Maybe the right-leaning types correctly realize that the left-leaning types can't take "yes" for an answer, and that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, but a means for rehabilitating socialism:
https://peoplesclimate.org/platform/.
> Every new job created to address the climate crisis must be unionized or have the right to unionize without interference and pay a family-sustaining wage.
> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti then asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Because this is a real, and serious risk. The defeat of socialism as a competitor to market capitalism in the late 1980s has seen the greatest improvement in the plight of the world's most vulnerable people in the history of the world. Places like Bangladesh, my home country, have enjoyed 5-7% GDP growth annually for three decades. (Polls show Bangladesh second only to Vietnam in support for the free market.)
If it was just a matter of carbon taxes, or investing the IPCC-recommended 2.5% of GDP on mitigation efforts, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. But if it's carbon taxes as a first step toward radical transformation of the economy--toward ideas that have been tried and failed--then no thank you.
I'm a center-left social democrat and believe in mitigating climate change for its own sake. If anthropogenic climate change weren't occurring, there would be no need for climate-oriented conservation. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people with political leanings similar to mine would agree with that statement. For most proponents, the purpose of climate mitigation measures is in fact to mitigate climate change. Assuming otherwise is plainly not to ascribe good faith to one's opponents.
It’s not a matter of ascribing good faith to any particular person’s arguments, but considering the trajectory of a movement as a whole. If you asked someone who supported the ACLU’s challenges Establishment Clause challenges in the 1950s whether the wanted to see a systematic erasure of religion from every aspect of public life, they wouldn’t necessarily have agreed with that outcome. But that was the result.
This is not an abstract concern about slippery slopes. It’s the fact that now only a minority of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, and a majority view socialism positively. It’s the actual stated principles of climate justice leaders who have launched a broadside attack on capitalism, trying to associate it with everything from climate change to racism to colonialism. It’s based on things like the Green New Deal concededly using climate change as a pretext for massive economic restructuring.
Regardless of your views, you can’t help whose driving the bus you’re on.
Do you honestly think that if you put this to a poll:
"In your view, is the purpose of addressing climate change: (a) to address climate change as an end in itself, or (b) a means for advancing socialism?"
that most Democrats in the US would choose option (b)?
(a) is capitalism a tool that has lifted tens of millions of people in the developing world out of poverty, or a tool for perpetuating racism, and colonialism, and environmental degradation?
(b) do you know that big-S socialists, including one of the architects of the Green New Deal, have latched onto climate justice as a tool for advancing socialism and attacking the liberal capitalist consensus: https://jacobinmag.com/series/green-new-deal;https://newconsensus.com ?
(c) in light of (a), what political compromises would you make with the people in (b) to address climate change?
You can be on the right and have an extremely dim view of unfettered, and out of control global capitalism, as we currently have. 40 years of an experiment where the only answer to everything is less government, fewer regulations, lower taxes and damn the economics. That's from both sides. Clinton as bad as Bush. Blair as bad as Thatcher.
You're kind of right about who's driving that bus - we've really been given no choice, have we? Both sides have offered a destination that takes only right turns.
Forcibly dragging capitalism back to a more inclusive middle ground, nearer where Eisenhower was politically, is hardly revolutionary socialism. Nor is wanting stronger constraints and taxes with fewer loopholes to the corporate machine. Enough to smooth the roughest edges, and limit the worst abuses. That is hardly exclusive to the left, outside the political and media bubble.
Except the last 40 years have seen the greatest expansion of prosperity in the history of the world. Countries that flirted with socialism, like India, started growing twice as fast when they made market reforms. Europe, which was moribund under more socialist and regulated times, has become economically vibrant under Thatcher and her ideological offspring.
Moving back to the Eisenhower era would in fact hurt people. That was an economy where the government decided everything from what price an airline could charge for a flight to what routes a trucking company could run. It’s a roll back to an economic model that has been rejected throughout the developed world. There is a reason that everyone from Canadians to Australians to Germans to Swedes have kept electing market oriented liberals who kept pushing down government spending, corporate taxes, and regulation. Heck, Macron, the “socialist” candidate, is still pro-markets and pro-deregulation. (And socialist France has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world.)
> Except the last 40 years have seen the greatest expansion of prosperity in the history of the world.
Not in the developed one, quite the opposite. And the developing countries, rising living condition is a mere consequence of catching up with technological progress ( for instance, the end of famines in India has nothing to do with free market, and is in fact the result of a state-driven agricultural reform [1]).
During the last 30 years, prosperity in Cuba and North Korea increased as well…
Also, calling France a socialist country, is utterly ridiculous.
For the 1%. For most typical workers, and the middle and lower tiers particularly it's seen stagnation and decline. The expansion has been in the developing economies. Which for a worker in USA or Europe, who has seen all the opportunity go to an ever dwindling proportion of society, makes for an empty statistic
The French Socialist Party is most definitely not in this day and age socialist, and hasn't been for decades, just as Blair's Labour wan't socialist. They sit firmly in the centre, and are a centre left party nearer the British LibDems than Labour. In a US context, well there's not really a match, as it's too bipartisan. Macron, the former financial regulator and Rothchild banker, is worlds away from and would be unrecognisable to Mitterand. Yet Mitterand was of the same party. So no, France is not socialist.
For European countries, which had dabbled with socialism but were liberalizing their economies in the last few decades, growth was strong at the median, not just the top 1%: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAaB94YXsAQSCXI.jpg
That is why France is longer “socialist.” People keep voting for people like Macron, and have stopped voting for people like Mitterrand, because capitalism works phenomenally well.
As to the U.S., stagnating wages are not true either. There are at least two main problems with the simplistic comparisons:
1) They don't measure the same people. The common choice of start date for the "stagnation" narrative is in the 1970s. Since then, the percentage of people that are immigrants has nearly tripled. The percentage of older people skyrocketed, the percentage of married households have fallen, etc.
> This means that comparing the income gains of the bottom three quintiles in 1979 and 2007 has little to do with the path of real families. Instead it is a commentary on the overall structure of the economy in that it compares low income people in 1979 to low income people in 2007 even though they aren’t the same people. … For example, the median income of those 20-31 in 1979 and married was $51,800 (2007 dollars), while 28 years later in 2007, the median of those 48 to 59 and married was $87,200.
^^^ This website has a ton of other great data slicing and dicing the various income trends. For example:
> Page 1: “The changing composition of households in the U.S. is the effect explaining the reported increase in Gini coefficient for households since 1967. When corrected for actual decrease in the average household size the relevant Gini coefficient returns to that of personal incomes.”
> From 1967 to 2011, the Gini index for persons in the U.S. has not varied by more than 2%.
> Average real wages and benefits have risen by nearly 40 percent since 1973, after adjusting for inflation. Sensational claims that 80-90 percent of Americans have experienced low and stagnant real incomes since 1973 are also shown to be incorrect . . . real consumption per person increased 74 percent from 1980 to 2004—a rate of improvement that far exceeded the trend from 1950 to 1979.
> Macron, and have stopped voting for people like Mitterrand, because capitalism works phenomenally well.
You can never boil it down, as politicians of every hue always try to after they won, to simply "because my way", "because capitalism", "because socialism" etc. Or as justification of the unpopular fringe policy that's a major swing issue to exactly none of the electorate.
It's as much "because the other guy is an arse", or simply who got the most enaging media smile and presence, or best slogan. Sometimes they are simply the least-worst of the two terrible, terrible choices presented in the election.
Simplistically it's a much shallower process than the actual issues. Quite often it is mostly events that swing it. 9/11, and The Falklands, made far, far more difference to election results than economic policies.
> Instead it is a commentary on the overall structure of the economy in that it compares low income people in 1979 to low income people in 2007 even though they aren’t the same people ... those 20-31 in 1979 and married ... while 28 years later in 2007, the median of those 48 to 59 and married was
Hoo boy, that's a really disingenuous way of presenting it.
In 1979, the office junior or trainee something, freshly out of college, goes on a journey through simply "something", and senior something, to head of team, department or one of many Vice Presidents in 2007. Twenties are most people's lowest earning years, and late forties or fifties their highest.
There would be something very broken indeed if most did not increase earning power in some sort of reasonable correlation to increasing seniority across their career. It's why we do indeed normally compare the progression of each quintile, or each job role across the years rather than of each person or individual family as they progress through the tiers.
Maybe the right-leaning types correctly realize that the left-leaning types can't take "yes" for an answer, and that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, but a means for rehabilitating socialism: https://peoplesclimate.org/platform/.
> Every new job created to address the climate crisis must be unionized or have the right to unionize without interference and pay a family-sustaining wage.
If they agree to carbon taxes, is that it? Or does the battlefront just move to things like this: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/aocs-top-aide-admits-green-...
> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti then asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Because this is a real, and serious risk. The defeat of socialism as a competitor to market capitalism in the late 1980s has seen the greatest improvement in the plight of the world's most vulnerable people in the history of the world. Places like Bangladesh, my home country, have enjoyed 5-7% GDP growth annually for three decades. (Polls show Bangladesh second only to Vietnam in support for the free market.)
If it was just a matter of carbon taxes, or investing the IPCC-recommended 2.5% of GDP on mitigation efforts, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. But if it's carbon taxes as a first step toward radical transformation of the economy--toward ideas that have been tried and failed--then no thank you.