Most Democrats knew just how bad the Green New Deal was, mostly because it exposed what the Democrats really want. But some are still trying to mainstream what is a massive government takeover of the economy and our lives, like Michelle Goldberg at the NY Times
The Useful Idealism of the Green New Deal
Amid the unceasing awfulness of the Trump administration, I’ve lately found comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time,†which has in turn informed my thinking about the almost utopian ambitions of the Green New Deal.
Surveying the American presidency, Skowronek sees politics unfolding in cycles. Every so often, insurgent coalitions bring an agenda-setting president to power who sweeps away the verities of the old regime, fundamentally restructuring our politics. These “reconstructive presidents,†as Skowronek refers to them, create the political framework that their successors of both parties must operate within. (snip)
Viewed through this schema, Donald Trump’s presidency looks more like the end of a cycle than the end of the Republic. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and the early months of the Trump administration, the constitutional law professors Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson exchanged letters arguing about the durability of our system; the letters will be published this spring as a book, “Democracy and Dysfunction.†Balkin is the more sanguine of the two, in part because he sees Trump fitting into Skowronek’s model.
Huh what? This seems more about Trump Derangement Syndrome than about the Green New Deal. It reminds me of the article in the Washington Post entitled “The Left: Online and Outraged” from back during the Bush years, were Liberals would wake up unhinged and angry and look to link everything to Bush.
Eventually, we get to the GND
The young progressives pushing the Green New Deal have a similar sense of historic opportunity. Waleed Shahid, communications director for the Justice Democrats — the group that recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress — frames the Green New Deal as an overarching vision for political renewal.
“This is not just an environmental sustainability policy,†Shahid told me. “It’s also about rewriting and expanding the social contract that began under the New Deal, was expanded under the civil rights movement and then was completely torn apart over the past 50 years.â€
Maybe McConnell is right. I’ve lived through enough right-wing backlashes to worry about left-wing overreach. But it seems at least possible that, at this moment of social breakdown and planetary emergency, the calculus of what’s politically feasible could be changing. The electorate certainly is; within the next decade, millennials, the most diverse and perhaps most progressive generation in history, will be the single largest voting bloc.
If we are in fact on the cusp of a new political epoch, then a sweeping, idealistic plan for social transformation is not a wild fantasy but a practical necessity.
It’s “idealistic” to use the fiction of ‘climate change’ and environmentalism to implement sweeping controls on everything? Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were idealistic, too. I don’t write that lightly, not in terms of what the GND wants to do.
What the hell is “idealistic” about regurgitating the ideas of the most murderous system ever devised by man, communism, and slapping a new name on it to repackage it’s built in failures to a new generation of useful idiots?
Idealism is not supporting a system that removes a man’s Freedom, his dignity and his own control over his own life and that of his family and replacing it with an all pervasive government that determines his job, where he lives, what he drives, what he eats and if he receives medical care.
Idealism is Freeing a man’s spirit to go forward as Freemen and create a life for himself and his family. Idealism is believing your country is a Good country and working hard to keep it that way. Keeping your laws fair and equitable without racial preference and applied equally to all citizens not just the ones you like. Teaching honesty and Patriotism and Faith to our children and not killing millions of our progeny in the womb for birth control while importing inferior people to do the jobs the murdered children are not here to do. Idealism is putting the needs and dreams of our own people before those of foreigners and sustaining our people before interlopers. Idealism is not allowing the lying liars on the left to convince you a male can become a female, an MS-13 member is a “refugee”, the earth will end in 12 years because cow farts, or being white is a sin against nature. That is idealism in 2019.