By George Will
Thursday, February 14, 2019
In 1994, the Clinton administration decreed a bright shining
future for education. Its Goals 2000 legislation proclaimed that by that year
America’s high-school-graduation rate would be 90 percent and American students
would lead the world in math and science achievements. Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan (D., N.Y.) was unimpressed: “That will not happen.” It didn’t, to the
surprise of no one with an inkling of reality’s viscosity.
Bill Clinton’s (then Congress’s) goals, which Moynihan
compared to the Soviet Union’s penchant for delusional grain quotas, illustrated
what the senator called the “leakage of reality from American life.” Speaking
of which:
Democrats, including many presidential candidates, have
endorsed something that makes Goals 2000 look like the soul of sobriety. The
Green New Deal’s FAQ sheet says:
In ten years America will have only non-carbon renewable
energy. (Exxon Mobil plans to produce 25 percent more oil and gas in 2025 than
in 2017.) By then, “every building in America” will be environmentally
retrofitted, “farting cows” (methane gas; say goodbye to hamburgers) will be on
the way out, fast electric trains will make airplanes unnecessary, “every
combustion-engine vehicle” will be gone (but relax: charging stations will be
“everywhere”).
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, averse to government by arrested-development
teenagers, dismissed the Green New Deal (GND) as a “suggestion.” Its
enthusiasts, buffeted by gales of derision, responded with gusts of dissembling
as implausible as the GND: Their fact sheet was a mere draft, or a dirty trick
(“doctored”), or something.
Do they know how the actual New Deal fared? It was
devoted to curing unemployment, but the unemployment rate never fell below 14
percent until 1941, eight years into the New Deal, as America prepared for war.
The 1937–38 “depression within the Depression” was the 20th century’s
third-worst recession.
Every endorser of the GND thereby endorses its claim to
life-and-death urgency, yet — cognitive dissonance alert — every endorser knows
that none of it will happen. Its authors say, “There is no time to waste.”
Strange. The last Democratic administration, which departed just 25 months ago,
proposed approximately none of what the GND says we cannot survive without.
The GND has no practical importance but much
significance. First, it underscores the rise of the politics of gestures that
are as flamboyant as they are empty: Donald Trump has his wall, the left has
its GND. Second, it reprises the progressive desire to militarize everything
but the military, to conscript everyone into vast collective undertakings that
supposedly justify vast excisions from personal liberty and the setting side of
pesky constitutional impediments. See Franklin Roosevelt’s call in his first
inaugural address for power “as great as the power that would be given to me if
we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
Third, the GND reveals progressives’ embrace of Trump’s
political style, a stew of frivolity and mendacity. Remember his campaign boast
that he would erase the national debt — not just the budget deficit, the
then–$19 trillion debt — in eight years, meaning by more than $2 trillion a
year? This was ludicrous, but not more so than the GND, which is not the only
example of the Trumpification of the left. The
Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman notes that last year Elizabeth Warren
said this on NBC:
“My mother and daddy were born and raised in Oklahoma. My
daddy first saw my mother when they were both teenagers. He fell in love with
this tall, quiet girl who played the piano. Head over heels. But his family was
bitterly opposed to their relationship because she was part Native American.
They eventually eloped.”
“Bitterly”? Because of the mother’s Native American
“part”? Which could not have been much more than Warren’s still-hypothetical
miniscule part? As Freeman writes: “If Native American ancestry was so distant
on her mother’s side that the senator has never been able to name any native
relatives — and even now her own DNA expert cannot rule out the possibility that she has no such relatives
at all — how would her father’s family have known enough to object?”
What a tangled web we weave . . .
It is now reasonable to conclude that Warren has made
“birther” claims for self-serving reasons that remain opaque, claims that are
no more factual or unimportant than the birther fabrications Trump concocted
for use against Barack Obama. What explains Trump and his progressive
emulators? No doubt many things, but begin with the leakage of reality from
American life.
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