Where Our New World Begins
Politics, power, and the Green New Deal
By Kevin Baker
Fascinating history, and ends with …
Like the best of liberalism, which was what the original New Deal was—and the Green New Deal could be—the proof is in the doing. All the efforts to dismiss it as some socialist plot will not stand, cannot stand, if we are to meet the greatest challenges of our time. Those challenges will not vanish just because we want to avoid them. They will not slow just because we prefer to go slow. The Green New Deal, as its name implies, is meant to be a restoration, a return to the sort of fairness, the human balance, the dignity of a working life wantonly abandoned and derided by so many of our leading politicians and commentators. If we are to survive, it will be necessary to ignore them. Obviously, they have nothing more to offer.
The manifesto that announced the Green New Deal will not be instituted literally. Some parts of it will be compromised, some will be improved, added, or subtracted. But it had better come into being, or we will leave to future generations a world of natural disasters unlike anything we have ever known.
No doubt it will be a heavy lift. But there is one, somewhat comforting fact to remember as we face the task ahead of us: we have been here before.