‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

Democrats seek Green New Deal to address climate change

A group of Democrats unveiled their “Green New Deal” (GND) that calls for a “‘10-year national mobilization’ on the scale of the original New Deal” geared to “transform the U.S. economy to combat climate change.”

Remember that the 1930s FDR New Deal was a catastrophic failure if the goal was economic well-being. But it was a smashing success at expanding the power and scope of government interference in the economy. The drastic transformation of the U.S. economy would require, against the choices that Americans would otherwise make, would do the same, this time likely on the scale of totalitarian power. If the climate is in a “crisis” that is an imminent “‘existential threat’ to the planet,” and human activity is the cause, then what control can’t the government impose on us? What limits on government power will be left under the government-imposed mobilization plan? None--and that’s the point.

But is climate change the primary factor motivating the GND? I doubt it. Remember that the Democratic Party is now a socialist party--a democratic socialist party. Socialism, according The Basics,

is a political and economic theory of social organisation which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned and regulated by the community as a whole, rather than by private individuals.

According to the website of The Democratic Socialists of America website,

working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few.

Cutting through the collectivist lingo--”the community as a whole” and “run both the economy and society democratically”--this means totalitarian control by government. The economy and society are made up of individuals living their lives. A government that runs the economy and society is a government with total control over the people’s lives. Economics is the field of activity by which people support their lives. A government that totally controls the economy has total control over people’s means of survival. A government with total control over people's means of survival is a government that has every individual by the throat. What freedom, what opposition, is possible under such conditions? Does it matter whether you have a single ruler or a politburo? Whether it is elected or not? A government, of whatever kind, that has every individual by the throat is a totalitarian state. Logic confirms this truth. History has proven this time and again.

In order to understand what this is really all about, we must take a brief look back. As thinkers such as Ayn Rand (P. 270) and Stephen Hicks (C. 5) have observed, socialists faced a crisis around the middle of the 20th Century. Marxist predictions that capitalism would lead to the few getting rich at the expense of impoverishing the many turned out to be 180º wrong: The growth of industrial fortunes was accompanied by a rising general standard of living, including the emergence of a vast prosperous middle class. Meanwhile, socialist nations collapsed into widespread poverty, one after another, accompanied by brutal repressions and often genocide. Rather than acknowledge the obvious, the socialists switched gears. Under a “New Left,” they aligned with the “ecology” movement, the precursor to modern Environmentalism, opposing capitalism for creating too much prosperity for the masses, thus ruining the Earth with pollution. When capitalist nations began cleaning up the pollution--genuine pollution--while continuing the upward trajectory of general prosperity, the socialists turned to a quasi-religion--the Environmentalists’ “climate crisis”. Capitalism-hating Naomi Klein captures the modern socialist strategy. Climate change “Changes Everything,” she writes. As Reason’s Ronald Bailey summarizes:

"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war," she asserts. Climate science, Klein claims, has given progressives "the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism" ever. If the stresses of globalization and a massive financial crisis cannot mobilize the masses, then the prospect of catastrophic climate change must.

Canonical Marxism predicted that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its class "contradictions," in which the bourgeoisie profit from the proletariat's labor until we reach a social breaking point. In Klein's progressive update, capitalism will collapse because the pollution produced by its heedless overconsumption will build to an ecological breaking point.

[P]rogressive values and policies are "currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature." [emphasis added]

Socialism is totalitarian, by design and in practice. So where does the Green New Deal come in?

Environmentalism--uppercase “E”; the ideological belief that values raw nature over human life--is fundamentally anti-human. It holds untouched nature as the moral standard. Since human beings survive and thrive by transforming the natural environment to fit human needs, Environmentalism is ideologically opposed to industrial development of any kind, and thus human well-being.

Climate change is therefor bad, not because change itself is bad, but because human-induced change is bad. Climate is so all-encompassing that there is virtually nothing that humans can do, short of reverting to a pre-fire, pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer Stone Age existence, that does not contribute in some way, directly or indirectly, to climate change. To end human caused climate change, then, is to obliterate human progress and flourishing. Energy is the industry that powers every other industry. Not just any energy. Reliable, economical, mass-scale energy. Fossil fuels are the leading reliable energy source, so Environmentalism focusses on banning of fossil fuels. To ban fossil fuels--go “carbon free”--requires the governmental power to impact every human activity. That is the very definition of totalitarian.   

So whether the goal is to “save” the Earth from human impact, or turn America socialist, totalitarian powers are needed. To avoid catastrophic climate change, governments must engineer “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” according to the recent report of U.N.’s IPCC. The American government must orchestrate a “10-year national mobilization [to] transform the U.S. economy to combat climate change,” according to the Green New Deal. Such utopian dreams are the stuff of which totalitarian dictatorships are made, because such sweeping reorganizations of the lives of 350 million--or 7 billion--human beings can only be “achieved” from the top down.

But Democrats are not primarily Environmentalists. They are socialists. They are not nihilists. They don’t intend to do away with industrialization and technology. They intend to control it. Socialism requires totalitarian powers. How to get it? The Environmentalists’ climate change agenda. “Saving the planet” sounds a lot better than socialism. They intend to gain full control by hitching socialism to Environmentalism, then riding the “save-the-Earth” totalitarianism of the “climate crisis” not to a “green” America but to a socialist America.

I have no doubt that the new Democratic Socialists are salivating over the chance to force these draconian changes on the American people. But I don’t believe it’s to stop climate change. OAC and her ilk couldn’t care less about the weather. To actually attempt to eliminate fossil fuels in 10 years would collapse the economy. It would be political suicide for the Democratic Party.

A “climate crisis”--the “end of the world in 12 years,” as OAC hysteria puts it--is a means to an end. Both the U.N. report and the GND integrate socialist goals into the climate agenda. The Green New Dealers want the totalitarian powers to transform the economy--not to save us from climate change, but to complete the transformation of America from a predominantly free capitalist nation to a socialist slave state. OAC is very open about this: “We can use the transition to 100 percent renewable energy,” says the self-described radical for socialism, “as the vehicle to establish economic, racial and social justice in America." And that’s the real motive behind the Green New Deal. "This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil rights movement of our generation," she gushed. Give OAC credit for honesty. The “climate crisis” is not the end to be solved. It is the means to an end--a socialist America.

Related Reading:

The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables--Michael Shellenberger

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

The 'Watermelon' Analogy is Real, and it is Dangerous

Democratic Socialism: The Left Escalates America’s Journey to Totalitarianism

Environmentalists, Luddites, and Collectivism

Earth Day: The Anti-Industrial Revolution