Voting (and Aspiring) on the Green New Deal

For a good while leftists in this country have claimed that the climate change apocalypse is nigh, and that unless we humans mend our ways, horrific disasters and even extinction are imminent.  Recently a freshman Democrat member of the house presented a fairly detailed path to salvation and labeled it the Green New Deal.  Among other things it would require an end to air travel, abolishing gas and diesel fueled engines, exterminating dairy and beef cattle, the  forced remodeling of every house and other building in the country, ending the use of coal, oil, or natural gas to produce electricity, and taxing productive people to subsidize a livelihood for anyone unwilling to work.  The proposal has gained the support of many well-known Democrats including several of the party’s senators and candidates for president. 

This week the members of the United States senate had the opportunity to vote on the plan. Every Republican and four Democrats voted against it. No one voted for it. Forty three Democrats including all of the senators who had said they supported it, voted “present” to avoid going on record on the proposal.  For those who might still need it, this was a fine illustration of the fact that leftist politicians are not really serious about this stuff except as a means to increase their power and authority.  Not only would they not put their money where their mouths were. They would not even put their non-binding votes there.

There were various lame attempts to excuse the hypocrisy. The most common was to say that the things in the plan were aspirational goals, blueprints for things desirable in some future or abstract way but not something to work on now.  Of course that  is inconsistent with  all their apocalyptic talk. If one is facing catastrophe or even  annihilation if one does not take immediate action, one does not  merely aspire. One acts or at least tries to.

Still, without accepting it as an excuse, one should  take the statement of aspiration at face value  and consider what it means. Many  people have political aspirations. Many libertarians aspire  to a freer and safer country where the government respects more of people’s rights, expropriates less of their earnings and property, and avoids unnecessary foreign wars. Social conservatives often aspire to a return to the values and mores of an imagined better past. A person’s aspirations say something about him.  Aspiring to something like the Green New Deal says something important about the leftists and Democrats who do so. Anyone who aspires to that level of power over his fellow humans is a dangerous sociopath who should not be trusted with the authority typically given to a junior high hall monitor, much less anything more.  That is worth noticing and taking seriously.

Democrats and the Electoral College

Many Democrats have decided that since Hillary Clinton got the votes of more people than Donald Trump did, the solution for  their difficulties is to abolish the electoral college and let a national popular vote select the president.  One assumes they think this plays well with and stirs up the more ignorant people within their "base”, but one should also assume they are not serious about it and not go charging at the red cape in the manner of numerous conservative media people.

The first thing to notice is that it won’t happen.  It would require a constitutional amendment, and that would require two thirds of the senate and the legislatures of two thirds of the states to support it. Those representing the less populous states are not likely to go for it, and there are enough of them to block an amendment.

Then there is the fact that the left did not win the popular vote in 2016. Hillary did get more votes than Trump, but she was not the only leftist getting votes, and Trump was not the only opponent of the left getting votes. Gary Johnson was not a very good candidate, but he received over four million votes for president as the candidate of the Libertarian Party,  far more than the party’s  candidates in other elections. While I  would like to believe that millions of people became libertarians between 2012 and 2016, it is likely that many or most of Johnson’s voters did so because they opposed Clinton’s leftist policies but could not stand Trump. Evan McMullin ran as an independent and a more or less explicit Republican alternative to Trump and got over seven hundred thousand votes. Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party received slightly over two hundred thousand votes.   On the other side Jill Stein of the Green Party got over a million votes with positions usually to the left of Clinton’s.  Bernie Sanders picked up a little over a hundred thousand, probably mainly from leftists who did not like Clinton, and Gloria La Riva of the Socialism and Liberation Party got over seventy thousand.  No one else is listed as getting a large number of votes, though several hundred thousand were cast for assorted “other” candidates.

It seems reasonable to combine the votes for  for Clinton, Stein, La Riva, and  Sanders  as generally favoring the Democrats/left  and those for Trump, Johnson, McMullin, and Castle as generally opposing it.  Doing so gives  the anti-leftists not only the lead but a majority of  all votes cast.

So conservatives should simmer down. The Dems are only kidding, and even if they weren’t and got their way, it might not do them any good.

A Question for People in the Traditional Media

People in the traditional media tend to emphasize or even sensationalize stories of  extramarital or unconventional sexual activity by conservatives and ignore those about  leftists.  They often try to justify it  by claiming that it is not a result of political bias because what they are focusing on is hypocrisy and not deviations from traditional norms as such.  Since conservatives  are more likely than leftists to claim to adhere traditional Christian doctrine on sex, they are more likely to be fair game for identification and calumny as hypocrites.  

That raises a question. If hypocrisy is what is decisive, why have the same people in the media not reacted similarly to the hypocrisy of leftists including  Sanders, Warren, and many others who preach and moralize endlessly in favor of  equality of wealth and income while amassing fortunes?  One may await an explanation showing how there is no problem of honesty or consistency here.