15 Rethinking the Green New Deal: From War to Work

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This permission terminates automatically if you breach any of these terms or conditions. © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS THE GREEN NEW DEAL AND THE FUTURE OF WORK edited by craig calhoun and benjamin y. fong Columbia University Press —-1 —0 —+1 New York calh20556_1st_pp.indb 3 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Add cover/jacket credit information -1— 0— +1— calh20556_1st_pp.indb 4 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS chapter 15 Rethinking the Green New Deal From War to Work harrY C. BoYte and trYgVe throntVeit I -1— 0— +1— n After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes, “I can only answer the question, ‘what am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”1 Societies, no less than the individuals who compose them, are both liberated and constrained by the stories they tell of their past, present, and future.2 In recent years it has become popular to frame quests for environmental and social justice as episodes in a saga of political conflict. The congressional proposals for a Green New Deal (GND) unveiled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on February 7, 2019, were no exception. Ocasio-Cortez described the climate crisis as “our World War II.” Battle talk is invigorating.3 It channels the human impulse to define enemies in times of crisis and to put faith in strong leaders.4 It is also unfortunate. The recent partisan and cultural battles incited by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the history of American reform since the Progressive Era, suggest it is an unsustainable rhetorical strategy that reflects and feeds a dangerous tendency to define politics in almost purely conflictual terms. Despite the constructively democratic goals of many GND proposals, the overall framing of the GND as a campaign of highly centralized government action along the lines of a military offensive dramatically constrains and distorts the field of democratic action. It is a story of state and state actors mobilizing the people against threats and enemies, the outcome of which depends little on self-organizing and collaborative citizen initiative across differences. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 310 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 311 We propose that the dual challenges of climate change and democratic renewal require a different story: one of continuing partnership among selfgoverning citizens and between them and their governments rather than a government-centered language of conscription, mobilization, deployment, and delivery from danger. The challenges call for a “we-the-people” narrative of productive citizens creating and recreating a commonwealth. In short, it is a story of work, not war. But work of what kind? In this chapter we address that question in three parts. First, we explicate the pervasive narrative of politics as adversarial and consumerist, focused on what government should or should not do for particular people rather than how it can work through and with diverse communities and the nation as a whole. Second, we describe the theoretical concept of public work and its empirical grounding in American history and contemporary life as an alternative. Public work philosophy challenges the conception of politics as a struggle among individualistic consumers over “who gets what”—what Robert Bellah and his colleagues called the “first language” of politics. It also complicates the “second language” of politics employed by Bellah and other communitarians who tend to celebrate unity over difference. Public work offers a third political language better expressing the dynamic interplay of individual and collective interests and more apt to galvanize co-creative civic impulses and capacities critical to meeting our climatic and democratic challenges.5 Third and finally, we draw upon public work concepts and real-life examples to sketch a plausible workcentered story of the GND and suggest how it might catalyze a broader effort to redefine democracy as the product of a people negotiating difference to create a thriving commons. WAR TALK AND CONSUMER POLITICS The national debut of the GND on February 7, 2019, was met with enthusiasm by climate activists and social critics. The enormity of the challenges posed by climate change and the perceived failure of government to act vigorously against them had led many to conclude that the nation was besieged by a nefarious coordination of forces, necessitating liberation of the state—and all good Americans— from the power of cynical plutocrats.6 Accordingly, the sponsors of the GND calh20556_1st_pp.indb 311 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 312 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society resolution submitted to Congress presented their plan for environmental, economic, and social justice as a war-like mobilization, conflating the GND’s namesake—the economic and social New Deal promised to Americans by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—with World War II and describing both as “Federal Government-led mobilizations.” 7 This call to arms was soon drowned out by other battle cries. On March 18, 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the nation, President Donald J. Trump proclaimed himself a “wartime president.”8 Soon the surgeon general warned that the COVID-19 outbreak was a Pearl Harbor moment, or a new 9/11.9 Democrats, too, rallied around the war metaphor, if not around the president. As Susan E. Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser from 2013 to 2017, wrote on April 8, “Mr. Trump is correct: This is war, the most consequential since World War II.” Rice expressed no confidence in Trump’s fitness to prosecute what she called “the viral version of World War III.” She expressed little doubt, however, that the crisis required aggressive leadership and centralized authority.10 Most certainly, pandemics require drastic action. And, granted, calling something a war does not make it one.11 Still, metaphors do not just describe reality; they help to create it. The consequences of a war-like, us-versus-them metaphor and mentality became increasingly clear as the pandemic spread. President Trump’s March 18 call for shared “sacrifice” and “devotion” in the battle against COVID-19 was soon followed by the firing of administration watchdogs; unilateral suspension of environmental regulations; efforts to preempt public-health objections to future regulatory changes; and attacks on reporters with the temerity to ask tough questions.12 As unemployment skyrocketed, Trump extended his militarization campaign, calling individual citizens “warriors” who must risk their lives in the battle to reopen the economy. “This is worse than Pearl Harbor,” he said. “This is worse than the World Trade Center. There has never been an attack like this.”13 Enemies proliferated: China, former president Barack Obama, the “liberal media,” Democratic governors and members of Congress; all made the list. Meanwhile, the xenophobes mounted their chargers as Trump’s talk of the “China virus” fomented suspicion and hostility toward Americans of Asian descent, regardless of family origin.14 Trump’s war metaphors were extreme versions of a trope with old and sometimes progressive roots in American history.15 For years the language of war has been casually employed in framing complex but nonmartial challenges: Lyndon calh20556_1st_pp.indb 312 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 313 Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” Richard Nixon’s and Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” Bill Clinton’s “War on Crime.” As the nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, reminded Americans, the latter of these “wars” prompted a spiral of aggressive policing, civilian fear and mistrust, force militarization, and deepening enmity between minority communities and law enforcement, along with exploding prison populations despite steadily dropping rates of violent crime.16 Meanwhile, all these martial campaigns against social evils diverted attention away from the activation of Americans’ diverse talents and energies and toward the centralization of decision-making, concentration of power, and targeting of enemies—often the poor, disenfranchised, or people of color.17 Indeed, modern war—with its massive scale, detailed planning, unity of purpose, concentration of energies, and relentless pursuit of critical objectives—has seduced American reformers since its emergence more than a century ago. The country’s participation in World War I advanced causes pressed for years by economic and social reformers, including a steeply progressive income tax, eighthour federal workday, and women’s right to vote. Such reforms were justified either as war measures or as just compensation for the wartime contributions of various groups. Simultaneously, however, the spread of cross-cultural tolerance, struggle for racial justice, and security of civil liberties all were undermined. For the fearful and defensive, calls for unity and vigilance became calls for purification and expurgation. Immigrants, labor radicals, and critics were targeted in communities across the nation, often violently. African Americans often fared worst of all.18 The war had a more insidious effect on conceptions of democracy. The unprecedented planning and logistical achievements of the war state reinforced the centralizing, technocratic inclinations of reformers who dreamed of a society made whole by science, technology, and disinterested experts committed to mastering and stewarding their use. “We all have to follow the lead of specialists,” wrote Walter Lippmann in the influential New Republic; the war showed that the solution of collective problems required the “infusion of scientific method, the careful application of administrative technique.” Science, Lippmann insisted, was the model for modern liberal thinking, and “only those will conquer who can understand.” During the war years, Lippmann; his coeditor, Herbert Croly; and multiple contributors to their magazine frequently touted the genius of the engineer and promoted the image of the state as a “machine” whose calh20556_1st_pp.indb 313 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 314 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society course should be set by those who best kenned its workings. At times it seemed the most dangerous enemy threatening the war effort was not the concrete power of Germany’s army but the privative specter of American inefficiency. From the editors’ perspective, the exponential growth of the administrative state and its unprecedented interventions in daily life saved the day, achieving “a triumph of organized units over unorganized individuals,” as one regular writer put it. Yet the war itself, the editors elaborated, was merely the proximate cause, not the essential justification of these developments. “In the last analysis, a strong, scientific organization of the sources of material and access to them is the means to the achievement of the only purposes by which this war can be justified.” Those purposes went beyond international peace to include preemption of a cataclysmic “class conflict” in America, achieved “by placing scientific research at the disposal of a conscious purpose” to supplant wasteful competition. Although the New Republic editors were most concerned with checking the power and hubris of gentleman statesmen, the implications for citizen involvement in governance and problem-solving were grim: “The business of politics has become too complex to be left to the pretentious misunderstandings of the benevolent amateur.”19 The disappointing democratic returns on this progressive investment in the war state are well documented.20 Still, the hitching of reformist wagons to martial stars continued. As historian William E. Leuchtenburg showed, many in the Roosevelt administration drew on personal experience and powerful metaphors of mobilization and sacrifice during World War I to build support for the drastic reorganization of the nation’s political economy. Yet the power of the war analogy proved “a mixed blessing,” Leuchtenburg observed. “Useful as a justification for New Deal actions, it also served to limit and divert” reform in unanticipated ways.21 In consequential instances, war talk and war thinking bred an authoritarian mindset among administrators and planners wedded to their pet ideas and convinced of the latter’s importance to national salvation. Both conservatives who challenged big government and labor, consumer, and small-business interests who opposed certain agencies’ cozy arrangements with industry groups were defamed as traitors and saboteurs. More generally, the centralizing logic of war significantly weakened the era’s democratic currents. Unwilling to nationalize or strongly regulate industry but committed to federal orchestration of relief, the Roosevelt administration did relatively little to encourage wider distribution of productive assets or economic calh20556_1st_pp.indb 314 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 315 and political power. Sometimes administration programs—notably the National Recovery Administration and Agricultural Adjustment Administration— abetted concentration. In its role as benevolent defender of citizens’ personal security, the New Deal state sought to guarantee individual access to goods and services rather than facilitate community control of economic resources and political processes.22 The result was to prime the political culture for a shrinkage of democratic politics during and after World War II, which reduced selfgovernment to periodic plebiscites on competing elites’ plans for distributing the means to consume (see chapter 1 by Richard Walker in this volume for a competing account). During World War II, actual mobilization against the real German and Japanese threats had a chilling effect on reform. Although many in the African American freedom movement adopted the “Double-V” language of victory against both fascism abroad and racism at home, the war mentality narrowed the democratic horizons of most Americans. Criticism of corporate power or racial oppression acquired the odor of treason.23 As for the following Cold War, one need not dismiss the Soviet threat to U.S. security to critique the militarization and atomization of society it encouraged. The narrative of the Cold War insulated “strategic” sectors from criticism, even as it expanded the definition of “strategic” to include the entire consumer economy. It demanded loyalty to a state whose main function was to promote the citizen’s freedom from all obligations save upholding the military and consumer structures supposedly essential to defeating communism. It also defined American democracy as an accomplishment—individualistic, consumerist, and expansionist—rather than an ideal.24 In such cold political light, social problems were evidence of sabotage rather than system dysfunction. Those who succumbed to or complained of them were either unfit for service or enemies of the state. Poverty, drug use, crime; all became causes for war. Wars require enemies, and if none present themselves, they will be found.25 Although this “military-industrial complex” and its consequences have received much scholarly and popular criticism, the Manichean mindset it fostered and feeds on is possibly the wider and more insidious threat to democracy, for it infects all parties and renders all politics as adversarial.26 From the Cold War to our own day, bellicose language dividing the world between righteous and damned has been used by Right and Left alike. As veteran organizers Paul Engler and Mark Engler argue, polarization “is not an unintended consequence” calh20556_1st_pp.indb 315 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 316 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society of modern consciousness-raising strategies. “It is central to how they work.”27 Ironically, given the perils of polarization for climate adaptation, the environmental movement helped promote this mindset. In the 1970s environmental groups, beginning with Citizens for a Better Environment, adopted and soon exported to other groups a new mobilizing technology, “the canvass,” in which activists go door-knocking to solicit money and support for causes. Environmentalists were understandably reacting to campaigns by powerful interests to roll back environmental protections won through long, toilsome efforts to educate the public. The method of the canvass, however, was divisive, based on a simple but powerful formula: find a target or enemy to demonize, develop a script defining the issue in right-or-wrong terms and preempting critical objections, and insist that victims of wrong require champions of right to deliver the justice and comfort they deserve.28 From the mid-1970s onward, this formula spread across the political spectrum, infusing talk radio, cable television, electoral strategies, and the internet, turning nearly every electoral and issue campaign into a battle of good versus evil.29 As repentant climate warrior Kate Yoder, a prominent environmental journalist, concludes, “An us-versus-them narrative turns people away from logic and into the realm of emotion and values.” 30 Yoder cites research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication indicating that only 30 percent of Americans deny climate change, yet 68 percent (including a majority of climate-change believers and worriers) avoid talking about it all or most of the time.31 Why? Yoder cites another study in which a large majority of Republicans surveyed believed climate change was real but opposed policies addressing it because they viewed such policies as “Democratic” causes: strategic liberal objectives, inextricable from campaigns for immigration reform or gun control and symbolic of the larger struggle over the nature and role of the American state.32 To summarize, war—actual and metaphorical—accrues authority to the state, sidelines vulnerable communities, and marginalizes citizens in general while dividing them into opposing camps contending for advantage, thus disenfranchizing the people writ large. War talk defines citizenship in terms of altruistic sacrifice to an idealized and therefore exclusive collective, submerging the constant negotiation of personal and public interests that everyday democracy requires of citizens. And wars end, or at least are waged in hopes of ending; calh20556_1st_pp.indb 316 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 317 specifically by the vanquishing of enemies opposed to the goals or controlling the resources for which they are fought. Citizenship does not end. It is not a task to be completed and certainly not a drive to defeat other citizens. It is work: continuous, difficult, often frustrating, yet inherently dignified, personally rewarding, and publicly meaningful work—work that embodies inclusive democratic ideals for the frankly practical reason that no one group or generation can do it. It is the kind of work that successful adjustment to climate realities requires, and the kind that a truly just, equitable, and vibrant democracy of “We the People” will afford to and demand of all Americans. Public work philosophy creates a discursive space for describing, evaluating, and disseminating examples of such collaborative, constructive citizenship and for conceiving new forms. It also draws on deeply rooted but often forgotten traditions in American history and culture. A GND centered not on state production and delivery of “climate solutions” but on catalyzing the environmentally and democratically sustainable work of citizens can draw on past traditions and contemporary examples to articulate a transformative strategy for social and political change: a strategy aimed not at destroying evildoers but at enlarging the commons and harvesting its fruits. THE PUBLIC WORK TRADITION Language shapes thought, and thought influences action. For decades two political languages have dominated American thought and practice, enervating and dividing citizens and obscuring the contributions of their daily activities to democratic growth. The first is the language of liberalism, emphasizing free elections and neutral public institutions as the central features of democracy and the relation of individual to state as the central concern.33 This state-centered conception of democracy is the version the U.S. government promotes worldwide and informs the main currents of American academic literature.34 Certainly, formal representation and individual protections constitute the essential skeleton of a democracy. Nevertheless, the liberal language, absent heavy borrowings from other tongues, renders politicians the main agents of self-government and the people mere calh20556_1st_pp.indb 317 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 318 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society consumers of competing products or opposed camps contesting for prizes; the skeleton of democracy is deprived of the energy and muscle of citizens.35 The second language of politics is communitarian, which emerged in its contemporary form as a challenge to liberalism and its account of the moral and political subject.36 Communitarians have revived concern for the cultural and ethical foundations of citizenship and for the everyday, interpersonal interactions that build and sustain what Robert Putnam and colleagues call “social capital”: norms, networks, and activities providing a relational foundation for collective governance.37 Seeking to strengthen social capital by encouraging structured forms of community service as well as more localized and organic forms of voluntary association, communitarians have highlighted the importance of resilient social relationships and shared moral codes to an orderly and flourishing democracy. But communitarian language often muffles the pluralistic noisiness of American life, muting the creative potency of citizens’ conflicting commitments, perspectives, and interests.38 Public work is a third language of democratic politics. It emphasizes selfinterested yet reflective, collective, productive work, directed and undertaken by diverse citizens, to solve public problems and create public goods. The aim of public work is not to unite the forces of good against the forces of evil or even to determine who the good and evil are. The aim is to build a commonwealth, generating and stewarding “free spaces” in which new commonalities and new differences develop and spur new growth. Put differently, public work is work done by a public, for public purposes, in public view, and open to public judgment and use.39 Both the first and second languages inform public work, which acknowledges the importance of formal institutions and sociocultural practices to political life. But each creates a binary between individual and collective interests that, from a public work perspective, defies social reality and impedes constructive activity.40 Each reifies difference and accentuates its conflictual rather than generative potential—liberalism by prioritizing Western ideals of liberty and equality, communitarianism by tethering all values to historically and culturally particular communities—obscuring alternatives and providing rhetorical cover to culture warriors, security hawks, and global crusaders.41 Finally, both demonstrate the classical Greek view of excluding productive and commercial work from civic life, as if the former could only degrade the latter—a fear that implicitly or explicitly informs most contemporary democratic theory.42 In reality, history abounds with examples of diverse individuals and communities undertaking calh20556_1st_pp.indb 318 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 319 productive, self-interested yet cooperative work to achieve broadly beneficial, public purposes.43 In fact, work was once the master metaphor and acknowledged engine of American democracy. According to historian Gordon Wood, when the Founders’ classical ideals of virtue failed to knit the newly independent states into a unified society, Americans “found new democratic adhesives in the actual behavior of plain ordinary people”—most of whom spent most of their time and placed much of their pride in productive work.44 Touring the United States in the 1830s, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wondered at the way Americans melded their interests in individual self-advancement and national democratic progress in the forge of work, and noted how their work lives shaped the rich associational life that, in Tocqueville’s eyes, made their society something genuinely new under the sun.45 The work that struck Tocqueville was neither the hyper-individualistic, ultracompetitive scrambling of a modern consumer culture nor an altruistic sacrifice of self in service to transcendent ideals. It was the work of men and women alert to conflicts between personal and public interests but assuming no sharp or unbridgeable divide between them.46 The social product of such work was neither the rugged individualism of liberal legend nor the semisacred unity of communitarian myth. Or rather, it was both. As David Mathews has observed, “Nineteenth-century self-rule” in the United States “was a sweaty, hands-on, problem-solving politics” for most Americans, “rooted in collective decision making and acting—especially acting.” 47 Public goods such as schools, libraries, greens, churches, forts, wells, roads, and bridges were created by groups of individuals in efforts combining practical selfinterests with public purpose. A tragic amount of that collective work was destructive, especially of Black and Indigenous lives and cultures.48 But the simultaneous story of cooperative world-building that Mathews tells must be recalled. “Settlers on the frontier had to be producers, not just consumers,” Mathews writes; they depended not only on their own devices or their neighbors’ but on the shared civil and political institutions they “had to join forces to build.” As such, Mathews concludes, “Their efforts were examples of ‘public work,’ meaning work done by not just for the public.” 49 Such commons-building work was not every American’s central experience. But it was critical to the course of American history. It informed the “free labor” republicanism that celebrated the individual and civic benefits of work and animated Abraham Lincoln’s vision for an American democracy unfettered by calh20556_1st_pp.indb 319 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 320 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society slavery.50 In the Civil War that followed, its exemplars included former slaves who served in the Union army and taught one another to read, write, and organize to secure their liberty at war’s end. After the tragic failure of Reconstruction, its products included the Black congregations, schools, businesses, and colleges that would incubate and orchestrate the twentieth-century freedom struggle.51 In fact, as the nineteenth century closed, diverse Americans devised an array of civic models reconciling independent enterprise and social mobility with mutual aid and cooperative governance. Agrarian populists, industrial democrats, the largely female pioneers of social work—these and countless other Americans contributed to a durably radical tradition of “civic autonomy,” conceiving personal independence as both essential to and dependent upon collective investments in healthy communities.52 Historical examples of public work can be multiplied.53 Given the GND’s historical signaling and comprehensive aims, however, the most instructive examples for GND advocates emerge from two moments: the Great Depression, which spurred the original New Deal, and the Black freedom struggle, which many GND champions treat as a touchstone of social-justice principles and action without fully understanding its dynamics. The war talk of the Depression was not the only language employed to address it. While several New Dealers turned to World War I for inspiration, others turned to older, work-centered models of collective action like that sketched by William James in his 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War”—an essay familiar to New Dealers as diverse as anti-monopolist Raymond Moley and centralplanning apostle Rexford Tugwell.54 James’s essay contained ideas and, in the 1930s, inspired applications that could help today’s GND advocates craft both compelling narratives and effective programs of social and climate justice, without resort to war talk or overreliance on central planning. These ideas and applications suggest that a democratically sustainable GND needs strong participatory elements, that such participation should not be overly scripted, and that some form of national work program might advance both goals. Like many New Dealers—Rooseveltian and Green—James appreciated war’s potential to foster civic identity and enhance social cohesion. He nonetheless insisted that war’s destructive consequences far outweighed its benefits; alternative, productive schools of civic virtue were not just conceivable but necessary. His effort to “illustrate” such a school was a national youth corps, designed to calh20556_1st_pp.indb 320 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 321 channel the innate “pugnacity” of human nature toward “constructive interests” and foster a “civic passion” to preempt war’s murderous excitement.55 Some of the “constructive interests” James suggested might sound dubious to modern ears, and his notion that “Nature” and its hardships could play the enemy role as well as foreign peoples partially undermined his own critique of the war mentality. James’s overall vision, however, was not to obliterate nature but to elaborate the physical and cultural infrastructure of democracy.56 By working across ethnic, ideological, and class differences to ameliorate suffering, build public spaces, steward public resources, and ensure employment and leisure to all, any given cohort of young people might get some of their day’s injustices “evened out” while simultaneously delivering “numerous other goods to the commonwealth”— including a generation alert to their “relations to the globe” and the “hard and sour foundations” on which they might rest. The goal was a culture in which activities common and momentous embodied the mix of courage and humility that, in James’s view, marked the best “priests and medical men”: that “spark” of appreciation for the interdependence and open-endedness of life which, if kindled in America’s youth, could ignite an “incandescent” movement of the people toward peace and “civic honor.”57 These ideas found their New Deal expression in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Roosevelt shared James’s interest in work as a forge of civic identity and capacity.58 In his March message to the seventy-third Congress, he called for federally funded, locally organized units devoted to “forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control and similar projects” of stewardship. Such commons-building work would “pay dividends to the present and future generations” of the regions improved and the nation generally. “More important” than its “material” products, however, would be “the moral and spiritual value of such work” to those who performed it—for themselves, their families, and the common good all at once.59 The CCC was not designed as a model of democratic governance. Most camps were male-only, segregated, and run on military lines.60 Still, to focus solely on the CCC’s hierarchical aspects and ignore its contributions to the broader democratic project is mistaken. Ample evidence confirms that the CCC fostered civic identities and skills among its members, who came to see themselves as civic agents with capacity to build and shape the commons in lasting ways—including the creation of entire new forests, thousands of fire towers, tens of thousands of public campsites and recreational facilities, and hundreds of thousands of miles calh20556_1st_pp.indb 321 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 322 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society of roads still in use today. Corpsmen interviewed in the 1990s recalled expanding their conceptions of who and what was American; building confidence and skills to challenge segregation; and developing a sense of contribution to purposes bigger than, yet including, their own.61 CCC projects addressing soil erosion and other ecological threats intentionally integrated the wisdom of trained scientists and local communities in what is now called a “civic science” approach, producing both better material results and wider epistemic horizons than the technocratic approaches coming to characterize “applied research” in the United States.62 For many participants and observers, these and other CCC activities conjured and realized an image of government as partner rather than shepherd or sheriff of the people.63 In these ways the CCC catalyzed a democratic form of populism, marked by rejecting technocracy and embracing difference as instructive, generative, and civically empowering.64 Such outcomes convey a democratic alternative to the flimsy construct of democracy as mere decision-making process.65 Nor are they unique to the CCC. In the 1930s citizens nationwide organized to address hunger, unemployment, poverty, and environmental degradation. In many cases, government became a partner and supporter rather than controller of such work.66 In others, the federal government created spaces in which state and local communities could creatively experiment. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), for instance, reflected director Harry Hopkins’s focus on providing decent jobs to unemployed Americans rather than prioritizing projects according to arbitrary measures of public necessity. The result gave local communities and the formerly jobless wide latitude to choose and direct the work to be done. Thousands of communities nationwide still use the schools, libraries, post offices, theaters, plazas, and other public spaces financed by the WPA. To this day, whole regional environments and economies are shaped by the WPA’s pioneering experiments (through the Tennessee Valley Authority) in flood control, rural electrification, and the “public investment” model of federally supported, locally executed planning.67 Meanwhile, the artistic, literary, and other cultural work supported by the WPA demonstrates just how broadly many Americans construed the nature of productive citizenship.68 The achievements of the CCC and WPA suggest that a participatory, civically invigorating, and sustainable GND needs to be more decentralized than talk of World War II–style mobilization implies. This does not mean rejecting federal investment and oversight. It means structuring government programs to allow calh20556_1st_pp.indb 322 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 323 for local variation, innovation, and choice—what the Civic Studies scholar Elinor Ostrom called “polycentric governance.” 69 The consequences of the centralized, technocratic alternative are foreshadowed in the history of New Deal labor organizing, which early on challenged the consumerist, distributive model of liberal political economy that labor–capital relations later came to symbolize.70 That ironic change was spurred by the National Reconstruction Administration, created in 1935 and modeled on the Wilson-era War Industries Board. The National Reconstruction Administration dissipated the “we-the-people” energy of nearly two decades of cross-cultural labor organizing, empowering corporate trade associations and encouraging defensive union postures and bureaucratized union structures. In doing so, it helped make the ostensibly neutral, explicitly distributive (rather than constructive and participatory) “broker state” the archetype of American postwar political economy.71 No historical development dramatized the democratic deficits of the broker state and the adversarial political culture it fostered more starkly than the African American civil rights movement. Few today appreciate the centrality of work to the leaders, spirit, and goals of the “freedom struggle” and, above all, to its strategy of constructive nonviolence.72 Especially for followers of Martin Luther King Jr., the dignity of daily work and its indispensability to human flourishing was inseparable from the domestic and global promise of democracy and its achievement through nonviolent means. The mutual dependence of freedom, democracy, and work with dignity was a central theme of the iconic March on Washington of August 1963.73 The quest for dignified and publicly valued employment continued through the 1968 garbage workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, which an assassin’s bullet ensured was the culmination of King’s career.74 In a speech on March 18, King described the garbage workers’ struggle as one for universal justice, to be realized in and through the work of all Americans. “You are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages!” he exclaimed. “You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of all labor.”75 For King, dignity had two meanings, both central to his nonviolent philosophy. One conveyed a demand for the equal and respectful treatment that each owes to others as citizens and persons. The other implied action to explore, realize, and claim one’s value as a human being and use it productively for one’s own and society’s flourishing.76 In King’s strategic calculus, collective action that was dignified in both senses would educate the actors and the larger society to seek calh20556_1st_pp.indb 323 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 324 The Work of Building a Better Society further means of flourishing together. As King declared in his last major speech, “whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity it has dignity and it has worth.” 77 A PUBLIC WORK FRAME FOR THE GREEN NEW DEAL Like all good war stories, the GND has other stories running through it. Indeed, one casualty of the war theme’s amplification is the work theme buried beneath it. At least since the first decade of the twenty-first century, various GND plans and precursors have tied the technological and infrastructural goals of a carbon-neutral grid and climate-proofed society to education and employment opportunities.78 These are public work goals. What remains inchoate and worrisome are the means. Is some federal bureau going to decide what projects to undertake, who will work on them, what form they take, and how to elicit the necessary efforts? A public work frame for the GND answers “No” to these questions. It promotes a catalytic approach, building citizens’ and communities’ capacities to address the challenges of climate change, structural racism, and inequality.79 Here are three rough building blocks. Belonging and Civic Muscle -1— 0— +1— The work of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ReThink Health epitomizes a paradigm shift in public health toward supporting entire communities holistically by identifying and helping to steward the intellectual, social, and cultural resources already embedded in them.80 It challenges technocratic interventions that, in solving discrete problems for rather than with communities, often weaken and atomize them, leaving them more vulnerable than before. In this vein, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention working group, supported by the CDC Foundation, collaborated with hundreds of organizations to co-create a “springboard” for community recovery based on years of nationwide experiments in boosting community well-being—“belonging and civic muscle,” in their terms—through citizen-empowering, citizen-driven government policy. The springboard framework stresses community-led work to create community-wide health in all meanings of the word: a model for climate and social-justice initiatives. It has been endorsed by surgeons general of both parties and generated an interagency government task force to advance its recommendations.81 calh20556_1st_pp.indb 324 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 325 Civic Environmental Policy The concept of civic environmentalism emerged in the 1990s from the work of Carmen Sirianni, research director of Reinventing Citizenship, a self-organized confederation of civic, higher-education, and philanthropic groups charged by Clinton’s White House Domestic Policy Council with developing strategies and policies to overcome the citizen-government divide. Policymakers and intellectuals of diverse ideological persuasions recognized the need to shift away from topdown regulation or control toward a citizen-inclusive, public work approach to problem-solving. Building on work by DeWitt John at the National Academy of Public Administration and innovative staff in the Environmental Protection Agency, Sirianni developed a model in which government mobilizing tools remain indispensable at high levels of implementation but are not used to “command and control” changes in the behavior and infrastructure of specific communities. Rather, legislators and agencies set broad goals for, say, ecosystem restoration or sustainable urban development, then let communities and regions develop and implement plans following general but essential guidelines ensuring inclusive and collaborative citizen involvement.82 The culture wars that engulfed the Clinton years hampered the Reinventing Citizenship initiative. Recently, however, the broad approach has resurfaced in an initiative called CivicGreen, sponsored by the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. In the first major CivicGreen concept paper, The Civics of a Green New Deal, Sirianni makes the case for a civic-environmentalist climate strategy, focused on engaging diverse citizens and organizations in processes of negotiated planning and coordinated action.83 He sketches how federal funding and agency action can support this work in communities and through multistakeholder partnerships nationally. As Tisch Associate Dean Peter Levine explains in glossing Sirianni’s argument, government spending on, for example, public transportation will not alone alter commuting and development patterns; citizens—many of them—must choose to use the options built, and citizen opposition may delay their getting built at all. Giving citizens “a say in where and how” lines are built and dollars are spent dramatically increases the chances that large numbers will use, appreciate, and steward the new option.84 Drawing from his 2020 book, Sustainable Cities in American Democracy, Sirianni backs this logical case with empirical evidence of successful public participation in major climate-related undertakings over several decades, many depending on public employees adept in “democratic-professional” or “citizen-professional” calh20556_1st_pp.indb 325 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 326 The Work of Building a Better Society practices.85 These citizens-cum-professionals realize that in fulfilling their expert and official functions—confronting raging wildfires or promoting greener agriculture—they depend on the wisdom, talents, and cooperation of lay fellow citizens working as educators, communicators, planners, and strategy implementers. They consequently learn to challenge, encourage, empower, and expect fellow citizens to build those capacities and use them—not to defeat opponents but to cultivate allies and create compelling goods and stories that attract still more.86 Regrowing Democracy -1— 0— +1— In recent decades, the meaning of “democracy” has shrunk dramatically, and the empowered public of the Depression-era New Deal has gone the way of the Cheshire cat. Citizens are no longer seen as muscular co-creators of a commonwealth but as fickle, complaining, and aggrieved consumers to be wooed with favors and mobilized against competitors by political professionals. The result has been the impoverishment of the American democratic imagination. As Christopher Ansell has argued, concepts are power resources whose definitions elites have ability and incentive to control. But as Ansell also argues, elites must consistently contend with publics, or potential publics, who can challenge and change conventional definitions.87 The concept of democracy itself is a case in point. After decades of bipartisan encomiums to the virtues of competitive individualism in America (and policies to promote it), so-called progressives have quite convincingly identified the outcomes (social and economic inequality, stagnant wages, crumbling infrastructure, political polarization) as an existential threat to democracy. Yet progressives’ all-too-common substitution of the state for the individual as the essential subject and guarantor of democracy disempowers the very communities they seek to empower, defining democracy as the legal codes of a corruptible set of institutions rather than the common life of a pluralistic society. Taking Ansell’s analysis to heart, we suggest the need for a large-scale, national effort to regrow the meaning of democracy as the work of the people, in root and branch. There are precedents in American history for such conceptual and practical public work. From 1938 to 1941, for example, a cadre of officials in the U.S. Department of Agriculture worked with land-grant colleges, cooperative extension workers, and agrarian community leaders to develop an initiative on the calh20556_1st_pp.indb 326 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 327 future of rural America. As historian Jess Gilbert shows, these citizenprofessionals “strongly supported historical traditions, local knowledge, regional cultures, [and] cohesive communities” as critical to the future of rural America and the nation generally, and their joint public work with citizens saved or rejuvenated family farms, small businesses, collective practices, and entire towns. They envisioned and worked to create “a more egalitarian society and wider distribution of power and resources.”88 A generation later, athwart the consumerist trends of the 1950s, the hundreds of “citizenship schools” undertaking grassroots leadership development for the burgeoning civil rights movement also awakened a larger and deeper conception of democracy. The schools, pioneered by Septima Clark, a Black schoolteacher in South Carolina, embodied what historian Charles Payne calls “an expansive sense of the possibilities of democracy.” They “espoused a nonbureaucratic style of work, focused on local problems sensitive to the social structure of local communities, appreciative of the culture of those communities.” Crucially, “they stressed a developmental style of politics . . . in which the most important thing was the development of efficacy in those most affected by a problem.”89 It is hard to imagine a crisper and more compelling credo for a nonadversarial, people-empowering strategy of physical and spiritual sustainability. ∑ As Americans have grown accustomed to look to others—experts, leaders, celebrities, critics—to identify and solve their problems, they have grown bitterly divided and sometimes debilitatingly aggrieved. Conflicts along lines of party, income, race, religion, and geography are exacerbated by a devaluation of the talents and intelligence of people without credentials, degrees, and celebrity status—markers that, ironically, are increasingly tribal rather than universal in meaning and weight. Civic agency has atrophied as the citizen’s role in politics has shrunk to that of spectator, client, and consumer. Leaders have lost both legitimacy and autonomy by embracing models at once domineering and scripted. The martial framing of the nation’s poverty, crime, drugs, terror, trade, disease, and climate problems epitomizes these trends. If American society is to make a transition from an ecologically calamitous, radically unequal present to an ecologically sustainable, broadly equitable calh20556_1st_pp.indb 327 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 328 The Work of Building a Better Society future, it needs a different story of democracy. We the people have to form publics to challenge the narrow definitions, which constrain our imaginations and our energies, and create a story of neighbors building communities and workers claiming dignity; of professionals teaming with lay experts and local sages, without naive expectations of harmony or consensus; of leaders calling all the people to the work of reconstructing their nation physically and spiritually through productive, self-directed, future-oriented yet humble citizenship. America today needs a story of public work. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. -1— 0— +1— Alasdaire MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), 279. The classic defense of this claim in connection with social policy is Malcom Spector and John I. Kitsuse, Constructing Social Problems (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987). For substantiation drawing on a transdisciplinary trove of research, see Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2020). Stephen J. Flusberg, Teenie Matlock, and Paul H. Thibodeau, “Metaphors for the War (or Race) Against Climate Change,” Environmental Communication 11, no. 6 (2017): 769– 83. Study participants found “war” language more urgent and more likely to motivate changes in their behavior than language of a “race” against climate change. See Max Fisher, “How Fear and Psychology Explain Rising Support for Leaders,” New York Times, May 25, 2020. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Bill McKibben, “A World at War,” New Republic, August 15, 2016, https://newrepublic .com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii; Luke Darby, “Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change,” GQ, October 11, 2018, https://www.gq .com/story/ billionaires-climate-change; and Kate Yoder, “Big Oil Wants to Kill a Carbon Price with One Simple Trick (It’s $$$),” Grist, October 30, 2018, https://grist.org /article/ big-oil-wants-to-kill-a-carbon-price-with-one-simple-trick-its/. H. Res.109—Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal, introduced February 7, 2019, 116th Congress, 1st session, https://www.congress .gov/ bill/116th-congress/ house-resolution/109/text. Caitlin Oprysko and Susannah Luthi, “Trump Labels Himself a ‘Wartime President’ Combating Coronavirus, Politico, March 18, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020 /03/18/trump-administration-self-swab-coronavirus-tests-135590. Quint Forgey, “Surgeon General Warns This Week ‘Is Going to Be Our Pearl Harbor Moment,’ ” Politico, April 5, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/05/surgeon -general-pearl-harbor-moment-165729. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 328 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 329 Susan Rice, “Trump Is the Wartime President We Have (Not the One We Need),” New York Times, April 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opinion/trump-coronavirus-us .html. Mike Orcutt, “If America Is at War with Covid-19, Its Doing a Bad Job of Fighting,” MIT Technology Review, April 20, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/20 /1000145/if-america-is-at-war-with-covid-19 -doing-a-bad-job -of-fighting /; and Liane Hewitt, “This Is What a War Economy Would Actually Look Like,” Foreign Policy, May 12, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-war-economy-trump -defense-production/. Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey, Tom Hamburger, and Mike Dubonis, “Trump’s Resistance to Oversight Draws Bipartisan Scrutiny,” Washington Post, April 9, 2020. For the March memo on suspension of environmental regulations, see Susan Parker Bodine, “COVID-19 Implications for the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Program,” letter to All Governmental and Private Sector Partners, March 26, 2020, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files /2020 - 03/documents/oecamemooncovid19implications.pdf. For administration efforts to preempt public-health objections to future regulatory changes, see Marianne Lavelle, “Trump’s EPA Fast-Tracks a Controversial Rule That Would Restrict the Use of Health Science,” Inside Climate News, March 23, 2020, https://insideclimatenews.org /news /23032020/trump-epa-health-secret-science-coronavirus. Peter Baker, “Trump’s New Coronavirus Message: Time to Move On to the Economic Recovery,” New York Times, May 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/us/politics /trump-coronavirus-recovery.html. Deshawn Blanding and Danyelle Solomon, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Fueling Fear and Hate Across America,” March 30, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues /race/news/2020/03/30/482407/coronavirus-pandemic-fueling-fear-hate-across-america/. See, e.g., Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). For statistics on civilian killings by U.S. police officers see the Mapping Police Violence database, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org /. Sherry, In the Shadow of War; and Ana Maria Santiago, “Fifty Years Later: From a War on Poverty to a War on the Poor,” Social Problems 62, no. 1 (2015): 2–14. For other examples, see Peter B. Kraska, “Militarizing the Drug War: A Sign of the Times,” in Altered States of Mind: Critical Observations of the Drug War, ed. Peter B. Kraska, 159–206 (New York: Garland, 1993); and William J. Chambliss, “Policing the Ghetto Underclass: The Politics of Law and Law Enforcement,” Social Problems 41, no. 2 (1994): 177– 94. Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: Norton, 1979); David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chap. 1; and Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. chaps. 1, 4, 6. Lippman and others quoted in John Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 75– 78. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 329 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 330 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. -1— 0— +1— 30. The Work of Building a Better Society See, e.g., Kennedy, Over Here, 348–69; Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 259– 96; Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 279– 320; and Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 327–56. On the significance of wartime reform, see Trygve Throntveit, Power Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), chap. 7. William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John Braeman, Robert Hamlett Bremner, and Walters Everett, 81–143 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964), esp. 84, 130– 31, 133. The classic account of the Roosevelt administration’s ironic role in the triumph of consumerist individualism over what some have termed “producerist republicanism” is Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1995). See Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chaps. 5– 6; Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Useful in understanding these nationalistic/atomistic contradictions and their intellectual and cultural origins are Edward A. Purcell Jr. The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973); Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). A critical account of such crusading liberalism is Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016). On the origins and impacts of the political-military-industrial-academic complex, see Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Reshaping the Twenty-First Century (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 205. Harry C. Boyte, “A Tale of Two Playgrounds,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California, September 1, 2001, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED458155 .pdf. On the rise of polarization and decline of shared values in American social debate since the 1970s, see Geoffrey Layman, Thomas Carsey, and Juliana Menasce Horowitz, “Party Polarization in American Politics: Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences,” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 83–110. Kate Yoder, “War of Words,” Grist, December 5, 2018, https://grist.org /climate/the-war -on-climate-the-climate-fight-are-we-approaching-the-problem-all-wrong /. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 330 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 331 E. Maibach, A. Leiserowitz, S. Rosenthal, C. Roser-Renouf, and M. Cutler, “Is There a Climate ‘Spiral of Silence’ in America?” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, New Haven, Conn., March 2016, http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content /uploads/2016/09/Climate-Spiral-Silence-March-2016 .pdf. Leaf Van Boven, Phillip J. Ehret, and David K. Sherman, “Psychological Barriers to Bipartisan Public Support for Climate Policy,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 13, no. 4 (2018): 492– 507. The touchstone text remains John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). On the role of liberal egalitarian ideas and tropes in the growth and centrality of government bureaucracy, see Anne Kornhauser, Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). The U.S. Agency for International Development defines democracy as “a civilian political system in which the legislative and chief executive offices are filled through regular competitive elections with universal suffrage.” For critical interpretations of the liberal subject as a “radical chooser” among predetermined alternatives, a player of competitive moral “games” with arbitrarily fixed outcomes, a party to adversarial legal arrangements rather than co-creative interpersonal relationships, and the foundation of a hostile social order, see Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 Human Agency and Language, 15–44 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). A representative communitarian argument is Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Works affirming the value of agonistic, interactionist norms and processes to just and flourishing polities include Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Chantal Mouffe, “Citizenship and Political Identity,” October 61 (Summer 1992): 28– 32; and Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Harry C. Boyte, “Constructive Politics as Public Work,” Political Theory 39, no. 5 (2011): 630– 60; and Harry C. Boyte and Sara M. Evans, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). In this regard, public work develops the thought of William James. See Trygve Throntveit, William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic (New York: Palgrave, 2014), esp. chap. 5. On this ironic confluence of liberal and communitarian politics, see Jeffrey Friedman, “The Politics of Communitarianism,” Critical Review 8, no. 2 (1994): 297– 340. Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 68; and Harry Boyte, Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004). Seminal in this regard is the Nobel Prize–winning work of economist Elinor Ostrom. See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), ix. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 331 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 332 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society Tocqueville’s most penetrating observations are expressed in Democracy in America, first published in 1835. See also William A. Galston, “Civil Society and the ‘Art of Association,’ ” Journal of Democracy 11, no. 1 (2000): 64– 70; and James T. Kloppenberg, “Tocqueville, Mill, and the American Gentry,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 27, no. 2 (2006): 351– 79. See Harry C. Boyte, CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989), esp. chap. 2; and Rowland Bertoff, “Peasants and Artisans, Puritans and Republicans,” Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (1982): 579– 98. David Mathews, Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy (Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Foundation Press, 2006), vii. Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); and James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Mathews, Reclaiming Public Education, vii. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Gerald Taylor, “Prometheus Unbound: Populism, the Property Question, and Social Invention,” Good Society 21, no. 2 (2012): 219– 33. Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984): 63. See Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Harry C. Boyte, with Marie Ström, Isak Tranvik, Tami Moore, Susan O’Connor, and Donna Patterson Awakening Democracy Through Public Work: Pedagogies of Empowerment (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018); and Albert W. Dzur, Democracy Inside: Participatory Innovation in Unlikely Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939), 173– 74. William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910), in Memories and Studies, ed. Henry James Jr., 267–296 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911), esp. 272, 289. A fuller version of this argument, including citations to various critiques of James’s essay, is Trygve Throntveit, “Civic Renewal: William James’s Moral Equivalent of War,” William James Studies 14, no. 1 (2018): 120–41. James, “Moral Equivalent of War,” 290– 91, 292, 289. Moley, After Seven Years, 174. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Unemployment Relief,” March 21, 1933, American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/207970. Melissa Bass, “The Success and Contradictions of New Deal Democratic Populism: The Case of the Civilian Conservation Corps,” Good Society 21, no. 2 (2012): 250– 60. Melissa Bass, The Politics and Civics of National Service: Lessons from the Civilian Conservation Core, VISTA, and AMERICA (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013); and Harry C. Boyte and Nan Kari, Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), esp. 29, 109. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 332 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 333 On scope and impact, see Bass, Politics and Civics of National Service, 57. Also Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chaps. 4, 6, 7; and on contemporary civic science, see Harry C. Boyte, Civic Agency and the Cult of the Expert (Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Foundation Press, 2009). Bass, “Success and Contradictions,” 255. On democratic populism, see Harry Boyte, “Introduction: Reclaiming Populism as a Different Kind of Politics,” Good Society 21, no. 2 (2012): 173– 76. See Josiah Ober’s etymological analysis of Greek demokratia, challenging modern uses of “democracy” as “a voting rule for determining the will of the majority” and recovering its connotations of “collective power to effect change in the public realm.” Josiah Ober, “The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, not Majority Rule,” Constellations 15, no. 1 (2009): 3– 9, esp. 3, 7. For other thick conceptions of democracy throughout European and American history, see James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Minnesota history is particularly rich with examples of such local innovation. See Paul S. Holbo, “The Farmer-Labor Association: Minnesota’s Party within a Party” Minnesota History (September 1963): 301– 9; George H. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and Richard M. Valelly, Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). A relatively recent overview of the WPA is Nick Taylor, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA; When FDR Put the Nation to Work (New York: Bantam, 2008). On the purposes and history of the TVA, see Walter L. Creese, TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). For treatments of Depression-era arts from several perspectives, see Bruce I. Bustard, A New Deal for the Arts (Washington, D.C.: National Archives Administration, 1997); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997); Scott Peters, Changing the Story About Higher Education’s Public Purposes and Work: Land Grants, Liberty, and the Little Country Theater, Imagining America Working Paper 6 (2006); Roger G. Kennedy, When Art Worked: The New Deal, Art, and Democracy (New York: Rizzoli, 2009); and Lynne Cooke, “Boundary Trouble: Navigating Margin and Mainstream,” in Outliers and American Vanguard Art: A National Gallery of Art Collection, by Lynne Cooke, Douglas Crimp, Darby English, Suzanne Perling Hudson, Thomas J. Lax, Jennifer Jane Marshall, Richard Meyer, and Jenni Sorkin, 3–29 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Elinor Ostrom, “Polycentricity, Complexity, and the Commons,” A PEGS Journal: The Good Society 9, no. 2 (1999): 36–40. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Steve Fraser, “The ‘Labor Question,’ ” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, 55– 84 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. 63– 65. Brinkley, Liberalism, 28– 30. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 333 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 334 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society On workplaces as sites of civic action and democratic growth, see Cynthia Estlund, Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: Norton, 2013). The following account is taken from Michael K. Honey, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice (New York: Norton, 2018), chap. 5. Martin Luther King Jr., “All Labor Has Dignity,” in All Labor Has Dignity, ed. Michael K. Honey (Boston: Beacon, 2011), 172. See Paul C. Taylor, “Moral Perfectionism,” in To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018). King, “All Labor Has Dignity,” 171. Paul Eccleston, “UN Announces Green ‘New Deal’ Plan to Rescue World Economies,” Daily Telegraph, October 22, 2008; and Emily Atkin, “The Democrats Stole the Green Party’s Best Idea,” New Republic, February 22, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article /153127/democrats-stole-green-partys-best-idea. On the failure of Democratic and Republican policymakers to treat constituents as civic agents with creative political potential, see Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (New York: Encounter, 2018), esp. 209. On desire for work with meaning, see Noam Scheiber, “When Professionals Rise Up, More than Money Is at Stake,” New York Times, March 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com /2018/03/25/ business/economy/labor-professionals.html; and Shawn Achor, Andrew Reece, Gabrielle Rosen Kellerman, and Alexi Robichaux, “9 out of 10 People Are Willing to Earn Less Money to Do More-Meaningful Work,” Harvard Business Review, November 6, 2018, https:// hbr.org /2018/11/9 -out-of-10 -people-are-willing-to-earn-less -money-to-do-more-meaningful-work. See the ReThink Health website, https://www.rethinkhealth.org /. For articles summarizing themes of the springboard, see the special issue of National Civic Review 109, no. 4 (2021). A stimulating synthesis of civic policy theory and case studies from the 1990s through the 2000s is Carmen Sirianni, Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2009). See also Levine, We Are the Ones, for theoretical and empirical arguments in support of civic policy and civic engagement generally. Carmen Sirianni, The Civics of a Green New Deal: Towards Policy Design for Community Empowerment and Public Participation in an Age of Climate Change, Tufts University/Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, May 2020, https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/sites /default/files/civic_green_new_deal.pdf. Peter Levine, Forward to Sirianni, Civics of a Green New Deal, 3. Carmen Sirianni, Sustainable Cities in American Democracy: From Postwar Urbanism to the Civics of a Green New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020). On democratic professionalism, see Dzur, Democracy Inside; Boyte (using “citizen” professionalism), “Constructive Politics as Public Work”; and the website of the University of Minnesota’s Citizen Professional Center: https://www.cehd.umn.edu/fsos/research/cpc/default.asp. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 334 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Rethinking the Green New Deal 86. 87. 88. 89. 335 Sirianni, Sustainable Cities, chap. 7. Christopher K. Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33. Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), 8– 9. Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 67– 68. —-1 —0 —+1 calh20556_1st_pp.indb 335 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS chapter 16 How to Create Good Jobs, a Sustainable Environment, and a Durable and Successful Left Political Alliance Through a Green New Deal riChard laChmann H -1— 0— +1— ow can ordinary people in rich capitalist countries, whose median wages have barely risen in recent years after being unchanged for four decades, be asked to support a conversion to green energy designed for the benefit of unborn generations? The Green New Deal is being attacked as ruinously expensive. The right-wing American Action Forum dreamed up a $93 trillion price tag, which was broadcast repeatedly on Fox News and echoed endlessly by Republican politicians. However, that number includes the cost of providing universal health care and a guaranteed job for every American, aspirations mentioned in passing at the end of the resolution sponsored by Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.1 American Action Forum’s estimated price for remaking the energy grid, other changes (mainly in transportation) to reduce emissions to zero, and retrofitting housing together come to a much more modest $12.6 trillion.2 Robert Pollin, an economist supportive of the Green New Deal, estimates it would cost 1 percent of GDP each year between now and 2050, or $18 trillion in total, to achieve a conversion to zero-carbon emissions in the United States.3 That would have a barely noticeable effect on the overall economy or on the federal budget. By comparison, the United States spent 3.1 percent of GDP on the military in 2018.4 Unfortunately, voters in the United States— or, indeed, in any other country— don’t have an opportunity to vote directly on whether they want a portion of the national budget reallocated from military to social or environmental spending. There is evidence that the American calh20556_1st_pp.indb 336 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Creations of the Green New Deal 337 public as a whole would support such a shift. In general, voters’ preferences, when surveyed, are for substantially lower military and higher social spending as shares of the budget than was the case under Barack Obama or Donald Trump.5 And we know that voters underestimate the fraction of the budget that goes to the military and overestimate what is spent on the poor. Thus, we can assume the Green New Deal would be seen as relatively inexpensive and a worthwhile investment if it can be presented as costing less than a third of the military budget while permanently reducing ordinary Americans’ energy costs and providing good jobs—that is, ones that pay enough to support a family at a middle-class level, that provide benefits including health insurance and pensions, and that are not contingent and unstable, allowing workers to make a career in a single place and thereby build and sustain ties to a local community. A decent society should provide the material and social bases for a comfortable and secure life. That is a worthy goal in itself, and a Green New Deal should be designed to foster such lives. In selecting among the various possible ways in which action to eliminate CO 2 emissions can be achieved, we need to pay equal attention to the moral necessity of treating every person as worthy of a life with meaningful work. We must avoid forcing people to abandon their communities and social connections to gain employment. Human dignity is as much a moral imperative as is preserving the planet’s ability to sustain human life. We do need to recognize that cuts in the military budget translate directly into losses of jobs, most of which pay above the national median wage. The only way to defuse those workers’ resistance to the losses they would suffer in a conversion from military to Green New Deal spending is to develop careful plans that would concentrate production of solar panels, wind turbines, and the other needed components of a green energy system in the same places where those workers currently live and produce weapons. Since the work needed to carry out a conversion from fossil fuels to green energy sources will take decades, we can guarantee those workers career-long jobs. Workers in military plants do not have a commitment to weapons; they have a need and desire for good jobs. The Green New Deal will have to be crafted and backed with commitments of long-term spending to ensure enough good jobs to make up for the shifts away from military spending and for the lost jobs in extracting, shipping, calh20556_1st_pp.indb 337 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 338 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society refining, and burning fossil fuels, which also are well-paid although much less stable than those offered by military contractors. Conversion plans, thus, are a political and moral necessity, and I address that below. Telling workers to get retrained or to move away from their communities in search of uncertain but hopefully better opportunities elsewhere arouses justifiable anger, especially when such suggestions come from politicians, journalists, or professors who themselves enjoy safe, secure, and well-paid jobs. People want and deserve more than just good jobs. They should be able, if they want, to remain in the communities where they currently live and where they have built ties to family, friends, and neighbors. We can build support for a transition to a zero-carbon emissions economy by showing that the current carbon-based energy sector imposes higher costs than the green alternative. Direct costs include exploration, extraction, transportation of fuels across the globe, and construction and maintenance of power plants and transmission lines. And of course the owners of oil, gas, and coal fields extract rents for access to those underground and underwater resources. Carbon fuels also impose indirect costs: pollution, destruction of entire ecosystems and land, and the military costs of securing fuel sources. Lives are lost to pollution, mining, and wars. All those costs would disappear with the transition to green energy. Of course, workers in fossil fuel industries, like those in weapons manufacture, appreciate their relatively well-paying and secure jobs, and they too would need to be convinced by clear plans backed by sustained funding that their old jobs would be replaced by equally remunerative jobs in green energy and that those jobs would be located where they already live. Above all, we know and already can experience the catastrophic effects of climate change. We are now living through the beginnings of the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet. Coastal areas will flood. While much of the globe will become wetter, other places will become hotter and dryer and catch fire more readily. Already interior Australia is becoming unlivable (as we saw with the summer fires and mass evacuations of 2019–2020), as are parts in the western United States and numerous places in the Global South. Climate change will reduce crop yields and render parts of the planet, now inhabited by hundreds of millions of people, unable to support human life or to grow food. All of these are costs, and ones that are far more expensive and disruptive to contemporary life than the taxes and other adjustments that will be needed to pay for a global Green New Deal. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 338 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Creations of the Green New Deal 339 THE COSTS OF GREEN ENERGY VERSUS MITIGATING OR ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE The price of moving to a zero-emissions economy will be less than the costs of mitigating the effects of climate change, which can at best be only partly effective. We know that many of the largest coastal cities in the world will disappear under water by 2050, including Ho Chi Minh City and much of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam (home to 20 million people today), Bangkok, Thailand (current population 9.7 million), Mumbai, India (current population 12.9 million), and Alexandria, Egypt (current population 5.1 million). Worldwide, “some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury.” 6 An additional 250 million people live “on land below annual flood levels.” Those numbers assume that Antarctic ice sheets will remain stable. With significant ice loss, sea levels will rise further, and an additional 50 million people by 2050 and 230 million by 2100 will be forced to move. In sum, a total of 480 million people would be forced to move by 2100, a year that babies born today in wealthy countries are likely to live to see.7 Of course, it is possible to mitigate some damage by constructing seawalls, as the Netherlands has done. However, the costs of protecting that small country have run into the many billions, and much of its defenses were built decades and centuries ago at much lower prices than similar works would cost today—even in countries, like those of South and Southeast Asia or Egypt, with very low labor costs. Conversion to green energy is much cheaper and will yield benefits beyond protecting a few densely populated cities. Of course, much of the world never could be protected with seawalls. It would be impossible to build a wall around all of southern Florida. Besides, walls will be of no help in addressing droughts and extreme heat of the sort that already are causing massive fires in wealthy places like Australia and California as well as in poorer regions utterly unable to respond effectively. Mitigation can at best save a fraction of those who will lose their homes and access to food because of climate change. Yes, houses can be made more resilient, but it would be far more expensive to retrofit or replace homes for the hundreds of millions who live on land that will be vulnerable to repeated floods—not to mention the additional costs of resettling the hundreds of millions of others who will have to leave lands that will be submerged under rising seas—than to replace fossil fuels with green energy. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 339 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 340 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society Some vulnerable crops can be replaced with drought-resistant varieties, but there is no currently feasible technology that can farm fish on a scale sufficient to substitute for the species that will die off as the oceans become more acidic. Similarly, while there is advanced desalinization technology, it is expensive and uses vast amounts of energy, contributing further to global warming. Desalinization plants so far are on a scale utterly inadequate to counteract the certain shortages of fresh water that will worsen in the coming few decades. Desalinization already creates dead zones in coastal waters where the brine extracted from seawater is dumped. No technological solution to that problem has been devised yet, and it may in fact be impossible to solve. Salt extracted from seawater has to go somewhere. We need to recognize that even if the conversion to carbon-free energy proceeds quickly and global warming is limited to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. there still will be a need for mitigation. Since poor people will be most of those who are harmed first by flooding, drought, and crop failures, we can’t expect capitalist firms to invest in mitigation projects. Thus, mitigation projects like the construction of green energy infrastructure will need to be undertaken by governments; therefore, mitigation, like green energy, will open opportunities for creating good jobs. However, we need to be clear that mitigation can help at the margins, at best, and only if global warming is kept to a terrible rather than catastrophic level. No matter how much money is spent on mitigation, there will still be the problems of unintended consequences. Ecosystems are complex, often structured with multiple feedback loops. Expensive schemes for mitigation could backfire, creating more problems than they solve. Current human knowledge about ecosystems is derived from observations on a planet that has had relatively stable temperatures for as long as humans have been engaged in the systematic study of the natural world. Our knowledge cannot be adapted quickly enough or accurately enough to predict the effectiveness of mitigation strategies on a continually but unevenly warming planet. Proposals for adaptation and mitigation all assume the continuance of existing governmental and economic organizations to implement those plans. In so doing, they ignore or at least drastically underplay the ways in which environmental catastrophes will affect political and social relations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is precise and realistic on how a range of calh20556_1st_pp.indb 340 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Creations of the Green New Deal 341 temperature increase will affect various aspects of the global environment, but it sees only a “moderate” increase in threat of large-scale singular events. In other words, the [IPCC] seems to tell us that a temperature increase that would cause significant additional stresses on earth systems and trigger a significant increase in extreme weather would nonetheless have only modest implications for global political economy. The implicit claim—somewhere between assumption and assertion—is that the prevailing liberal, capitalist order is more robust than the global environment, and will adapt to the coming threat better than the ecosystems upon which it depends.8 For example, the panel’s most recent report from 2014 (the next one, scheduled for 2021, is still being written) assumes increases in global “consumption in baseline scenarios . . . from 300% to more than 900% over the century.”9 That is the epitome of what environmental activist Greta Thunberg calls “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”10 The Green New Deal is thus the most cost-effective way—indeed, the only realistic way—to prevent the disastrous consequences of global warming, which would mean mass extinctions and the irreversible melting of the polar ice caps and of glaciers that provide drinking water and irrigation for over a billion people in South Asia, China, and South America.11 The costs of a carbon-free energy regime are far less than what the effects of even 1.5 degrees Celsius will produce, let alone of the 2 to 3 degrees of warming that now is the middle range of temperature increase expected by 2100. WHO WILL PAY FOR THE END OF FOSSIL FUELS? As with any radical change, the Green New Deal will cost some people a lot of money and change the ways in which they live. Those people for the most part will think of themselves and their immediate material interests, not the longterm viability of their species or the planet. Therefore, any realistic plan to implement a Green New Deal cannot focus only on technical and organizational issues. We need to address the expected potential opposition and find ways to mobilize the majorities who do not benefit from current economic arrangements and who will suffer the consequences of climate change. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 341 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 342 -1— 0— +1— The Work of Building a Better Society The one undeniable cost to a conversion to green energy is the destruction of private property in the carbon fuel sector. Oil, coal, and natural gas fields will become worthless. The equipment to mine, refine, and transport those fuels will become useless as well. We need to remember that those costs will be borne by capitalists and by states that have nationalized their oil industries. But most of those states (Norway is the big exception, with some other democracies earning royalties from leasing public lands and offshore sites) do not spend oil money on public goods. Instead, the money goes to the private consumption of rulers, their extended families, and political allies. Ordinary citizens in those countries have little to lose from the end of carbon fuel revenue streams. In the United States, the receipts from royalties paid by fossil fuel companies to extract oil, gas, and coal on public lands pale in comparison with the direct subsidies those corporations get from the government, not to mention the vastly greater indirect benefits oil and coal companies receive—above all, the ability to pollute and the costs of military protection for their energy holdings abroad. The end of carbon fuels has been compared to the abolition of slavery as the only comparable case of the total elimination of an entire category of property through a political process.12 Emancipation cost only the small cohort of slave owners. Ordinary people did not pay a price when slaves were freed, just as they won’t if all the remaining reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas are left in the ground. Slave owners did not surrender easily. Indeed, they fought a civil war in which 2 percent of the U.S. population was killed. Northerners were willing to fight to end slavery because abolitionists were able to portray slaveholders as a powerful elite who controlled, or were conspiring to control, the U.S. government as they did the Southern states. The slave power was presented as a threat to democracy and to the ability of free workers to earn a living wage if slavery expanded beyond the South. The attack on slave power unified workers and farmers in the Northern and Western states. Owners of oil, gas, and coal will not surrender their wealth without a fight. Indeed, they still are pressing for government subsidies to expand drilling for fossil fuels in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Even though solar and wind power now are cheaper to produce than are coal or oil, coal plants and oil pipelines still are being constructed. The G20 countries (the nineteen countries of the world with the largest economies plus the European Union) increased calh20556_1st_pp.indb 342 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Creations of the Green New Deal 343 subsidies for coal from an annual average of $39 billion in 2013–2014 to $57 billion in 2016–2017. While subsidies for coal production fell by more than half in those years, subsidies for coal-fired power plants more than doubled.13 In India, billionaire Gautam Adani used his longtime connections to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party to win loan guarantees, outright subsidies, and regulatory exemptions that made a $2 billion coalfired power plant profitable.14 The same money could have paid for solar panels and windmills that would have produced more power, but green energy advocates lack connections to the Indian government. Green power entrepreneurs in South Asia now will have to compete against subsidized coal power. Adani’s coal plant is built and will continue to be profitable to operate no matter how cheap green energy becomes. Similar deals still are being sealed in Africa, elsewhere in Asia, and to a lesser extent in Latin America, many pushed by China as part of its Belt and Road initiative.15 However, we shouldn’t assume government subsidies for fossil fuels are confined to poor and benighted countries in the Global South. One-time liberal darling Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, pushed through the purchase by the Canadian government for $3.4 billion of the Kinder Morgan Corporation’s Trans Mountain pipeline. The purchase will allow Canada to then spend government funds to triple the pipeline’s capacity to transport oil sands from Alberta to Pacific ports where it can then be exported. Oil sands produce more CO 2 than any other type of oil. We can expect oil and coal barons in all countries to use their wealth to control media, buy politicians, and finance election and propaganda campaigns to try to defeat ambitious and even modest Green New Deal proposals. We need to recognize that these capitalists are our enemies. They cannot be negotiated with. They will not accept compromises because any shift to green energy will destroy the value of their property. Therefore, it is futile to compromise our plans in vain attempts to lessen their opposition, and we should not be fooled by their ad campaigns and pledges to develop green energy. To defeat the carbon fuel barons, we first need to recognize that they are implacable enemies who need to be routed. We need to expose again and again the depth of their greed and their willingness to destroy the planet to enrich themselves. Above all, we need to enlist allies, just as the abolitionists and the politicians of the new Republican Party—most notably, Abraham Lincoln—did in the 1850s and 1860s. calh20556_1st_pp.indb 343 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 344 The Work of Building a Better Society BUILDING A GREEN NEW DEAL POLITICAL ALLIANCE -1— 0— +1— If we want to build mass support for a Green New Deal, it will not be enough to show that the rich will pay and not you. We need to make a positive argument, to show how green jobs will be better and more plentiful than the jobs they replace. In the United States and in much of Europe, good jobs are declining in number. That is why those who work as coal miners, in oil and gas fields and refineries, and in munitions plants fight so hard to preserve those jobs, which are among the best-paying working-class jobs in the United States. When Trump talked of bringing back coal-mining jobs, he was not just appealing to racism by evoking an imagined all-white workforce of the past; he was speaking to the working class’s wish for stable, well-paying jobs. Those jobs are especially precious because they are located in rural areas with few other good jobs, and their high wages support entire families and infrastructures of small businesses. When a coal mine or oil field shuts down, entire communities die. Unemployed oil workers can no longer support the stores and other businesses in their rural communities, and departed oil companies no longer pay the taxes that support schools and other local governmental functions. We can, of course, point out that even if coal production increases, it will create few jobs, and that almost all the job losses in the carbon fuel industries have been due to mechanization, not to a transition to green energy. Coal production in the United States has increased almost 50 percent since the 1930s, but it is being extracted with less than a tenth of the workforce.16 We can show that green energy already is a rapidly growing source of jobs. In 2016 there were 475,000 Americans working in solar and wind energy production compared to only 136,000 in coal, oil, and natural gas.17 But that, too, will not be enough to build mass support for the Green New Deal. Instead, we need to explain how green energy will create millions of permanent good jobs that will not be vulnerable to the vicissitudes and cruelties of capitalist markets. Capitalist firms, especially the large corporations that overwhelmingly dominate the fossil fuel industry and provide most of the jobs in that sector, have no commitment to any particular community. Nor do they care about their employees. They seek to maximize profit and therefore will abandon facilities that are insufficiently profitable, even when that devastates the communities in which those workplaces are located. Most coal mines in the eastern United States have calh20556_1st_pp.indb 344 11/03/22 11:18 AM © COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Creations of the Green New Deal 345 been closed. Workers in the extraction industries have by far the highest rates of injury and workplace death of any employees in the United States.18 Unlike work in the fossil fuel industry, work in green energy is inherently local. It must be located in places where wind or sun are plentiful and where land can most easily be used for wind turbines and solar farms. Environmental rehabilitation must be done where land has been polluted or otherwise harmed, which is much of the United States. The infrastructure for transmitting green energy and for a green transportation system must be built everywhere. Thus, green jobs will be located throughout the United States and mostly in rural areas. A Green New Deal therefore will ensure that the workers who already have lost or will lose jobs as a result of the ordinary operation of a capitalist fossil fuel industry will gain new secure jobs. Since the new jobs will involve construction and skilled manual labor, they will meet former fossil fuel workers’ selfconceptions of what it is to be a useful worker. The Green New Deal, by offering fulfilling and rewarding work to manual laborers who mostly lack college educations, can draw those workers into a coalition that will support the broader expansion of public sector employment that is needed to address the mass transfer of industrial jobs out of the United States and the loss of highly skilled as well as less skilled jobs to increasingly sophisticated programs that rely on artificial intelligence. Public sector employment is the only realistic alternative to the current trajectory, which will doom far too many workers to contingent employment if not permanent joblessness. The political virtue of the Green New Deal is that it can draw manual workers, many of whom live in rural areas that carry disproportionate weight in the U.S. constitutional structure. However, we need to see the Green New Deal and its direct beneficiaries (the people who will be employed building carbon-free energy and mass transit and making existing facilities energy efficient) as part of a broader alliance that will include people who can be employed in care work, including health care and support for the elderly and education for children, as Alyssa Battistoni argues in chapter 4 of this volume. That alliance of course also would include the children and adults who will benefit from making childcare, eldercare, and education at all levels public goods. President Joe Biden recognizes this reality in his infrastructure plan, which includes social service and green energy jobs along with traditional infrastructure. Republicans who oppose Biden’s plan, and who counter by claiming that infrastructure only encompasses roads and bridges, certainly perceive the political potential of calh20556_1st_pp.indb 345 —-1 —0 —+1 11/03/22 11:18 AM