In February, Democratic representative from the state of New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a piece of legislation that would completely overhaul how the United States confronts what Democratic politicians see as the environmental crisis our planet is currently facing. The Green New Deal for America, as Ocasio-Cortez refers to it, is bursting with far-left policies and unreasonable expectations for the future of our country, dooming it from its inception and formally killing the bill with a senate vote that occurred last month.
As a political outsider, an individual can easily grasp the bill was too much, too quickly for America to digest at one time, but the Green New Deal is a fair representation of the Democratic Party’s stance on environmental issues. This raises a question. Why was Ocasio-Cortez unable to drum-up the left-wing support for her bill? The answer is simple. Political ideology did not kill the Green New Deal, political tactics did.
Democrats are the historical masters of incremental politics, gradually acclimating the American people to their unpopular initiatives since former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ocasio-Cortez’s willingness to propose such a massive piece of legislation illustrates her honesty in her intentions as well as her inexperience in politics, in contrast to her more seasoned colleagues’ ways of operating. Through incremental politics, the Left integrates their policies into American society through small yet nearly irreversible victories, with the intention of moving towards some radically left terminal goal in the future.
This tactic has been employed successfully regarding various issues within American politics; Some such issues include gun-control, abortion rights and government-controlled healthcare. Recognizing, exposing and countering the Left on their incrementalistic tactics is essential in the preservation of traditional conservative values and fundamental American freedoms.
The incremental politics of the Left are most obviously observed when America faces a time of economic crisis or tragedy.
According to Ruth Ravve of Fox News, former President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff and current mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
No Democrat accelerated his unpopular agenda through incrementalistic politics better than Franklin Roosevelt. FDR used the Great Depression as a catalyst to force his social programs down America’s throat. A government-centric economy complete with price control, state control of business and exorbitant tax rates was and is the left-wing dream, and the Great Depression served as a perfect launch pad to push this agenda.
According to Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, when FDR launched his agenda, “The cruel irony of the New Deal is that the liberals’ honorable intentions to help the poor and the unemployed caused more human suffering than any other set of ideas in the past century.”
This is because these liberal policies endure and build on one another. It is impossible to remove the New Deal’s legacy because it is already entrenched in the American system. It is impossible to remove programs like Social Security post-creation without denying the promised benefits to those who have paid into the system for their entire lives.
These politics build on themselves as history seemingly repeats. One of the most recent example is the Obama administration. His Affordable Care Act, a government mandated and regulated health insurance policy, is a crippling expense on businesses and is detrimental to the healthcare quality of employees. Obamacare allowing the government to regulate what an individual’s health insurance must cover is a massive government overstep on the rights of its citizens and, as a result, it is a bill that should have failed as spectacularly as the Green New Deal. But the problem is, the bill passed because it is was a change that was small enough for the American people and, more importantly, lawmakers to digest. But “Obamacare” is not the ultimate goal. Medicare for All, total socialization of healthcare, as proposed by Bernie Sanders, is the new objective for the Democrats.
According to John Tozzi of Bloomberg News, Medicare for All “would be a radical change to U.S. health care, potentially dismantling much of an existing system where people get health benefits through work.”
The radical change would make government the sole entity responsible for the health of all its citizens, making each one of us dependent on it for our healthcare. Every doctor would become a state employee, the incentive to work would be removed, quality of care would diminish immensely and this is all because the Democrats want to expand the power of the government over the lives of ordinary citizens.
The same policy holds true with the gun-control issue. The proposed bump stock ban and regulation of what they refer to as assault rifles are just stepping stones to their true intentions of total repeal of the second amendment. NRA lobbyists and conservative politicians are forced to oppose any “common-sense” gun legislation proposed by Democrats as a preemptive deterrent to the Left’s incrementalistic tendencies.
It falls to the American people to recognize and combat the left-wing agenda and the misleading legislation they try to force. A socialist-planned economy, single-payer healthcare and total repeal of the second amendment, these are the nightmare policies today’s Left are using to radically change the fabric of American life. We have a patriotic duty to ensure America remains the envy of the Western world and remains the shining beacon of freedom and prosperity we all know it to be.
