When the Green New Deal Goes Global
AFTER DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a woman in her late 20s drove west from her home in New York City. She passed through Flint, Michigan, and ended up on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, where protesters had camped out to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, which they said posed a threat to local water supplies.
Inspired by what she saw, she returned to New York to oppose the incumbent Democrat in a congressional primary, beating him to become the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress. On the first day of her orientation, she joined the youth-led civic Sunrise Movement in occupying the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives, the highest-ranking member of her own party. Three months later, she followed up by proposing her first piece of legislation with veteran Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey: the Green New Deal, a multitrillion-dollar plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy on the path to global net-zero emissions by 2050.
The person is, of course, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist. Her origin story tells us much about the present moment—and the West’s future politics.
First, there is the centrality of climate change, which keeps this variety of socialism blissfully distant from that of the Cold War. Ocasio-Cortez was less than a month old when the Berlin Wall fell and has no vestigial defensive reflex to the red-baiting that she still faces from her U.S. opponents.
Second, there is the will to be guided by projects originating at the grassroots and the margins—a lesson taken from the abject mismanagement of the insular and centrally controlled Democratic machine of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Third, and most expansively, there is a focus on how power runs not just through money and government—Wall Street and Washington—but through the soil, the turbine, and the mortgage lender’s redline
