What If Progressives Don’t Believe in Progress?

I found this interview by Brendan O’Neill at Spiked of Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor at Newsweek, refreshing. First, to place Ms. Ungar-Sargon on the political spectrum:

Batya Ungar-Sargon: I consider myself a left-wing populist. Routinely, people on the left would say that I’m a conservative and that the points I make are conservative talking points. I always laughed at this because, first of all, I don’t think ‘conservative’ is an insult. People expect you to act like somebody just called you fat.

In a way that hearkens back to one of my earliest posts here at The Glittering Eye. Because such statements are almost always subjective, they’re also almost always off target. Most people identify themselves as moderates because they’re in the center of their universes. However, when you analyze their views according to some objective standard, it may turn out quite differently than they might anticipate. Every year or so I check my own views over at The Political Compass and gosh dern it I’m actually centrist—almost smack dab in the middle.

I don’t know what Ms. Ungar-Sargon’s political views are but for that reason she probably doesn’t have a very clear notion of where she fits into the political spectrum.

Here’s an interesting exchange:

O’Neill: Do the elites really believe in the green agenda? Or do they just benefit from it?

Ungar-Sargon: I think they definitely believe it. I don’t think you can look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, and not see somebody who is deeply sincere. The only thing that makes me think that they don’t believe it is the private jets. If you believed so deeply in man-made climate change, surely the first thing you would do is ban private jets. But on the whole I do think they believe it. It would be very hard to pull off at this scale if they didn’t.

The way the elites think of the economy is very related to green ideology. They picture an economy in which the top 20 per cent keeps making over $100,000 a year and lives in nice neighbourhoods and nice cities. All production is done in China. All service-industry jobs are performed by slave-wage Venezuelans brought in by cartels. And everybody making under $100,000 a year – who used to be the working class – is on universal basic income. That’s the view that a lot of so-called progressives consciously or unconsciously have of their ideal economic system.

Of course, this fits right into the green movement. You can’t have a middle class without cheap, affordable fuel and energy. And climate activists don’t believe in cars, they don’t believe in trucks, they don’t believe in farming. They don’t believe in the jobs that we actually rely on to survive. They’ve essentially given up on America. They’re definitely not proud of America, they’re ashamed of it. They hate conservatives, religious people, Republicans, people who voted for Trump. To them, those people are anathema to the good life.

The green movement just fits so neatly into this worldview. We’re outsourcing the dirty jobs to China, so we can forget about the CO2 emissions. At the same time, we’re happy to sentence the people who do those jobs to impoverishment. It’s an incredibly dark and elitist worldview.

Of course the environment doesn’t care where the emissions are produced. If human action is the primary driver of climate change, it doesn’t make any difference whether that action is taken in the United States, China, or Brazil. In time it will spread across the entire world.

I honestly don’t know if that’s what today’s progressives believe. It certainly doesn’t comport with my idea of progress, indeed, it sounds a lot more like totalitarianism to me.

The greatest irony of all is that while a tremendous number of those in the top 20% of income earners, the so-called “creative class”, are completely expendable. Those are the jobs that will be replaced by artificial intelligence. They can be replaced but plumbers and UPS drivers can’t.