When you have lost ultra-squishy, always #NeverTrumper, usually left of moderate “Republican” David Brooks….
How the Left Embraced Elitism
The progressives’ Green New Deal centralizes power.….
As many conservatives have shifted leftward, so have progressives. From Bill Clinton through Barack Obama, Democrats respected market forces but tried to use tax credits and regulations to steer them in more humane ways. Obamacare was an effort to expand and reform private health insurance markets.
That Democratic Party is ending. Today, Democrats are much more likely to want government to take direct control. This is the true importance of the Green New Deal, which is becoming the litmus test of progressive seriousness. I don’t know if it is socialism or not socialism — that’s a semantic game — but it would definitely represent the greatest centralization of power in the hands of the Washington elite in our history.
The resolution is unabashed about this, celebrating and calling for more “federal government-led mobilizations.†Under the Green New Deal, the government would provide a job to any person who wanted one. The government would oversee the renovation of every building in America. The government would put sector after sector under partial or complete federal control: the energy sector, the transportation system, the farm economy, capital markets, the health care system.
The authors liken their plan to the New Deal, but the real parallel is to World War II. It is the state mobilizing as many of society’s resources as possible to wage a war on global warming and other ills. The document is notably coy about how all this would be implemented. Exactly which agency would inspect and oversee the renovation of every building in America? Exactly which agency would hire every worker?
But the underlying faith of the Green New Deal is a faith in the guiding wisdom of the political elite. The authors of the Green New Deal assume that technocratic planners can master the movements of 328 million Americans and design a transportation system so that “air travel stops becoming necessary.†(This is from people who couldn’t even organize the successful release of their own background document.)
If even squishy David can notice this, so can others. And this is what the whole anthropogenic climate change movement is about. It’s why we are seeing more and more of their solutions including measures that are about bigger and strong and more controlling government. They never seem to realize that this will include their own lives. Why? Because they’re brainwashed idiots.
In an alienated America, efforts to decentralize power are more effective and realistic than efforts to concentrate it in the Washington elite. The great paradox of progressive populism is that it leads to elitism in its purist form.
The impulse to create a highly centralized superstate recurs throughout American history. There were people writing such grand master plans in the 1880s, the 1910s, the 1930s. They never work out. As Richard Weaver once put it, the problem with the next generation is that it hasn’t read the minutes of the last meeting.
The minutes from the last meeting are generally being erased in the public education system, which is more of an indoctrination system. David is correct in referring to them as “Progressives.” In true Socialism, you have the government heavily involved in the economy, including running and owning the means of production. But, in true Socialism the government also leaves you alone in your private lives. Progressivism is Fascism, is authoritarian, in which the government does control your life. And voting? Socialism is about having as few restrictions as possible. When the government controls you, you will vote a certain way. Or else.
