AOC - GreenLeap Forward

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveils the “Green Leap Forward.”

FEBRUARY 9, 2019 BY BOOKWORM 12 COMMENTS

Today’s new Leftists like to promise us Swedish style socialism. They make these promises ignoring the fact that Sweden long-ago stopped socialism and became a market-based economy although one with a large social welfare infrastructure. They also like to ignore the fact that, as Sweden has morphed from a small, homogeneous country into a larger country flooded with immigrants, the social welfare infrastructure is struggling.

Alternatively, today’s new Leftists like to promise us European style socialism. They make these promises ignoring the fact that Europeans managed to have this socialism because, for decades, America paid all their defense costs. In other words, it wasn’t socialized medicine, it was American medicine. They also ignore the fact that the medical care provided gave people access to doctors, but not access to actual health care. As Scott Atlas long ago explained, you have to look behind the praise and rankings to the actual outcomes. And of course, the new Leftists ignore the fact that, as American monies dried up and immigrants changed the social structure in European countries, all that nice welfare became all flipsy-wopsy.

To sum things up, the new Leftist’s first tier big lie is that the Europeans actually had a loving, all-supporting, high-functioning soft true socialism, which they did not. Alexandria-Ocasio’s Cortez’s Green New Deal, however, exposes the really big lie, which is that the new Leftists didn’t intend to go full communist. As her plan, which most of the front-running Democrat primary lemmings have endorsed, is full-bore communism.

If you haven’t seen the amazing FAQ Cortez prepared and then hid, you have to read it. It demands a mind-boggling takeover of the entire economy using technology that doesn’t exist and almost certainly cannot exist. Perhaps it’s the imaginary technology that led Ocasio-Cortez to propose a ten year time-line, rather than the standard communist Five Year Plan. It’s easier to kill all the farmers and demand that peasants produce impossible farm output than it is to retrofit every building in America, turn all cars electric (never mind the fossil fuel needed to make those cars run), and regulate car farts. The first just involves killing people; the second, as I said, requires actual magic.

I have derived great pleasure during my travels listening to podcasts of people having a laugh at Ocasio-Cortez’s mad plans. The retreat from reality is perfectly emblematic of the direction in which the entire Democrat Party is headed.

What I haven’t seen many people speak about is the full horror of the command and control economy Ocasio-Cortez envisions. Her plans are silly, but the real plan is the complete takeover of the American economy. This isn’t the soft corporate crony fascism the Lefties have previously been pushing (plans remarkably similar to both German and Italian economic plans in the late 20s and early 1930s). This is full-out communism. It is a Green Leap Forward —- and Mao would be proud.

Even the funny line about jobs for everyone, including those who don’t want to work was scarily ambiguous. It really wasn’t clear if she was promising free money for slackers or forced conscription for slackers. Either is a bad idea but the second interpretation has the reek of gulags in America.

The Dems are essentially doing Mao backwards. He started with the Great Leap Forward, which saw 50-75 million deaths, and then, when the population was sufficiently softened up, he went for the murderous Cultural Revolution. That entailed intellectual purges, thought crimes, forced confessions, and re-education camps —- all of which the Democrats have already implemented at institutions across America.

Hard to blog well on an iPhone but I’m just trying to say that, while Ocasio-Cortez’s plan is being deservedly ridiculed, we would do well to be afraid that Kamala Harris, who is thought to be the front runner, thinks this coercive, true communist Green Leap Forward is a great idea.

(A friend commented that this was probably a revamp of someone’s high school paper . . . which got an A. In academia, you don’t have to defend ideas, you just advance the politically correct ideas, no matter how ludicrous, and happiness ensues.)

THE NEW GODS:

A faith requires its pieties, and the so-called “Green New Deal” amounts to a sacrament. To true believers, its implausibility and impracticality is not a mark against it. Just the opposite; it is an expression of zeal, an acknowledgment of the righteousness and urgency of the cause it seeks to address. Its efficacy is measured in the number willing to genuflect before it.
This is not a serious policy proposal. Its goal is the elimination of fossil fuels in transportation and power generation, though it also would phase out emissions-free nuclear power plants. It seeks to retrofit every free-standing structure in America, pare back America’s industrial agriculture industry to “local” (or, presumably, subsistence) scale, and virtually eliminate domestic air travel within the continental U.S. by transitioning entirely to high-speed rail (which, assuming perfectly uniform topography, would still force bicoastal Americans to a nearly 20-hour trip). This would all be done in a single decade.
All this disruption to the economy isn’t much of a problem, of course, because the plan assumes that the displaced will simply transition directly into new, unionized green jobs. And for those who spent their lives acquiring expertise that is no longer valuable, the proposal would impose a “just transition” into a lifestyle more befitting this brave new world.
The Green New Deal’s central planners aren’t so hubristic that they cannot admit uncertainties. For example, they admit that it’s unlikely that they could “fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The ethics associated with industrial-scale bovine slaughter are unaddressed. The Green New Deal is its own moral imperative.
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In the absence of a national religion, Americans have frequently adopted a variety of civic codes that mimic the inviolable tenets of a faith. Some of them are healthier than others. With each passing day, the dogma of the green revolution looks less like a healthy expression of political agency and more like a cult.

Once Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” the entire history of “Progressivism” became an exercise in replacing Him with various and often interconnected cult-like pseudo-religions. As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Try reading this piece by Arthur Allen Leff for more on this phenomenon.