[NationalReview] ’This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation," Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) says about her so-called Green New Deal. The marketing material published in support of the concept ‐ and that’s all the Green New Deal is: an advertising campaign without a product ‐ offers what passes for soaring rhetoric anno Domini 2019, calling for a "new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II."This is Sandy’s War.
In my forthcoming book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, I consider an observation from Erich Fromm, the Marxist-Freudian social critic whose Escape from Freedom was required reading only a generation ago. (It remains worth reading.) Fromm believed that the disruption of the medieval social order by the early stirrings of what we would come to call "capitalism" left Europeans of all classes uncertain and anxious about their status: social, political, economic, and religious. He connected this to the rise of Protestantism and also to the genesis of something much more relevant to our own disruption-convulsed culture of social-media obsession: