Please watch the 20-minute video of the current predicament of small agricultural producers in Oregon. You’ll see how green ideology leads to totalitarianism, or complete micromanagement of a people. It’s a lesson in how the tapestry of individual liberty is crushed under mass controls. It’s happening across the country. And you wonder why Trump remains popular in many quarters.
Trump is the middle finger to this ideologically driven straitjacket. Trumpism, loosely referred to as “populism”, isn’t a refined set of beliefs so much as it is a temperament, an attitude, a posture toward the smothering of personal, mundane choices.
It’s a consequence of the ruling eco-left’s attempt to herd people into an officially preferred lifestyle, one that is easily concentrated and thus managed in urban locations. The war on the internal combustion engine, and on fossil fuels, is one means to that end. It’s a war on personal mobility. If you can’t make the EV work for you or your family, or afford it, lying below the surface, unstated, remains their ultimate selection for you: unaccommodating, grimy, and unsafe government mass transit.
The impracticality of electric vehicles – their only choice left for you – will force you back into the equivalent of tenements anyway, exactly where the charging infrastructure is most efficiently provided. The concomitant range anxiety will do much to keep you condensed into apartment life for the rest of your family’s existence. No swing set or doll house for your daughter, the government’s park in all its seedy glory being the only remaining option for her. That, or the streets.
The desire for control doesn’t stop there. The increasing grip on urban folk is extended to those who are scattered in places where the grip of the central planners is more tenuous, in the outback. Small agriculture is targeted like the individual family in their individual car in their individual bungalow. Climate-change hysteria is the ramrod for empowering the state. Other hypothetical eco-disasters – groundwater use and pollution for instance – are similarly used to police the guy or gal with a few sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, or surplus vegetables. The way is left open for greater concentration for the already highly concentrated operators, those big enough to stand toe-to-toe with big government.
Anyway, it’s an easy sell to ideologically domesticated urbanites once they accept the premise that cattle flatulence is a mortal threat to Gaia, or the choices of those rural “deplorables” must be made to fit the mold of their urban cousins. Urbanites outvote the “deplorables”, so it is a popularly elected totalitarianism. Somehow, the chant of “save our democracy” rings rather hollow.
Again, please watch the video of eco-consciousness turning into eco-totalitarianism.
RogerG