One of the less-appreciated wonders of the Green New Deal—the proposal for large-scale federal investment in alternative energy sources introduced in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey—is that it presses almost all the buttons of the right at once. It’s the brainchild of a woman (a young Latina at that). It conjures up the ambitious, habit-altering agendas of radical environmentalists—and if this wasn’t bad enough, it reaches all the way back to the original modern program of radical reform, the New Deal! Identity politics, the New Left, the Old Left: For eager right-wing merchants of ideological invective, the Green New Deal has it all.
Precisely because it seems to embody so many of the right’s worst fears, the response to the Green New Deal provides us with a catalogue of conservative arguments in all their schizophrenic glory. Post after tweet after editorial oscillates madly between a depiction of the Green New Deal as sheer folly, a laughable and frivolous exercise in ultraliberal vanity, barely worthy of analysis—and a portrayal of savvy, power-crazed environmentalists rubbing their hands with glee....
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And here the past serves as an instructive prologue; we’ve seen pretty much this same furor over imperiled liberty and hovering tyranny in the concerted bid from some business leaders to stigmatize and delegitimize the original New Deal. Right-wing foes of the 1930s program of social and economic reform hailed each newly arrived New Deal initiative as the harbinger of social revolution—when, that is, they weren’t wringing their hands over its “ravenous madness” (as one American Liberty League pamphlet put it) or warning against the tentacles of bureaucracy strangling a once-free land. What we view today as barely controversial registered then as a series of seismic shocks to the entire social order.
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But Wall Street conspicuously dissented. The investment economy’s opposition focused on two main points: Wall Street savants predicted that the Securities Act would slow economic recovery and thus prolong the depression; and they painted a dire portrait of a bureaucratic state gone mad, seeking ever-greater control and power. At first, it seemed that Wall Street would accept the new law, if warily. Even though “the underlying principle of Federal control of business is as repugnant as ever,” the New York Times wrote, “most industries and business executives are resignedly falling in with the purposes of the two-year experiment which Congress has been asked to authorize.” But this grudging toleration for regulation quickly gave way to resentment. A 14,000-word article in Fortune magazine in August 1933 (by lawyer Arthur H. Dean of the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell) warned that the act “contains many provisions not apparent on the first reading which will have a profound effect on the entire economic system of the country.” What’s more, Dean continued, the measure was “drastically deflationary” and “may seriously retard economic recovery.”
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Much of the hostility toward the Green New Deal is difficult to separate from the right’s obsessive denigration of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—referred to affectionately by Glenn Beck and others as “Alexandria Occasional Cortex.” Commenters over at Free Republic describe her as a self-absorbed “bimbo” and a “very slow learner.” There’s an attitude of disbelief that this young woman could possibly be in Congress at all, let alone proposing something as ambitious as a Green New Deal. The apotheosis of this demonization campaign is the notion—put forward in an online video that has been promoted by Fox News host Sean Hannity among others—that Ocasio-Cortez is a puppet entirely controlled by the Justice Democrats, a caucus they portray as a Leninist vanguard of power-mad state planning. Ocasio-Cortez is, in this dark surmise, “not really the Congresswoman from New York’s 14th Congressional District. She is—essentially—an actress, she’s merely playing the part of a New York Congresswoman.” AOC is at once a virago drunk on her own self-aggrandizement and an incompetent ditz; the people who support her are dupes, idiots, or both.
In some ways, these critiques themselves echo the dismissive contempt many conservatives famously held for FDR; the president was often characterized as an intellectual lightweight (“a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would like very much to be president,” journalist Walter Lippmann, a founding editor of The New Republic, wrote in 1932). Occasionally, they depicted FDR as a cripple who had no business running for national office (these criticisms were more whispered while he was on the campaign trail than publicly lobbed at the exceedingly popular president). Both in the 1930s and today, such personal attacks become a way of diminishing the program while also implicitly undermining a demos foolish enough to have chosen such a fraudulent leader.
The more sophisticated critiques of the Green New Deal follow a rhetorical structure that Hirschman surely would have recognized from earlier campaigns against universal suffrage and the welfare state. Whatever the proponents of the Green New Deal may intend, such critics lament, their plans will actually lead to the exact opposite outcome. Writers at the American Enterprise Institute have argued that the Green New Deal will “unintentionally inhibit” investment in clean technology by encouraging companies to sign up for government contracts rather than invest in research and development to develop low-carbon machines. They have insisted that what looks like environmental legislation is in fact the opposite: “To achieve ‘Green New Socialism’ we would have to trash all existing environmental laws,” writes Mark Perry on the American Enterprise Institute’s Carpe Diem blog. Building renewable energy sources would mean abandoning habitat protections and other longstanding environmental laws—jeopardizing the natural landscape in return for preserving the social one, argues Myron Ebell over at the website of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Much the same set of unintended-cum-ironic consequences are sure to attend the Green New Deal’s specific provisions for economic reform. In the telling of its critics, the Green New Deal’s stated attempts to address economic inequality would only lead to the further entrenchment of crony capitalism and the impoverishment of the working-class people it purports to help.
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In a way, the public relations barrage is not at all surprising. After all, for many years, the entire public debate about climate change has been hamstrung by the wealth and political power of the fossil fuel industry. The top 25 oil and gas companies alone produced $73 billion in profits in 2017. Industries tied to fossil fuels spent nearly $2 billion in lobbying between 2000 and 2016, according to a report from the Public Accountability Initiative. As Kate Aronoff put it at The Intercept, the result has been that significant parts of the Republican political establishment recycle fuzzy science and insist that climate change is no more than a hoax, a socialist plot or some other variety of wild-eyed conspiratorial maneuver; meanwhile, those liberal politicians who admit the reality of the problem have entirely failed to generate any political energy for actually addressing it. As the Sunrise Movement has pointed out, many of these political leaders, too, routinely collect financial contributions from the fossil fuel industry.
No one objects to debate and analysis (though this is not quite the same as derisive laughter), and there’s clearly much that remains uncertain about the Green New Deal. But it’s hard to escape the sense that it has elicited such a strong response precisely because it represents the first effort to shake off the complacency and timidity that have for far too long marked the mainstream response to climate change. It’s the first attempt to mount a response to the emergency that treats it as an emergency. Here, too, looking back to the New Deal may be helpful. The 1930s businessmen and newspaper editors who assailed the first New Deal were in many cases alarmists, and in some instances, flat-out paranoid. The 1933 Securities Act was not, after all, the first step on the road to serfdom.
But in one key sense, they were on to something. In marshaling broad-based opposition to the first New Deal, they helped popularize the ideas of the business executives who joined the Liberty League or financed the Republicans in 1936 or resisted labor unions in the 1930s and again after World War II. And it’s true that, taken together, the measures of the New Deal did actually entail a significant transfer of political power and social resources away from the elite—a partial and limited one, but a substantive one nonetheless.
The same will be true of any meaningful proposal to cope with climate change. This is not a problem that can be confronted in a technocratic way that avoids all redistribution of resources; in its essence, it suggests that certain social goods are more important than an individual’s right to consume whatever he or she wants to with no regard for the consequences, or a company’s right to profit above all else. As such, it’s going to meet with tremendous resistance, and it will take an enormous show of political will to overcome it.
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That seems rather Trumpian to me.
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