Democratic Socialists Want a Green New Deal … and More

The Democratic Socialists of America aren’t whispering anymore. Their official party platform is a blueprint to remake the country: tax the rich, cancel student debt, free healthcare including “gender-affirming care,” free college and medical school, a living wage, and a 32-hour workweek with full pay.

Their big tent panders to pretty much everything — except John Fetterman and traditional American values.

They vilify President Trump for denying a catastrophic climate crisis; walking away from Paris; and reviving coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power.

So the DSA promises a Green New Deal to reverse all of that — one that goes well beyond what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey proposed in 2019.

The first GND was already a budget-buster: $52 trillion to $93 trillion over 10 years, by the American Action Forum’s count. AOC’s then-chief of staff acknowledged it wasn’t “a climate thing at all.” It was “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Ending fossil fuels and converting the grid to weather-dependent wind and solar would do exactly that — and leave Americans without the fuels, fertilizers, plastics and medicines that come from oil and gas.

Many of the same advocates also wanted “cooperative and public ownership” of essential industries — starting with utilities and the grid — and some wanted the government to own transportation, manufacturing and natural resources.

Washington would then subsidize the newly jobless and make sure “the public” got “appropriate ownership stakes and returns on investment.”

The new DSA Green New Deal keeps all of that and piles on “social, economic, racial, regional, and gender-based justice and equality.”

What leprechaun pot of gold pays the tab? How does an economy buried in that kind of debt help American workers and families? On those questions, they take the Fifth.

On what planet have wind, solar, communal ownership and anti-capitalist government delivered anything but poverty and decline?

Britain and Germany now have nearly the highest household and industrial electricity prices on earth. They have sent millions of jobs and entire industries to China and India — countries that burn coal, lean on oil and gas, and emit far more greenhouse gases than the United States, Europe, Australia and Africa combined.

Rich UK families are already leaving for lower-tax shores. In the process, the Brits, Germans, and other Europeans have set the planet to mining metals and minerals for turbines, panels, batteries and thousands of miles of new transmission lines that blanket the land and slaughter birds and bats.

This, they assure us, is clean, green, renewable and sustainable.

Climate-obsessed California and New York are on the same path: the highest continental U.S. electricity prices, lost jobs, and the same ecological wreckage at home and abroad.

Newly reinstated DSA member AOC has now reintroduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Delia Ramirez. The “climate crisis,” said Ocasio-Cortez, has brought “record-breaking heat waves to extreme flooding.”

“Natural disasters are getting far worse,” and “hurricanes are intensifying,” Sanders claimed. “Safe, sustainable, resilient, affordable housing is a HUMAN RIGHT,” Ramirez insists — especially amid our “urgent climate crisis.” Colorado DSA candidate Melot Kiros calls the GND “a floor, not a ceiling” and a zero-emissions grid “feasible and essential.”

The Housing Act would mandate all-electric apartments — supposedly resilient to climate threats, but chained to policies that drive power prices ever upward.

Back on the actual planet, we face no climate crisis. No Category 3-5 hurricanes hit the United States from October 2005 to August 2017. Models and press releases are not evidence. And the GND is only the opening bid.

The same DSA platform also wants to fight mass incarceration and police brutality, “Free Palestine,” end the U.S. war machine, demilitarize the border so workers can “migrate as they wish,” and extend full voting rights to noncitizens.

Ultimately, the DSA treats almost every problem as a symptom of capitalism’s alleged drive for resource extraction, excess profits and endless growth. The more “educated” people become at Indoctrination U, the more they share those views.

A change-the-entire-economy thing? They want to change everything about the America we love. We’ve long said today’s Greens are watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. This platform proves it.

That these factions, ideologies and policies already control too much of our educational system, media, boardrooms, and state and local governments is bad enough.

On September 1, after Democratic primary voters embraced multiple Democratic Socialist candidates, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution denouncing socialism “in all its forms.” All Republicans and eight Democrats supported the resolution; 192 Democrats voted against denouncing socialism, and two voted “present.”

Give the Democrats and Democratic Socialists control of Congress and the Supreme Court, and affordability, justice, equality and opportunity become a distant memory — or a pipe dream — for the middle- and working-class Americans they claim to champion.

Reprinted with permission from DC Journal.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.