The progressives’ Green New Deal centralizes power.
by David Brooks New York Times
February 11, 2019
Over the past generation, global capitalism has produced the greatest reduction in human poverty in history. Over the past 10 years, American capitalism has produced 20 million new jobs. The productive dynamism of capitalism is truly a wonder to behold.
But economic growth alone is not enough. Growth alone does not translate into economic security for the middle class and the less skilled. Growth alone does nothing to reverse the social decay afflicting communities across America.
This reality is transforming the political debate — and shifting everything leftward. Among conservatives there are now a bevy of thinkers who are trying to find ways to use government to reduce inequality, promote work and restore community.
For example, in the lead essay of the conservative journal National Affairs, Abby M. McCloskey notes that the family you are born into and the neighborhood you live in have a much stronger influence on your socioeconomic outcome than any other factors. Her essay is an outstanding compendium of proposals designed to strengthen family and neighborhood.
Pell grants could be used to pay for vocational and apprenticeship training and not just for college. The federal government could support a voluntary national service program by paying people, once in their lifetime, to work for a year at a local nonprofit. The tax code could be tweaked so that people with no income tax liability could receive a cash credit for making charitable donations.
These proposals are activist but humble. It’s not the federal government centrally deciding how to remake your community. It’s giving communities and people the resources to take responsibility and assume power for themselves.
As many conservatives have shifted leftward, so have progressives. From Bill Clinton through Barack Obama, Democrats respected market forces but tried to use tax credits and regulations to steer them in more humane ways. Obamacare was an effort to expand and reform private health insurance markets.
That Democratic Party is ending. Today, Democrats are much more likely to want government to take direct control. This is the true importance of the Green New Deal, which is becoming the litmus test of progressive seriousness. I don’t know if it is socialism or not socialism — that’s a semantic game — but it would definitely represent the greatest centralization of power in the hands of the Washington elite in our history.
The resolution is unabashed about this, celebrating and calling for more “federal government-led mobilizations.” Under the Green New Deal, the government would provide a job to any person who wanted one. The government would oversee the renovation of every building in America. The government would put sector after sector under partial or complete federal control: the energy sector, the transportation system, the farm economy, capital markets, the health care system.
The authors liken their plan to the New Deal, but the real parallel is to World War II. It is the state mobilizing as many of society’s resources as possible to wage a war on global warming and other ills. The document is notably coy about how all this would be implemented. Exactly which agency would inspect and oversee the renovation of every building in America? Exactly which agency would hire every worker?
But the underlying faith of the Green New Deal is a faith in the guiding wisdom of the political elite. The authors of the Green New Deal assume that technocratic planners can master the movements of 328 million Americans and design a transportation system so that “air travel stops becoming necessary.” (This is from people who couldn’t even organize the successful release of their own background document.)
They assume that congressional leaders have the ability to direct what in effect would be gigantic energy firms and gigantic investment houses without giving sweetheart deals to vested interests, without getting corrupted by this newfound power, without letting the whole thing get swallowed up by incompetence. (This is a Congress that can’t pass a budget.)
If this were ever put into practice, there would have to be several new Pentagons built to house the hundreds of thousands of new social planners. The elite universities would have to be transformed into technocratic academies in which the children of the rich were trained so they could be dirigistes for the state.
The authors of this fantasy are right that we need to do something about global warming and inequality. But simple attempts to realign incentives, like the carbon tax, would be more effective and more realistic than government efforts to reorganize vast industries.
In an alienated America, efforts to decentralize power are more effective and realistic than efforts to concentrate it in the Washington elite. The great paradox of progressive populism is that it leads to elitism in its purist form.
The impulse to create a highly centralized superstate recurs throughout American history. There were people writing such grand master plans in the 1880s, the 1910s, the 1930s. They never work out. As Richard Weaver once put it, the problem with the next generation is that it hasn’t read the minutes of the last meeting.
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David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and the forthcoming book, “The Second Mountain.”
Link to original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/opinion/green-new-deal.html
In this article, David Brooks asserts that increased economic insecurity has produced political extremism on the left. Economic trends in the past ten years have produced enormous net gains in wealth and prosperity, but not without fluctuations in stability along the way which have produced feelings of insecurity among the middle and lower income brackets (I hesitate to attribute all of these developments to capitalism alone because the United States economy has a capitalist foundation, but is quite heavily socialized). Brooks claims that economic anxiety is leading many, including conservatives, to doubt America’s predominantly right-wing, free market economic structure and swing in favor of a far-left, centralized economic system. Under such a system, the government would provide grants for vocational and apprenticeship training and would place most sectors under “partial or complete federal control” through the Green New Deal, transforming into an authoritarian communist state.
This shift in policy is consistent with Wike and Fetterolf’s claim that economic insecurity often motivates its victims (frequently the lower classes) to adopt extremist ideologies. These people feel like the status quo, in this case the perceived free market, has left them behind, and only a drastic change in the system (like a switch to a command economy) will even up the playing field. This is similar to Hochschild’s idea that both sides of the political spectrum have become more extremist because people feel victimized by those in power, but there are a few notable differences. Hochschild believes that specifically, those on the right feel betrayed by their government because it gives preferential treatment to people who are not necessarily “true” Americans and disregards those who have formed the backbone of the country’s culture and workforce (white, Christian males) since its inception. A similar theory can be applied to the far left as Brooks describes them in this article. While the far right feels betrayed by the government, the far left feels betrayed by “gigantic energy firms and gigantic investment houses,” among other wealthy institutions which have concentrated wealth for themselves at the expense of the less-powerful. Therefore, the left looks to the government to address what it perceives as the failure of free-market capitalism, because they believe that capitalism inherently concentrates wealth in the hands of large, selfish, greedy corporations who disregard their impact on the environment and on the lower classes. Hochschild focuses on the right, but her idea of betrayal goes both ways.
This idea of betrayal should in theory lead to intense polarization. If the right feels betrayed by the institutions of the left and the left feels betrayed by the institutions of the right, then theoretically, they should each become more extreme. By contrast, Brooks describes not only leftists embracing even farther-left policies, but conservatives as well. This is interesting because Teixeira and Abramowitz, as well as Hochschild, believe that the existing right, especially the white working class, has shifted “very far” rightward. However, they believe that this extreme rightward shift is an attempt to salvage traditional American values and cultural norms from the influence of the left, without regard for the far right’s economic policies, which supposedly threaten the white working class (This is up for debate. The mainstream right, which these authors mistakenly conflate with the far right, likes to pretend it supports free market economic policies when in practice, it supports corporatism. It’s the very far libertarian right that advocates a purer free market). It may be that sects of the the right, like the white working class in particular, have shifted farther right socially and remain right economically (again, the white working class), while others have shifted to the left economically (the elite Washington conservatives that Brooks describes). All of these authors use right and left as blanket, catch-all terms, when there is a ton of nuance in the ways in which people can support right- or left-wing economic policies while simultaneously supporting right- or left-wing social and cultural values, so their failure to account for this might explain the contradictions between Brooks and Teixeira, Abramowitz, and Hochschild.
Wike and Fetterolf explain that concerns about economic injustice tend to preclude support for non-democratic forms of government and economic organization. According to Dahl, the free market is democratic by nature–it puts the success of private enterprises largely in the hands of consumers. Consumers vote producers into power with their money, and producers lose their power in the market when consumers stop funding them. Corporatism and the authoritarian communism that Brooks describes remove this democratic element: they guarantee the success of all government-owned enterprises and ensure the elimination or absorption of smaller competitors. The consumers no longer determine who succeeds or fails in the market, because businesses will receive all the funding they need as long as the government owns and supports them with taxation. Dahl defines democracy as the “continuing responsiveness of government to the demands of its citizens as equals.” This definition can easily be applied to the market as well–a democratic political system often depends upon the continuing responsiveness of the market to the demands of consumers. Support for authoritarian communist measures such as the Green New Deal is anti-democratic because it prevents the market from responding to the demands of consumers, and by extent it prevents the government from responding to the demands of citizens because the government owns the market.
I agree with Brooks that the left’s elitism is harmful to democracy. The left is particularly prone to a type of elitism that I call authoritarian progressivism, which is the attitude that ceding more control and power to the government will allow it to solve society’s problems. Authoritarian progressives presume that people in the government are elite and superior to the general public, which allows them to solve difficult problems if given enough power. Authoritarian progressivism is extremely dangerous to democracy because it pushes a society towards authoritarianism.
Politicians do not have as much ability or integrity as elitists seem to think. Often, politicians who seemed benevolent are exposed as power-hungry and tyrannical, but even those who genuinely seek to prosper the nation usually fail to fulfill their promises. Transferring responsibilities from the citizens to the government does not ensure that they will be more effectively handled, and many of the problems that politicians claim the government can solve simply cannot be solved by the government.
There are numerous instances in which an increase of the government’s power, justified by the assertion that it will help solve societal problems, has failed to bring about the social change it was intended to. A pungent example is the all-too-recent shooting in Parkland, Florida. The Florida government was entrusted a long time ago, through numerous statutes, with the power to restrict who can and cannot buy firearms because, in theory, the state should have the ability to predict which prospective buyers would use a firearm maliciously. As well, the right to keep and bear arms on school property is restricted only to police officers (and, in some cases, armed guards) with the intention of making the students and faculty safer. When weapons were banned from school campuses, the responsibility was placed in the hands of the government to protect the otherwise-defenseless campus from violence. The lives of everyone in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were wagered on the notion that the police had both the ability to stop violence from occurring and the integrity to put their lives on the line and actually do it. However, the firearms purchasing restrictions did not stop a shooter from acquiring his rifle, the laws prohibiting weapons on campus did not take it away from him, and as he carried out the murders of 17 innocent students, the police officer on campus hid from the violence rather than intervening (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/02/15/florida-shooting-suspect-bought-gun-legally-authorities-say/340606002/) (https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/parkland/florida-school-shooting/fl-florida-school-shooting-fdle-officer-20180904-story.html). Tragically, the government did not have the ability to predict who would and would not use a firearm to commit a crime (and how could it, without becoming so intrusive as to mimic George Orwell’s 1984), and the police officer on campus, though unrepresentative of the vast majority of police officers, did not have the integrity or bravery to run towards the gunfire and carry out his duties. The people in that high school were under the impression that they did not need to defend themselves because the government was supposed to do it for them, but the government failed them miserably. The restrictions put in place by the government left the students and teachers defenseless and gave them a false sense of security.
Authoritarian progressivism is seen in calls for socialism as well. Socialism, rather than entrusting the people with control over economic capital, entrusts the government with it. The presumption, again, is that the government is able to solve societal problems (such as poverty and inequality) through direct control. The problem with socialism is that the government, just like the populace, is made up of mere men who are just as prone to immorality, corruption, and incompetence as the general public. In the best case, poor decisions are inevitably made with the country’s capital and economic problems still remain. The danger, though, is when corruption takes hold. A society in which both the same people who control the economy also control the military is extremely susceptible to becoming an authoritarian regime, where the elites decide to keep the money they have been entrusted with instead of using it to prosper all citizens equally. The result, then, is a dictatorship like Chavez’s Venezuela (https://www.cato.org/commentary/corruption-democracy-venezuela).
Democracy is threatened by authoritarian progressivism because it encourages the yielding of rights and powers to the government, reducing freedom and encouraging corruption. To put it in terms of Robert Dahl’s dimensions of democratization (see Polyarchy by Robert Dahl), authoritarian progressivism decreases both the inclusiveness of a society because it takes decision-making power away from the people and gives it to the government, and the opportunities for public contestation because it aggrandizes the government elites and assumes that they know better than the general population. It also encourages the concentration of power, making it easier for corruption to take hold. Advocates of the Green New Deal, for example, insist that if the government is given direct control over transportation, it will somehow increase efficiency and save the planet from an emissions-induced extinction. The actual result would be a bigger government requiring increased taxes, reduced inclusivity because the people would no longer have control over their own transportation methods, and a transportation infrastructure which would still be prone to failure because ordinary, fallible, human beings would control it. Other political candidates assure us that, if bans are passed allowing them to confiscate “assault weapons,” they have the ability to make our schools and society safer. Yet, while the government has infringed ever more on the people’s right to bear arms over the past century, violent crime has continued to occur, and the problem of public safety remains unsolved. As well, every move towards disarming the populace severely reduces the opportunity for public contestation because the people then have less means to fight back against a government gone rogue. In general, authoritarian progressivism is harmful to democracy because as the government is given more control, inclusivity and liberalization decrease, pushing a society towards authoritarianism. Authoritarian progressivism is just authoritarianism justified by the prospect of social change.
Some problems simply cannot be solved by government, but politicians still promise to fix them in order to get votes. When the proposed solution is for the government to seize more power, this threatens democracy and, more often than not, the increased control does little to prosper society. Authoritarian progressivism is an attitude that gets politicians votes and increases their power, but if the public does not realize that such politicians’ promises are empty, our democracy is at a great risk of becoming illiberal and authoritarian.
When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected, progressives embraced her as the face of the Democrats’ future, shaking up the Democratic establishment after defeating senior Representative Joseph Crowley. Her youth and energy, as well as her hardline defense of progressive policies, make her a force to be reckoned with, both within her party and outside of it. Democrats and Republicans alike are deciding what to think about her and how to approach her policies, and the Green New Deal is no exception.
There is no denying the inequality in the United States, as pointed out in the article. Class status has always been a significant factor in politics. Explained by Seymour Martin Lipset as early as 1959, a large middle class is necessary for mitigating conflict because they tend to reward moderate parties and punish extremists. However, the robust size of the middle class does not change their frustration with the widening wealth gap between them and the upper classes. Richard V. Reeves points out that both class gaps and cash gaps are important; if rates of upward mobility stay low and the top’s average income rises faster than the middle’s, let alone the bottom’s, then people are bound to desire change.
This is one school of thought when it comes to the rise of Trump. He made populist appeals to the middle class, arguing that he would “drain the swamp” of Washington elites acting only for themselves and, from his Inaugural Address, return “the wealth of our middle class [that] has been ripped from their homes.”
Trump’s rise to power can also be explained, and more accurately according to several experts, by value-based appeals, not class-based. He took stances on hot-button issues like abortion and immigration that supported the threatened white middle-class voter’s desire to return to a nostalgic image of America. He used extremist rhetoric to support those values and is acting on them as promised; declaring a state of emergency to secure funding for the border wall was a move frowned upon by both Democrats and Republicans.
All that being said, it seems to many that Ocasio-Cortez has fallen into the trap of rhetorical rage, defined by Amy Gutman as “the phenomenon of one form of extremist rhetoric breeding another, counter-extremist” form. Though Trump moved deeper red, conservative thinkers like those referred to in the article have begun inching out of the deep red and into a middle-ground closer to moderates. The shift is inevitable; as the population shifts leftward, so do its advocates.
The Green New Deal is not a response to the moderate wing of conservatives, though. Instead, it is a response to the Trump administration’s refusal to address issues of climate change. With a price tag estimated in the trillions, it is an extreme attempt to support the liberal side of a hot-button issue in the same way that Trump’s national emergency is an extreme attempt to support the conservative side of a different hot-button issue. If the middle class is supposed to reward moderates but is being offered two sides of the same extremist coin, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to punish or reward anyone. The average voter is being forced into gridlock the same way Congress is.
The article suggests that to define something as socialism is a “semantic game,” but the Green New Deal shows clear signs of socialist ideology. Putting sectors under federal control, providing government jobs, and renovating every building all require the government to take collective control over many aspects of American life. Even Republicans who want to address climate change would be opposed to such policies, not because they hate the environment but because they hate excessively big government.
Even if the Green New Deal were to go into effect, it is likely that the Supreme Court would take “referee” action, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt would define it. FDR was halted by the outrage in response to his court-packing scheme, and the Supreme Court blocked his efforts. Vague terms, huge spending requirements, and vast government control would most likely be shot down by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court with strict constitutional interpretations of government.
Some anxiety may still be justified, however, when comparing the Green New Deal to World War II. The Green Party’s explanation of the Green New Deal indeed refers to it as “a WWII-scale national mobilization to halt climate change.” The Supreme Court was less involved with acting in opposition to actions taken during World War II, including permitting the internment of Japanese-Americans, a decision that is now universally denounced. Though hope for the Green New Deal seems small now, especially with the Senate rejecting it 57-0, it is unlikely to go away any time soon. And with Trump’s declaration of a national emergency over illegal immigration setting a dangerous precedent – a Democrat president could easily declare a national emergency over climate change in the future – the Green New Deal is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
The article focuses on Leftist elitism, which is indeed a problem. However, the moderate electorate should be wary of this attempt, and Trump’s attempts, to turn the nation into a battleground for value-based politics. Gutman believes that extremist rhetoric divides and deceives democratic citizens; it is this rhetoric from both sides of the aisle that Americans must pay attention to now to avoid becoming soldiers in the value war.