onset of what would become a long and decisive right turn in American politics. More importantly, it helped galvanize the creation of a conservative infrastructure – in the courts, in the policy world, in universities and in the media – to push back against that “chorus of criticism.”

This political shift would yield an array of organizations and initiatives, including the political mobilization of business, best represented by the emergence of the Koch brothers and the powerful libertarian conservative political advocacy group they founded, known as Americans for Prosperity. It also yielded a new wave of conservative voices on radio and television and a raft of right-wing policy shops and think tanks – including the Heritage Foundation, creator of Project 2025.

In national politics, the conservative resurgence achieved full expression in President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. The “Reagan Revolution” united economic and social conservatives around the central goal of dismantling what was left of the New Deal and Great Society.

Powell’s triumph was evident across the policy landscape. Reagan gutted social programs, declared war on organized labor, pared back economic and social regulations – or declined to enforce them – and slashed taxes on business and the wealthy.

Publicly, the Reagan administration argued that tax cuts would pay for themselves, with the lower rates offset by economic growth. Privately, it didn’t matter: Either growth would sustain revenues, or the resulting budgetary hole could be used to “starve the beast” and justify further program cuts.

Reagan’s vision, and its shaky fiscal logic, were reasserted in the “Contract with America” proposed by congressional Republicans after their gains in the 1994 midterm elections.

This declaration of principles proposed deep cuts to social programs alongside tax breaks for business. It was perhaps most notable for encouraging the Clinton administration to pass the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, “ending welfare as we know it,” as Clinton promised.

Aiming at the ‘deep state’

Project 2025, the latest in this series of blueprints for dramatic change, draws most deeply on two of those plans.

As in the congressional purges of 1940s, it takes aim not just at policy but at the civil servants – Trump’s “deep state” – who administer it.

In the wake of World War II, the charge was that feckless bureaucrats served Soviet masters. Today, Project 2025 aims to “bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.”

As in the 1971 Powell memorandum, Project 2025 promises to mobilize business power; to “champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism.”

Whatever their source – party platforms, congressional bomb-throwers, think tanks, private interests – the success or failure of these blueprints rested not on their vision or popular appeal but on the political power that accompanied them. The New Deal and Great Society gained momentum and meaning from the social movements that shaped their agendas and held them to account.

The lineage of conservative responses has been largely an assertion of business power. Whatever populist trappings the second Trump administration may possess, the bottom line of the conservative cultural and political agenda in 2025 is to dismantle what is left of the New Deal or the Great Society, and to defend unfettered “free enterprise” against critics and alternatives.

Colin Gordon, Professor of History, University of Iowa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Michael J. Murdoch, Rochester Institute of Technology

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Where does black fall on the color spectrum? – Utsav, age 17, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

People love the rainbow of ROYGBIV colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Human eyes perceive visible light as this array of colors.

You may notice that some colors you can perceive aren’t part of the classic rainbow, though. Where is black, for example?

I’m an associate professor of color science, a field that combines physics and perception. Color scientists are interested in learning more about human vision and applying that knowledge to make color systems – such as in cameras, screens or lighting systems – work better.

To understand where black falls on the color spectrum, first consider what light actually is.

Light is radiation visible to the human eye

Light is energy called electromagnetic radiation. It’s made up of a stream of energy particles called photons.

Each photon has its own energy level. There are two characteristics you can use to describe a photon. Its frequency is how fast it vibrates back and forth – or oscillates – as it travels. And its wavelength is the distance between those oscillations in space.

As photons with wavelengths within a range of about 400–700 nanometers stream into your eyes, your brain perceives them as light. Scientists call these photons visible radiation. You perceive photons with different wavelengths as different colors.

Photons outside that range of wavelengths are invisible to human eyes. Shorter wavelength energy includes ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma radiation, while longer wavelength energy includes infrared and radio waves.

Shades and intensities

Color perception is also affected by the quantity of photons – what physicists call the power – at different visible wavelengths. More photons means more powerful light, which looks brighter. A very vivid color consists mostly of photons of similar wavelength. For example, a pure red may consist of photons that all share the same wavelength near 620 nanometers.

A stream of photons with a wider range of wavelengths will appear as a paler, less saturated color. White light, such as natural daylight, consists of photons with wavelengths spread fairly evenly across a wide range of the visible spectrum. LEDs and other electric light sources are not quite as uniform across the spectrum, but they still appear white or achromatic, meaning without color.

Mixtures of wavelengths combine and appear as new colors. The human visual system interprets pure red light and pure green light combined as yellow. Add in pure blue, and this mix of radiation appears white. Scientists and engineers take advantage of this quality in display devices, which are able to create a huge range of perceived colors by mixing the primary colors red, green and blue.

Black on the color spectrum

While there’s no black in a rainbow, photons anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum can be seen as black. Or in some cases, they can’t be seen at all!

Radiation within the visible spectrum can appear black if it is low in power – more specifically, lower in power than its surroundings.

Additionally, radiation outside the visible range of wavelengths appears black to our eyes. For example, infrared radiation appears black because it is invisible to humans.

Perception is subjective

Our eyes detect the wavelength and power of the light, but our brains interpret it. So color perception always depends on the context.

People are good at adapting to a wide range of light levels, from sunlight to starlight. So our perception of color and brightness depends on what’s around and what we’ve been looking at recently. If you step from outdoor daylight into a dark theater, at first you probably perceive the whole environment as black, and you may even have trouble finding your way.

However, your visual system immediately begins to adapt to the low light level. Soon, visual details begin to emerge. What appeared black now has different levels of lightness and color.

Consider the optical illusion that consists of a light rectangle next to a dark rectangle. Each rectangle contains a circle. The circles appear to be different shades but in fact are identical. Against the light background, the circle is dark enough to appear black. Surrounded by the black background, it becomes clear that the circle is merely dark gray. Even when you know the circles are the same, it’s hard to believe because the effect of the surrounding background is so strong.

You might be asking yourself, how dark must a color be to appear black? Another way to ask the question is, how low in power must the physical light be in order to look black?

For a visual answer, look at a gradient from dark gray to black. Where in the gradient is the boundary, or threshold, at which you call it black? What if you dim your display or view the screen in a much brighter or much darker environment? Probably the best answer for how dark it must be is, “It depends.”

Color perception is a fascinating topic, and we color scientists are continuing to uncover details of how the human visual system works while also applying our knowledge to many other useful things, including dyes, cameras, printers, LED lighting systems and AR/VR displays.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit − adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Michael J. Murdoch, Associate Professor of Color Science, Rochester Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Frederik Joelving, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse

Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating – possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies, only to find that they were made up.

Even when bogus papers are spotted – usually by amateur sleuths on their own time – academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews and other research and discusses findings.

These fake papers are slowing research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies, from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts’ data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard-hit, while areas such as philosophy and art are less affected.

To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, we – a contributing editor at Retraction Watch, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France’s Université Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier and Université Grenoble Alpes who specialize in detecting bogus publications – spent six months investigating paper mills.

Co-author Guillaume Cabanac also developed the Problematic Paper Screener, which filters 130 million new and old scholarly papers every week looking for nine types of clues that a paper might be fake or contain errors.

An obscure molecule

Frank Cackowski at Detroit’s Wayne State University was confused.

The oncologist was studying a sequence of chemical reactions in cells to see whether they could be a target for drugs against prostate cancer. A paper from 2018 in the American Journal of Cancer Research piqued his interest when he read that a little-known molecule called SNHG1 might interact with the chemical reactions he was exploring. He and fellow Wayne State researcher Steven Zielske began experiments but found no link.

Meanwhile, Zielske had grown suspicious of the paper. Two graphs showing results for different cell lines were identical, he noticed, which “would be like pouring water into two glasses with your eyes closed and the levels coming out exactly the same.” Another graph and a table in the article also inexplicably contained identical data.

Zielske described his misgivings in an anonymous post in 2020 at PubPeer, an online forum where many scientists report potential research misconduct, and also contacted the journal’s editor. The journal pulled the paper, citing “falsified materials and/or data.”

“Science is hard enough as it is if people are actually being genuine and trying to do real work,” said Cackowski, who also works at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Michigan.

Legitimate academic journals evaluate papers before publication by having other researchers in the field carefully read them over. But this peer review process is far from perfect. Reviewers volunteer their time, typically assume research is real and so don’t look for fraud.

Some publishers may try to pick reviewers they deem more likely to accept papers, because rejecting a manuscript can mean losing out on thousands of dollars in publication fees.

Worse, some corrupt scientists form peer review rings. Paper mills may create fake peer reviewers. Others may bribe editors or plant agents on journal editorial boards.

An ‘absolutely huge’ problem

It’s unclear when paper mills began to operate at scale. The earliest suspected paper mill article retracted was published in 2004, according to the Retraction Watch database, which details retractions and is operated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch.

An analysis of 53,000 papers submitted to six publishers – but not necessarily published – found 2% to 46% suspect submissions across journals. The American publisher Wiley, which has retracted more than 11,300 articles and closed 19 heavily affected journals in its erstwhile Hindawi division, said its new paper mill detection tool flags up to 1 in 7 submissions.

As many as 2% of the several million scientific works published in 2022 were milled, according to Adam Day, who directs Clear Skies, a company in London that develops tools to spot fake papers. Some fields are worse than others: biology and medicine are closer to 3%, and some subfields, such as cancer, may be much larger, Day said.

The paper mill problem is “absolutely huge,” said Sabina Alam, director of Publishing Ethics and Integrity at Taylor & Francis, a major academic publisher. In 2019, none of the 175 ethics cases escalated to her team was about paper mills, Alam said. Ethics cases include submissions and already published papers. “We had almost 4,000 cases” in 2023, she said. “And half of those were paper mills.”

Jennifer Byrne, an Australian scientist who now heads up a research group to improve the reliability of medical research, testified at a July 2022 U.S. House of Representatives hearing that nearly 6% of 12,000 cancer research papers screened had errors that could signal paper mill involvement. Byrne shuttered her cancer research lab in 2017 because genes she had spent two decades researching and writing about became the target of fake papers.

In 2022, Byrne and colleagues, including two of us, found that suspect genetics research, despite not immediately affecting patient care, informs scientists’ work, including clinical trials. But publishers are often slow to retract tainted papers, even when alerted to obvious fraud. We found that 97% of the 712 problematic genetics research articles we identified remained uncorrected.

Potential solutions

The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence and is developing a tool to spot problematic medical trials. And publishers have begun to share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud, including image fraud.

Technology startups are also offering help. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check collaborators for retractions or misconduct. Morressier, a scientific conference and communications company in Berlin, offers research integrity tools. Paper-checking tools include Signals, by London-based Research Signals, and Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm.

But Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won’t be won as long as the booming demand for papers remains.

Today’s commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. Cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking. “Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves,” she said.

There’s a fundamental bias in for-profit publishing: “We pay them for accepting papers,” said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With more than 50,000 journals on the market, bad papers shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern said.

To prevent this, we could stop paying journals for accepting papers and look at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. “We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms,” he said.

Peer review, meanwhile, “should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article,” Stern said. And journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. This is a condensed version. To learn more about how fraudsters around the globe use paper mills to enrich themselves and harm scientific research, read the full version.

Frederik Joelving, Contributing editor, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Professor of Computer Science, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Professor of Computer Science, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.