On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

by Naomi Klein

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas, informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism, are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises. But imagine, for a moment, how all this looks to a guy like Heartland president Joseph Bast, who studied economics at the University of Chicago and described his personal calling to me as “freeing people from the tyranny of other people.” To him, it looks like the end of the world. It’s not, of course. But it is, for all intents and purposes, the end of his world. Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.