When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts introduced their Green New Deal proposal in February, they chose language loaded with nostalgia for one of the country’s most transformative historical moments, urging the country to undertake “a new national, social, industrial and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era .”

They are not the first to hark back to the struggles of that era. Former Vice President Al Gore, Senator Lamar Alexander and the environmentalist Lester Brown have all been calling for national “mobilization” to fight climate change for more than a decade. In 2011, environmental groups wrote a letter to President Barack Obama and China’s president, Hu Jintao, demanding “wartime-like mobilization by the governments of the United States and China to cut carbon emissions.” In 2014, the climate psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon and the journalist Ezra Silk founded the group Climate Mobilization, dedicated to an “all-out effort to deploy the strongest and most aggressive solutions for reversing climate breakdown.”

Two years later, Bill McKibben wrote an article arguing that climate change was actually World War III, and that the only way to keep from losing this war would be “to mobilize on the same scale as we did for the last world war.”

Yet much of this rhetoric involves little or no understanding of what national mobilization actually meant for Americans living through World War II. As a result, the sacrifices and struggles of the 1940s have begun to seem like a romantic story of collective heroism, when they were in fact a time of rage, fear, grief and social disorder. Countless Americans experienced firsthand the terror and excitement of mortal violence, and nearly everyone saw himself caught up in an existential struggle for the future of the planet.