To be blunt, telling a person what to think is not wrong; claiming the power to make another person think that way is wrong. The former is necessary for dialogue in a community of free association. Before there is a voluntary dialogue of views, one must first have a view contra another’s. The second half of the first sentence is the Green New Deal (GND), which is grounded in the rationalized Prussian state and more fully implemented in the full-mobilization governments of the warring parties of WWI – what was called War Socialism.
Let me explain. After the humiliations of Prussia at the hands of Napoleon, the Prussian state was rationalized around the administration of academics under the Hohenzollern monarchy as the cure for what ailed the nation. For people like the philosopher Hegel (Google him), it was the perfection of political organization.
This gave rise to his history-as-progress thing, and would flower into Obama’s silly talk of being on the right side of it – which means to agree with him. Add a dose of “experts” rooted in opinionated “science” and you’ve just short-circuited popular sovereignty. Oh, lip service is paid to “democracy”, but it’s only of the kind that is allowed to agree with the stale and calcified opinions of a claque of “experts”. Thus, we have the unelected administrative state and the Green New Deal demand for a whole lot more of it.
Modern industrialized war provides the opportunity to put the grotesque plan into operation. Since it’s all about government controls in time of war, it’s socialism, thus War Socialism. It also explains the constant search for the “moral equivalent of war”. Declaring a war-like situation is the go-to excuse to marshal the state, create new claques of “experts”, bust the budget, and control the lives of people. Once again, welcome to the Green New Deal.
The parallels with that other high priest of the “laws” of history, Karl Marx, are aplenty. He announced the need for a lot of consciousness-raising by a prescient few. Lenin called them the “vanguard elite”. As in the Communist Manifesto, so in the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal. Who else but the few self-anointed gnostics, schooled in the theology of the global warming apocalypse, can be entrusted to lead us to the promised land?
Don’t dare, you “frontline communities”, use your democratic voice to build coal-fired power plants to sell electricity to communities stuck in the brave new world of windmills and solar farms. If you try, the full force of the soviet will descend upon you.
Speaking of soviets, the GND has them too. The vague references to local community councils will be nothing but warrens of left-wing activists, just like the soviets of revolutionary Russia. The boilerplate title of “workers, soldiers, and peasants” was nothing but cover for Bolshevik militancy.
And so we are to go the way of Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, etc., etc.
Ocasio-Cortez, our teenage central planner, symbolizes the extreme myopia of many that are treading a well-worn path from the post-Napoleonic Prussian state to the garrison governments of the world wars and the spawning of systematize totalitarianism. Don’t expect the realization to suddenly dawn on her and her Twitter followers. She is to erudition what an oil slick is to water. It only floats on the surface and there ain’t much beyond that.
RogerG