Liberalism began its lurch toward
soft socialism with the
Progressive movement at the beginning of the 20 th century, with additional propulsion provided thereafter by the New Deal in the 1930 s and the New Left of the 1960 s. But now that the Soviet Union has collapsed and socialism in general has miserably failed, the left has been reenergized by New Age environmentalism, like Marxism a quasi-religion that provides an even more comprehensive justification for restricting individual freedom and its economic expression in the form of market capitalism. The leftist project of replacing socialism with environmentalism as an ideological organizing principle has culminated with global warming theory, an apocalyptic scenario that has proved much more salable than anything Karl Marx could come up with. Marx, after all, could only promise a future utopia on Earth once the proletariat seized the means of production from their capitalist tormentors. Global warming theory and environmentalism more broadly work the other way around, promising not so much a future of heaven on Earth as the destruction of the Earth itself if present-day habits and values are not dramatically altered. Global warming was the perfect expression of environmentalism as ideology and religion because it went farther than Marxism to discredit not just capitalism but industrialism and consumerism as well. Communism appealed to people’s hopes, environmentalism more generally and global warming more specifically to their darkest fears. Nikita Khrushchev claimed our grandchildren would live in a better world of communism. Al Gore says there might not be a world at all for them to live in unless we change our ways.
Environmentalism has the additional advantage of hiding the left’s visceral anti-Americanism within a broader concern for the planet’s welfare that all reasonable people can agree with, or at least wish to be seen as agreeing with. Because it is something that just about everyone claims to be in favor of, environmentalism has a vastly higher social desirability content than that of socialism / communism, which in many societies, especially ours, was always something of a pejorative.
Whereas actual political Communists often had to keep their allegiances secret and were forever having to try to explain away the oppression found in places like the Soviet Union and North Korea, environmentalism has come to represent a crucial component of political correctness itself. Being more “green” than your neighbors even constitutes a new twist on the age-old phenomenon of statusseeking.
It was, in short, always easy to be green as long as it was largely all for show and didn’t demand much on an individual level, perhaps only some recycling, third-grade class projects and token Earth Day genuflecting.
But this is now likely to change, and change in a big way. The dramatic rise in gas prices has suddenly reversed public priorities, with large majorities now favoring whatever expedients, including those long opposed by environmentalists, to reduce gas prices by increasing oil supplies. Latte liberals from the affluent chattering classes don’t mind the dramatic increase in gas prices because it fits their agenda of draconian energy conservation and reduced CO 2 emissions, but other components of the Democratic Party coalition, most obviously the poor and working class, certainly do. Liberals who complain that Republicans use cultural issues to lure the working class into voting against their economic interests are about to find out what happens when liberal cultural dispositions in the form of environmentalism clash with the working-class desire for relief from $ 4-per-gallon gas. Big battles are coming that will redefine American politics. Oil shale will likely prove the most intense of these battles because it holds the greatest promise of solving our current energy dilemmas of foreign dependence and spectacularly rising costs. The United States alone possesses half of the world’s estimated oil shale reserves and those reserves could be enough to power our economy for not just our grandchildren but their grandchildren as well. Alas, it is precisely the kind of energy source whose extraction will give environmentalists nightmares. We are about to soon find out how green we really are and whether the whole thing was simply a bit of celebrity fashion chic.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.
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