Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.) and Senator Ed Markey (D, Mass.) hold a news conference for their proposed “Green New Deal” at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., February 7, 2019. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

One of the most eyeroll/retch-inducing aspects of the recent conversation about the so-called Green New Deal — an asinine exercise in cheap political marketing that not one mentally normal adult walking this Earth takes seriously — is the soundtrack, all those tuneless odes to “idealism” and witless hymns to “starting a conversation.” This set me to thinking about nuclear weapons, for reasons that don’t bear dwelling on here.

Which brings me to SDI.

Anybody remember the chorus of mockery that greeted Ronald Reagan’s proposal to develop a missile-defense capacity? Undoable, too expensive, impractical, disconnected from political and economic realities, etc. No paeans to idealism then. You don’t remember the idealism, do you? President Reagan proposed not only developing a missile-defense system but also sharing the technology with other countries — including hostile ones, with the hope of lowering the strategic value of nuclear missiles as a prelude to eliminating them entirely, a chance for the world to “escape the prison of mutual terror.”

As Reagan wrote:

Some of my advisors, including a number at the Pentagon, did not share this dream. They couldn’t conceive of it. They said that a nuclear-free world was unattainable and it would be dangerous for us even if it were possible; some even claimed nuclear war was ‘inevitable’ and we had to prepare for this reality. They tossed around macabre jargon about ‘throw weights’ and ‘kill ratios’ as if they were talking about baseball scores.

A difference between SDI and the nonsensical program proposed by Democrats in 2019: SDI works. The program launched by Reagan provided the basis for what is now a “demonstrated capability” in missile defense, and the world is better off for it.

That difference in outcome is the result of a difference in conception: Defending against missiles is a fiendishly difficult but well-defined problem. You don’t have to take over the entire U.S. economy or, say, reorganize the material affairs of the entirety of the human species to get it done. It’s an engineering problem, and Americans are awfully good at those. It took time, effort, research, false starts, dead ends, and many failures to get this far, and it will take more of the same to advance the project farther still. Field Marshal Sandy and her lamentations of cow flatulence are, in comparison, basically unserious.

But the same people who now praise the purported idealism (which is just old-fashioned authoritarianism in drag) of the Green New Deal and its authors for starting an illiterate conversation had nothing of the kind to say about a genuinely audacious proposal to address a problem that was . . . well, I suppose raising the local temperature to 100,000,000 degrees Celsius in a millisecond counts as global warming.

Conclusion: It isn’t about the so-called idealism. It’s about the power grab, and who is doing the grabbing.