I could care less, my friends, what your politics are. I think three things in life in matter — disco, chocolate, and the last one’s a secret — and near the bottom of the lost of what matters in life should rank politics. I’ll come back to that — here’s why I mention it.

Here’s the narrative in America surrounding a Green New Deal — it’s some kind of outlandish, radical political position, to be “debated” and bickered over and investigated like some kind of great mystery. Here’s the truth. It’s the precise opposite: something as necessary and urgent as breathing, just the barest beginning, the first step, not the last, a relatively small one, not a huge one. If we can’t get even this done —investing enough in ourselves to no longer go on poisoning, abusing, and depleting our own water, air, land, and soil, agreeing on a plan to survive, tame, and conquer the roaring flood, the deep freeze, the scorching drought — what future do we really have? Are we thinking at all? Haven’t we let the bad guys win by turning reality into some kind of suspiciously debatable proposition?

Yet because this narrative — the Green New Deal is communo-fascism! No, the Green New Deal Stalinism all over again!! — is what they hear day after day, from legions of crackpot pundits and quack economists, I see many Americans treating the Green New Deal just that way: as a matter of politics. As a dangerous, unknown idea, a thing to be treated with caution and hesitation, something alien and strange and menacing. They shouldn’t be. It isn’t. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s a matter of fact, of common sense, of reality — the most basic test of whether we can think at all anymore, really.

It shouldn’t be radical politics to want to save the planet, the economy, democracy, and us. It should be what it is: common sense. Hence, for just that reason, the GND should be the most basic — not the most advanced and sophisticated — litmus test every thinking person uses to judge whether their aspiring leaders are a) thoughtful b) reasonable c) living on the same planet as the rest of us, or whether they’re deluded, ignorant, and cosseted in the bubble of billionaires and beltway Pundits, whose feet don’t touch the ground, between the private jet, the limo, and the payoff. Let me explain.

Here are the facts, my friends. Just the facts — they’re not up for debate, they’re not a matter of your opinion or mine, they’re not a subject for “debate” on MSNBC or CNN. They’re simple empirical realities each and every one of us should know by now.

80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 70% can’t raise $1000 in emergency savings, half don’t have anything saved up for retirement.

The middle class has imploded, at precisely the same moment in history that American fascism has risen. Does that sound like a cosmic coincidence — totally unrelated — to you? And another one that just the same happened in…Weimar Germany?

All that, while the rich have grown richer than in the 1930s. Labour’s share of the economy hasn’t grown in decades, it’s shrunk — hence, incomes have been stagnant for half a century — while capital has taken all the gains, and then some.

Meanwhile, American economists and intellectuals and pundits repeat over and over, like broken robots — “we’ve got to save capitalism!” LOL — capital’s taken more than 100% of economic gains over the last few decades, capitalism’s in rude health (that’s how clueless we are as a thinking society.)

Hence, what jobs are being created are what are called, euphemistically, “low-wage service jobs” — which basically means people are becoming something servants to the super-rich. They don’t work at stable jobs with good benefits making actual things of value anymore — they sell the cheapest form of labour capital affords, their bodies, whether by driving Ubers, working at warehouses run by robots, or performing camshows. Americans are basically having to sell themselves in ever more desperate, abusive, and harmful ways, to the algorithm, at this point, just to desperately keep their heads above the ever-rising waterline.

And on the algorithm, the program, of capitalism goes — “maximize profits! maximize profits! bzzt!!” — melting down the planet. To what larger purpose? Not surprisingly, America’s become a caste society, of old poor — former slaves and so on — new poor, the imploded white middle class, and the rich who became something like a new aristocracy, except without the aristos, actually being the best at anything, except preying on everyone else. The only end of this game is plunging backwards right down into the Stone Age.

Shall I go on? School shootings, medical bankruptcy, young people with imploded lives, etcetera? Let me get to the point.

If you don’t believe such a society badly, urgently needs to rewrite its social contract — then you are either not thinking straight, deluded, or you might be a good candidate for writing a New York Times column. There hasn’t been a Western society since Weimar Germany that needs a New Deal as badly as America does. That’s what the rise of fascism should be telling us, incidentally.

Hence, the “New Deal” in “Green New Deal” isn’t a matter of politics. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my political beliefs, my cherished ideologies, or yours. Whatever way we’d like the political world to be, we should all — those of us left who are thinking people at this point, anyways — agree that America badly, urgently, severely needs a New Deal, that America needs a New Deal like Donald Trump needs a soul, that without a New Deal, there is no future whatsoever for a country this badly broken. Whether we’re conservative, liberal, or somewhere in between — we should have absolutely no problem agreeing on this. Where else do the facts above lead? What else do they say? If we don’t agree on the need for a New Deal, we should ask ourselves if we’ve become the very fringe extremists we angrily denounce, if we’re thinking at all, if we’re lost in hubris and delusion.

Now let’s come to the “Green” part. Is that all this “New Deal” should be? Let’s think about it.

Every “New Deal” is a plan to build a new set of social institutions, which provide much needed jobs, employment, income, and stability. In the modern context, these “New Deals” arise in the wake of capitalism’s failures, it’s crises of concentration — the rich pile up too much, by abusing their wealth, power, and position, the average person isn’t left with enough, society runs of short of money, resources, jobs, opportunities. Wham! It’s either fascism — or reinvention. That was the case — or lack of it — in Weimar Germany, it was the case during the Great Depression, it was what Europe did right for fifty years after the war — and it’s the challenge for America today. “Capitalism implodes into fascism” is an idea everyone should know by now — it’s “New Deals” that prevent it. They can be as minor-league as what America did in the 1930s — or as ambitious as Europe’s fifty years of expanding, growing social democracy, which you can think of as a Long New Deal, a New Deal which never ended.

What, though, should the purpose, the ambition, the shape of this new agenda, this “New Deal”, for a society be? Well, different junctures in history have different challenges. Let’s take Europe’s Long New Deal — it’s half century of explosive growth, thanks to expanding social democracy, after the war. Europe’s challenge was providing livable lives for everyone again — the whole continent had been shredded and devastated by war. Europe took up that challenge — and built everything from public healthcare to education to high speed trains that will get me from Paris to Barcelona in the blink of an eye.

America, too, needs a New Deal that big. A Long New Deal — one that lasts at least a generation. How long have American incomes been stagnating? Half a century. And yet we that we can plaster that over with a fleeting, temporary band-aid — my friends, we can’t. It will take decades of investment to repair and renew a nation as badly broken as America is today. It’s a little like Europe was then — a place that’s dysfunctional in basic ways, a place where kids get shot in school, where there are shortages of basic things, like medicine, decent food, water, and affordable education.

So if anything, the “Green” in the “Green” New Deal understates things. It is a compromise, the kind the left makes without even knowing it’s compromising. The left’s been beaten so badly for so long, it doesn’t know or remember what thinking big, well, or clearly, about real problems, is anymore, really.

If we think about it, the “Green” in a “New Deal” is vitally important — but it’s hardly the end or beginning — in fact, a New Deal for America should go way beyond it. It should provide healthcare, education, retirement, income, savings, and so forth — all the things Americans lack, have never had, and yet can’t do without, at least if they want to continue living in a democracy, instead of go on imploding into a fascist tyranny.

America needs a Long New Deal like Europe had, to become a social democracy, which is the next phase socioeconomics reach after capitalism. Without a Long New Deal — the bitter truth is, it probably won’t get there.

And yet there’s that little matter of the planet melting down, and taking most of us with it — starting (let me check my watch)…now. In that respect, it’s eminently sensible that the beginnings of the Long New Deal America needs should be “Green.” But see the point: that doesn’t mean that a New Deal should only be Green, or that it should stop at being Green. It means the very opposite, in fact — the “Green” in a “New Deal” is just the starting point, the most urgent part, the first step — not the last one or the only one.

So the Green New Deal is the bare minimum that all sensible and thinking people should agree that we need — if we want to go on prospering, that is. There is nothing “political” about it whatsoever — unless you think that collapsing into fascism, like we’re doing now, is a legitimate and desirable alternative. In fact, it’s “conservatives” who should want to save the planet most — conservation, hello?

All that’s exactly why you should use the Green New Deal as a litmus test for aspiring leaders, for pundits, for thinkers, for intellectuals. You should treat it as a kind of minimum, not a maximum, the starting point of acceptability, reason, thoughtfulness, consideration, understanding, the lowest possible bar that you want a leader or idea to jump over. If someone can’t even get that far, you should rightly think of them as either incompetent, deluded, foolish, or living in la-la-land. And whenever someone calls the idea of a Green New Deal “fascist”, you should roll your eyes, and point at…the White House.

The thought you should keep with you, if you really understand things these days, is that America needs a Long New Deal — not just a little or short one — and therefore, a Green New Deal is just the barest, hastiest, crudest beginning towards that, if a good and awesome and necessary one.

No, that doesn’t mean that ever investing in each other — or in the planet, in the rivers, trees, and grass we walk on — is Stalinist socialism, aka the government nationalizing everything McDonald’s to your TV . Can we get a grip, please? If that were the case, Sweden and Canada would be prison camps, not generally happy and decent places. Instead, it’s American that’s looking a little prison-campy these days, isn’t it? Social democracy isn’t Stalinism, in the same way that your local microbrewery isn’t exactly predatory mega-capitalism. A Green New Deal isn’t “socialism”, it’s not “communism”, and it’s certainly not “fascism” — the New Deal of the 1930s hardly led America to become the Soviet Union, LOL — so anyone telling you it is is basically overwhelmed by histrionic delusional paranoia, which is to say, they’re clueless about the basics of modern history, economics, politics, and progress, and what they’ve really proven is they’re not worth taking seriously — just worthy of being ignored or laughed at, mostly.

The Green New Deall — or the Long New Deal — isn’t about politics in exactly this way. It’s one of the greatest delusions in human history to think that, when the icecaps are melting, investing in the planet is the truly dangerous thing, because apparently if we’re ever nice or decent or humane to each other or the world around us, Stalin’s ghost will possess us, and we’ll (wait for it) suddenly end!! up!! in!! gulags!! When that bizarre upside down fantasy is more alarming to you than the looming reality of flooded cities, burning towns, and devastated societies…you are not thinking at all anymore, my friends. You have become a paranoid, histrionic, narcissistic ideologue, which is exactly what most American pundits are these days.

The Green New Deal isn’t home base, my friends. It’s barely even first base. It’s just one first step in a Long New Deal. It’s not the maximalist position it’s made out to be by pundits, economists, and other assorted fools — some kind of outlandish extremist (socialistical!! Oh no, it’s Stalin!!) fantasy, which is just a delusional relic of Cold War thinking. It’s the precise opposite, in fact: the lowest possible bar for the future we should all want — because it’s the only one in which we prosper, thrive, and endure at all. Instead of our democracies, societies, and civilization melting down with our planet, while the billionaires laugh as they go on turning our bright, free, joyous, and wise kids into their cleaners, chauffeurs, concubines, and callgirls.

Umair

February 2019