The Green New Deal: The top-down initiative that is going to save us from ourselves!
Based off of the New Deal, everyone’s new favorite part of 20th century United States. (Though no one ever talks about the square deal anymore, poor Theodore Roosevelt and his racist statue in front of the Natural History Museum. You naughty rough rider you).
Yes, that is what we need. Because according to history, life was bad, but then it got markedly worse with industrial capitalism in the late 19th century. And it was the New Deal: Government, Keynesian Economics, and investments into social services that steered capitalism onto it’s famously somewhat equitable run post WWII. (Though let’s not mention the Housing Act, a centerpiece to the New Deal and the subsequent redlining of every city in America. Equitable for who?)
And since then we’ve had neoliberalism, which has put us back in the ‘markedly worse,’ section, and we need to shift back to Keynesian economics, to ‘marxism,’ as some would call it, to shore up capitalism yet again and have it more evenly distribute things.
Except now, we have climate change. So no problem, we’ll just invest in renewable energy that will create “jobs,” and we’ll expand the power of our government, even though we also don’t trust our government at all, and have problems with every single leader who rises up to the task.
I guess what I’m saying is, this “Green New Deal,” can’t just be a ‘Greened’, ‘New Deal,’ it truly has to be a paradigm shift in the way we think about growth and the economy in general. As much as everyone loves it, the New Deal created urban sprawl, single family home ownership and segregated redlined cities. The whole socio-ecological mess we are in today is a result of the trajectory of growth that the New Deal put us on.
We need a whole new way of imagining things. The New Deal at the time, was a whole new way of looking at things. Government? Mortgages? Social Security? Until the New Deal, the government in the US was the post office and the armies who chased the Indians off their lands. That was pretty much it. We need a way of looking at things that is not based on Keynesian or classical economics, we need to look at things from a ecological economics perspectives. Cause that is really what this is about, is how to weave our economy in to our larger ecology. It’s not how to weave ecology into our larger economy.
As Bina and La Camera write, “Their framing of problems and solutions remains narrowly confined to the realm of market economies: capital accumulation, innovation, technology and growth remain unquestioned… Ultimately, it is the very notion of goals (ends) that informs the definition of problems and solutions.” (Bina, La Camera, 2314)
The GND proposal put forward by AOC has potential to be many things. It can be either steered towards the economy or our collective ecology. Neither of which would be bad, in fact either would be markedly better than what we have now. But until we reorient ourselves in terms of what we want our societies to do, give us all an “equal” chance at pursuing happiness, or come together and decide on what happiness would mean for each other, we will still be on the same path towards socio-ecological collapse.
Great critique of the GND based on the original New Deal and Bina and La Camera’s work in Ecological Economics. I agree with your conclusion that the GND can go either way. It is the most radical legislation we have and yet the rhetoric is a lot about jobs — and yet it hasn’t been able to pass…
One of the most insightful and difficult texts on economics I have explored is John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory…. The text consists of Keynes’ ideas on government intervention, demand and uncertainty, with the latter being his most powerful idea. Keynes believed that uncertainty is the driver of consumption as, under uncertain conditions (like a recession), people wouldn’t be spending as much, and money wouldn’t circulate in the economy. This is a powerful point and in the context of Climate Change, can be used to help increase spending, especially as we face a precarious future ahead.
Though I am not advocating for Keynesian economics to be used to implement a Greener Economy (investment during a recession, as you write, keeps the system afloat), the foundation on which his ideas are built are inspiring in the sense that they center a universal human element (uncertainty of future).
Nonetheless, I appreciate your point on rhetoric in legislation (“jobs”) and think that, just as language can be used to help pass GND, we can pull apart some ideas from past economists to help mitigate fear from deniers or those unwilling to pass legislation (in a sense, speak the other side’s language).