The Green Old Socialism 

The Green Old Socialism

In a fawning profile in the Washington Post Magazine, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, parted the curtain on the Green New Deal. The piece describes a meeting between Chakrabarti and an emissary from Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who is running for president on a global warming platform:

Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an attentive poker face. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Or, in other words, a make-government-all-powerful-and-squash-the-individual-like-a-bug thing. This theme recurs throughout the Post story.

At first Chakrabarti shared the idealism of those lured to the Bay Area to change the world through tech. But San Francisco was a shock. “You see, like, holy crap, is this the dystopian future we’re signing up for?” he says. “I mean, it’s just huge amounts of wealth and some very rich people, and then just poverty and homelessness very visually and very viscerally.”

It apparently didn’t occur to Chakrabarti that San Francisco’s problems might have something to do with its being ruled exclusively by progressives for decades.
Chakrabarti refers to “today’s crises of climate and inequality.” But what is the “crisis of inequality”? If it were actually true, as he says elsewhere in the Post article, that “things seem to be regressing and getting worse for a large number of people,” it could be a crisis. But in fact, employment is at an all-time high, and wages are rising more rapidly than they have in a long time, especially for minorities and lower-wage workers. What, exactly, is the “crisis”?
We know what the crisis is: it’s the fact that monomaniacs with a lust for power haven’t been able to stamp out freedom in America, as they have in so many other places. When have socialists ever cared about the environment? Once they take power, they ruthlessly despoil the environment, as in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. Making you live the way the socialists want you to live is not a means to an end. It is the end. And the idea that the environment has something to do with it is the feeblest of pretenses.