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.