Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I believe that this photo which led in the NY Times at the very end of 2019 and which I have chosen for my “lead” will be an iconic one for our times... or the “last days” as we have come to fear them.
A more optimistic reading might be that it will be the signature for the end of “the bad old days” of climate denial and our “gig and dig” capitalism, to borrow Naomi Klein’s most recent penetrating characterization.
The only thing more shocking than the scenes from Australia was, as economist Paul Krugman wrote in the subtitle for his article, that “the political reaction is scarier than the fires.” His article’s title was that “Australia Shows us the Road to Hell.” The story ran Thursday, January 9th, and was of course competing with the drama of yet another potential war in the Middle East, so many may have missed it, and its significance, in that whole fraught period. Here’s the link: www.nytimes.com/…
Now Krugman is an important figure, representing the centrist and technocratic tendency in the Democratic Party, if not the West in general. Therefore, when he signals, as he does here at the end of his article, that the only way out of the terrible dilemmas posed by climate chaos setting in far more quickly than even the alarm sounding scientists have projected, and the dramatic indication that the Neoliberal Right and Center are willing to go down with the economic status quo, Ahab like, and will not change course on fossil fuel dependency even as their surroundings go up in flames — then we all should sit up and take notice.
How did Krugman reason his way to this significant shift, from his usual political caution? Here are, in my view, the key blocks of logic from this ever logical economist who has been so committed to mathematical economic modelling that he missed the key subtext of the globalization wave that had so infatuated him in previous decades: that it was turning the political democracies of Western society upside down with pain, depression, “deaths of despair,” and of course, “backlash,” especially by the old working classes. Turning them ugly, looking for scapegoats the political Right is only too happy to supply. So ugly, as in the case of Australia, that the conservative establishments (and Labor too in Australia) say “let it burn” — and then reach for the old individualist/conservative tropes, that the fires were caused by arsonists and by tree huggers failing to prune the dry under-story. Now where have we heard that before?
Ok. So here are Krugman’s building blocks of logic:
“...this is a horror story told by walls of fire and terrified refugees huddled on beaches.”
“The Australian experience suggests that climate denial will persist come hell or high water.”
“...scientific persuasion is running into sharply diminishing returns.”
“In particular, conservatives with high scientific literacy and numeracy are especially likely to be climate deniers.” (!!)
From this structure of alarming trends and findings, we then get Krugman’s two closing paragraphs:
“What might an effective political strategy look like? I’ve been rereading a 2014 speech by the eminent political scientist Robert Keohane, who suggested that one way to get past the political impasse on climate might be via “an emphasis on huge infrastructural projects that created jobs” — in other words, a Green New Deal. Such a strategy could give birth to a “large climate-industrial complex,” which would actually be a good thing in terms of political sustainability.
Can such a strategy succeed? I don’t know. But it looks like our only chance given the political reality in Australia, America, and elsewhere — namely, that powerful forces on the right are determined to keep us barreling down the road to hell.”
When I first read this, hurriedly on the Friday morning after it appeared, I dashed off an Email to economic and environmental colleagues wondering if it really happened, if there had been a conversion, because Krugman has hardly been a champion of the Green New Deal, giving a couple of back-of-the-hand references but clearly steering away from recognition of its chief architects and political proponents, to say the least. And choosing to plug the plans and details of the less ambitious Green New Deal left candidate over Senator Sanders, and pushing Our Revolution, Justice Democrats and the Sunrise movement completely out of the picture.
And never getting in the trenches with his math skills, to directly grapple with Sanders big numbers from his 35 page Green New Deal paper, willing to spend $16.3 trillion over ten years, so $1.63 trillion per year in a federal budget which was $4.75 trillion for Fiscal Year 2020. If and when enacted, that would make the Green New Deal expenditures the greatest share of federal spending committed to a new policy direction since the World War II “all out” Mobilization spending of 1942-1945. (Ironically, I was rushing this past Friday to finish my comments on Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s Green House Gas Reduction Plan for 2019, scheduled for a hearing that very Friday night. That tells you, a Friday night public hearing does, about the lack of seriousness of Hogan and his plans, and out of the sixty or so attenders, he had one person say they liked what he was doing. And here’s my testimony on his administration’s plan: www.dailykos.com/...)
Now I don’t like to fire off announcements of possible “Eureka” and “Road to Damascus” conversion moments without a chance to do some further digging and reflecting, which I have now done. I think this is an important moment for Krugman, and I think his logic here is about the same as mine, and at least ought to be more widely shared, if many have not gotten there already, because what else can we conclude from the grim, awful message after the conflagrations (and floods) in America and Australia, and the reaction of the Right? They will not budge an inch.
But my “pause” in writing gave me a chance to read Krugman’s cited source, Robert Keohane, a Princeton University political scientist, and to see his reasoning on getting to his “large climate-industrial complex” answer, here in a speech he gave as his James Madison award lecture: depts.washington.edu/…
Well, this speech is pretty wonky, actually very wonky if you haven’t kept up with the trends of “political science” these days, where the emphasis is on imitating the pretensions of economics, not the old political economy days, but the reaching for mathematics, models and the imprimatur of “science.” Well, I’d better give science its due, but no more than that, because the place where the conservative and Libertarian Right is today, and not just in the US, as we have seen from “down under,” is more an irrational place than a science driven place, and even the best of the economic and poly sci “modelers” will defend free market capitalism with a near religious fanaticism. Which is one of the things Karl Polanyi saw so clearly in his 1944 book, the answer to Von Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” his “The Great Transformation.” It’s one of the great weaknesses of the Center, which joined the Right via the economic policies of Bill Clinton on several major parameters, not to be able to see the market fundamentalism of their brand of Neoliberalism as a form of secular religious belief...no matter the disastrous patterns that it has delivered for the West and Nature over the past 40 years. TINA...until we have no choice but to invent an alternative which saves us.
And so I can see why Krugman liked this text, this 2014 speech so much. No mention of the Green New Deal at that date, even though versions of it had been broached by Neoliberals like columnist Thomas Friedman, and much more left leaning economists in Great Britain just as the financial crisis was breaking. (And in good part, in response to it.).
Keohane, an new name for me, comes to his conclusions on the rational self-interest, interest group theories of politics — where the question is not “what sacrifice can I make to save our commons, Nature,” and what movement can bring us a more humane economy, but what’s in it for me, financially, this saving of Nature project? Needless to say, this is one reason why I never majored in “political science,” which, as some leftists have snidely put it, was developed in earnest to answer the radical left sociology of the 19th century, the rise of class based labor policies, and everything that former President Obama says he fears in “left wing populism” - as well as Trumpism.
Krugman, by picking this source for his shift, put the fulcrum for his change, if he is serious, on a author and date (2014) which enabled him to plug the Green New Deal while entirely avoiding the authors of the actual Green New Deal Resolution, announced February 7, 2019, the think tanks backing it, and of course, the candidate who is most likely to promote and achieve it. And avoiding all the national dialogue, good and bad, about it since.
Just to see if I was being too hard on Professor Keohane, I did some searches of his text, about 18 pages worth in total when converted to single page format. There is no mention of class, except “Middle Class” in the bibliography, (from Senator Chris Van Holen’s (D, MD) “cap and dividend”speech), none of “working class,” and unions only once, in the context of the old “pluralist” interest group model from Robert Dahl, “organized interests like corporations, unions and pensioners.” Mass movements, popular mobilizations, New Deal, CCC...nope, nary a mention. Interesting, don’t you think, for someone calling for a massive infrastructure program? No attention paid to the actual historical time and place which was the greatest manifestation of building public goods, and to save capitalism from itself — in our history. Now that’s a “model” that many economists and political scientists want to avoid.
To help Kossacks keep in front of them what I feel is the best writing about the Green New Deal, and our need for it, and clear-eyed assessments of the hurdles it must face, I have two recommendations, to get you over and beyond Professor Keohane’s justifications.
They can both be found in the just arrived Winter issue of Dissent magazine. The first is by Alyssa Battistoni and Jedediah Britton-Purdy, and is titled “ After Carbon Democracy.” It cautions, in a deeper and better way than Keohane, that it will be very hard to sell a Green New Deal if it is all sacrifice, all “green austerity.” I think they are right and that Keohane and Krugman got that right as well. The other article, which is the best full bodied and multi-dimensional case I’ve read for the Green New Deal and what’s in the Resolution, comes from none other than Naomi Klein, and it’s called “Care and Repair: Left Politics in the Age of Climate Change.” Care and Repair is the two word antidote to Neoliberal capitalism’s “gig and dig” economy.
There is a tension between the two essays in just one area: Klein leans toward the ecological view that we can’t have a growth economy any more, on anything like the lines of what has gone before, everything the ecological left has meant by too much consumption and waste. By hyper consumerism. Does it veer towards “green austerity?” I think it does, and we may get to that view, but it isn’t going to win us the democratic power we need in 2020 to get Trump out and begin what should have begun outside Nancy Pelosi’s office in January of 2019: The Select Standing Committee on the Green New Deal to begin the planning. And besides, if we are forced, by experiment and hard experience to say that we cannot have economic growth in the old ways, the annual 2-3 percent (or less over the past 40 years) then there is the possibility of creating a better, richer life in many more dimensions than mere material wealth. “Deaths of Despair” start with downward economic mobility, but the disappearance of meaning and purpose follow directly in its wake, out as causal factors as well.
But I don’t think we need to concede “green austerity” at this point...We are going to have jobs for all and have to remake the entire dig, refine, manufacture, transport and dispose of cycle of today’s capitalism - in Nature friendly ways...that’s a given, a huge task, and I don’t see how, given the redistribution proposals on the table, why it means a worse material life for 60-80% of us. Those in the top 20% may have to see cruel cuts in their income, and wealth, from 20 billion to 5 or ten billion, or from 500,000 per year to 300,000, but should I be shedding tears for them when I struggle to meet my 20% share of Medicare for cataract surgery, and my teeth are beginning to look like those from Southern sharecropper pictures from the 1920’s? I don’t think so. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Even Paul Krugman, if the the “conversion” is more than a mere column’s mention’s worth.
Best to you all in the coming struggles…
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD