(Why) the Green New Deal is Awesome, Urgent, and Necessary

It’s Shouldn’t be Radical Politics to Want to Save The Planet, the Economy, Democracy, and Us. It Should Just be Common Sense.

I could care less, my friends, what your politics are. I think three things in life in matter — disco, chocolate, and the last one’s a secret — and near the bottom of the lost of what matters in life should rank politics. I’ll come back to that — here’s why I mention it.

Here’s the narrative in America surrounding a Green New Deal — it’s some kind of outlandish, radical political position, to be “debated” and bickered over and investigated like some kind of great mystery. Here’s the truth. It’s the precise opposite: something as necessary and urgent as breathing, just the barest beginning, the first step, not the last, a relatively small one, not a huge one. If we can’t get even this done —investing enough in ourselves to no longer go on poisoning, abusing, and depleting our own water, air, land, and soil, agreeing on a plan to survive, tame, and conquer the roaring flood, the deep freeze, the scorching drought — what future do we really have? Are we thinking at all? Haven’t we let the bad guys win by turning reality into some kind of suspiciously debatable proposition?

Yet because this narrative — the Green New Deal is communo-fascism! No, the Green New Deal Stalinism all over again!! — is what they hear day after day, from legions of crackpot pundits and quack economists, I see many Americans treating the Green New Deal just that way: as a matter of politics. As a dangerous, unknown idea, a thing to be treated with caution and hesitation, something alien and strange and menacing. They shouldn’t be. It isn’t. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s a matter of fact, of common sense, of reality — the most basic test of whether we can think at all anymore, really.

It shouldn’t be radical politics to want to save the planet, the economy, democracy, and us. It should be what it is: common sense. Hence, for just that reason, the GND should be the most basic — not the most advanced and sophisticated — litmus test every thinking person uses to judge whether their aspiring leaders are a) thoughtful b) reasonable c) living on the same planet as the rest of…