In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.
We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.
Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).
The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.
Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.
Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.
The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.
Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).
Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.
For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.
This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.
Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.
Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.
The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.
We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.
RogerG
