Cultural Marxism at Columbia; Scotland Backs Off Net-Zero; & Greens Hate the Planet
Cultural Marxism at Columbia; Scotland Backs Off Net-Zero; & Greens Hate the Planet
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh looked at the ongoing protests at universities around the United States:
Mephisto's Revenge
And so the War of the Baby Boomers has now come full circle, and for those of us who were in college at the end of the Sixties it's déjà vu all over again. The urgent need of the postwar generation to protest something, anything, is now -- like them -- in its dotage but still lashing out at the thing it's always hated: the United States of America. Only this time, they're on the receiving end of the nasty activism of which they were the first modern practitioners.
And it's happening precisely at Ground Zero of the anti-American revolution: Columbia University, the American home of the Frankfurt School. The tragic irony is that an "intellectual" movement of largely German-Jewish Marxists, refugees from National Socialist Germany, has now been weaponized against the Jews themselves, with anti-Semitic outbreaks on campuses and elsewhere across the country -- this time with the Jews cast in the role of the Nazis. (The current moment is not, it should be noted, the first time Columbia's had a Jewish problem.)
A few years back I published a book that has become, somewhat to my surprise, a foundational text in the war against the anarcho-fascist Left: The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. That book was not strictly about politics but rather a cultural examination of "critical theory's" religious and literary roots, for which I used Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (itself a riff on Genesis) and Goethe's play Faust, Part One as tools of analysis. This is how it begins:
Read it and weep.
In the aftermath of World War II, America—the new leader of the West—stood alone as the world’s premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, a burgeoning transnational elite in New York City and Washington, D.C., embraced not only the war’s refugees but also many of their resolutely nineteenth-century “modern” ideas as well.
Few of these ideas have proven more pernicious than those of the so-called Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of “critical theory.” At once overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile, Critical Theory—like Pandora’s Box—released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a fashionable
Were any of the originators of Critical Theory sill among us, they might well say, quoting Sir Christopher Wren: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Look about your daily lives here in early twenty-first-century America and Western Europe, and see the shabbiness, hear the coarseness of speech and dialogue, witness the lowered standards not only of personal behavior but also of cultural norms, savor the shrunken horizons of the future.
Although this battle is simply the latest front in an ancient war, this critical struggle—“the Fight” or “the Struggle” (or der Kampf), as leftists call it—is the defining issue of our time. It will determine not only what kind of country the United States of America will become but also whether the Western world will continue the moral, cultural, and technological dominance it shares with the larger Anglophone world, or finally succumb to a relentless assault on its values and accept the loss of its cultural vigor. In other words, will it—will we—repel the invaders, organize sorties, ride out and crush them—or wearily open the gates to the citadel and await the inevitable slaughter?
…. Still, the answer to the question I asked in Devil nearly ten years ago remains. It's not enough to laugh at the Boomers' children and grandchildren as they ape their elders while burning down the neighborhood, advocate untrammeled illegal immigration, and mock conservatives for wanting to have children. It is not enough to fall back on the intellectually lazy trope: "Don't they realize that..." as if that's going to dissuade them. They do realize it; the terrifying thing is that they don't care. Maybe -- as the embedded academic twaddle above indicates -- the institutional forces arrayed against any sort of pre-Frankfurtian restoration will prove too strong, and the old campus radicals' chant of "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" will finally be effected.
Our Founding Editor, John O’Sullivan, wrote about the international flight from Net-Zero.
Retreating From 'Net-Zero'
It can’t have escaped your notice that the enthusiasm of the world’s governments for policies of decarbonization that go under the catchy title of Net-Zero has been waning throughout the democratic world in the past year. There was never much enthusiasm for Net-Zero in the non-democratic or “authoritarian” world to start with; it agreed to decarbonize only under pressure from the West and in return for Western wealth transfers, and it never seriously implemented the policy’s tougher restraints on economic growth. That’s especially true of China which has been building coal-fired power stations at a rate of knots.
But the Western democracies have been gripped by a missionary religious fervor, garbed in the white laboratory coat of science (or, more accurately, of Scientism), to lead the world towards a future of Net-Zero carbon emissions by example and climate diplomacy. Even if the theory of man-made global warming were sound—and the headline “imminent catastrophe” version is not supported by the U.N. and many scientific sources—it would not dictate or require Net-Zero policies. There are other and better policy responses—notably a mixture of nuclear power, market-led innovation, and the greater use of “green” natural gas as a “bridge” to lower emissions.
Until the last year, however, Western governments ignored these realities. That was always a case of temporary, if powerful, self-deception. As this column has repeatedly stressed, there is a simple and unavoidable clash between Net-Zero and political democracy. The first has been presented to us as an irresistible force, and the second is proving to be the immovable object that will derail it.
Why? Net-Zero requires cuts in living standards and changes in lifestyles that ordinary citizens won’t like and will vote to reject. If that was mere theory when we at The Pipeline first advanced it, political practice has since confirmed it. Government after government has recently been “scaling down” their targets for carbon reduction; withdrawing or postponing the policies needed to achieve it; and losing elections when proposing “carbon taxes” to fund it.
In recent days there’s been an especially dramatic example of this trend. Scotland’s “devolved” government (i.e., a regional authority with limited sovereignty within the United Kingdom) announced that it was abandoning its earlier Net-Zero target of cutting Scotland’s carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030.
Staying with Scotland, Peter Smith blogged this week about Scotland’s about-face.
'Climate' Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
Steven Hayward contributed a piece on the contradictions embedded in the environmentalist approach to public policy.
Environmentalists vs. the Environment
A funny thing has happened on the way to the glorious “energy transition” to a net-zero economy: environmentalists keep getting in the way.
It is well understood that the maniacal drive to install massive wind and solar power projects, not to mention large new battery farms and “carbon-capture” facilities, all require substantial expansion and upgrading of the electricity grid. When Sen. Joe Manchin finally capitulated in 2022 to supporting President Joe Biden’s blowout “green energy” subsidy bill (the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act”), it was supposed to be part of a deal in which regulatory and permitting reform would follow, not only to allow for a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia that is dear to Manchin, but other infrastructure projects, especially to enable new green energy supplies.
But the permitting reform legislation never passed Congress. Environmental fundamentalists, including 70 Democratic House members, opposed any permitting reform. The chief achievement of decades of environmental activism is the patchwork of laws at the national and state level, such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), that have empowered environmentalists to slow and sometimes block development of all kinds. While NEPA and its state-level versions have not stopped all development, they can delay or increase the cost of projects sufficiently that many projects are simply deterred from even being proposed. When one lawsuit fails, environmental lawyers are often ready at the courthouse steps to file a dozen more, and the cycle of delay repeats.
Environmentalists are loath to give up their superpower, even for the supposed "climate change" kryptonite of "green energy." The Sierra Club, for example, has spent six years blocking a proposed transmission line intended to import emission-free hydropower from Canada. The Sierra Club has also opposed proposed solar power projects in California’s desert areas. (The silver lining here is that the Sierra Club is in deep financial trouble at the moment, with internal rifts and mass layoffs imminent, according to The New Republic.) The Washington Post editorial page took note of this perverse state of affairs in a recent editorial, “Environmentalism Could Stop the Clean-Energy Transition.” The Post notes:
Solar plants and wind farms, transmission lines and carbon-capture projects face opposition from conservationists and other environmental groups asking courts to stop new infrastructure from encroaching on wetlands, forests and other ecosystems. . .
Researchers at Stanford University studied 171 large energy infrastructure projects that completed federal environmental impact studies between 2010 and 2018. Nearly two-thirds of solar energy projects were litigated, they found, as were 31 percent of transmission lines and 38 percent of wind energy projects. . . [L] itigation causes massive delays, raising the costs of multibillion-dollar energy projects. (Even before a project is challenged in court, the required environmental impact assessments can take as long as 14 years.)
Every serious energy analyst knows that grid modernization is urgent even if we weren’t trying to force-feed unreliable “green” energy into our system. Even Jerry Brown, in his second stint a California governor a few years back, called for significant reform of NEPA and California’s own version (CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act), after having championed those regulatory choke mechanisms back in the 1970s.
Jack Dunphy writes about the police recruitment crisis.
Cops Wanted (Some Risks Involved)
Gentle reader, are you looking for a job? Are you interested in one in which you’re regularly exposed to staph infections, lice, scabies, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and every other imaginable parasite and infectious disease as borne by America’s largest population of drug-addicted vagrants?
Would you like to work for a city whose municipal government is rife with socialists, people who would more quickly blame you for their city’s ills than the criminals who prey on their fellow citizens? Are you thrilled at the prospect of a job in which the split-second decisions you make in defending yourself and others from death or serious injury are endlessly scrutinized by people in your chain of command who have spent their careers avoiding situations requiring such decisions?
And finally, are you hoping to work in a city where the district attorney is more eager to imprison you than the criminals you’re expected to confront? If all of that describes you, gentle reader, you’re in luck. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass wants you to know the LAPD is hiring.
Alas for Mayor Bass, the open positions in the LAPD are going begging, with the ten most recent academy classes graduating an average of only 31 recruits, an insufficient number to keep pace with attrition. (For comparison, when I joined the LAPD in the early ‘80s, my class, which was typical of the time, began with about 85 recruits, of whom about 65 graduated, the others having been weeded out by what at the time was a fairly grueling training regimen.)
Los Angeles is not alone in this predicament. A 2023 study by the Police Executive Research Forum showed the problem is felt nationwide. Chicago, for example, is more than 1,600 officers below its staffing level of 2019 as it deals with a robbery epidemic and prepares for this summer’s Democratic National Convention, which has the potential to rival its 1968 predecessor for arousing chaos in the streets.
The dearth of new recruits comes, unsurprisingly, at a time of accelerated attrition, as tenured officers retire earlier than they might once have and as younger officers transfer to departments in less hostile environments or leave law enforcement altogether.
To put it simply, not enough people want to be cops these days, and many who already are wish they weren’t. Consider: As you read this, police officers across the country are on patrol and facing the various hazards to life and limb listed above while knowing that at any moment they may face a wanted suspect willing to violently resist being arrested, perhaps even to the point of killing. These cops know that unless that arrest goes by the book and conforms precisely with every law and policy, no matter how ill-considered, and even with every whimsical preference of those in whose command they serve, they risk being suspended, fired, and even imprisoned.
Tom Finnerty blogged about the Trudeau Government’s latest EV boondoggle.
Throwing Good Loonies After Bad
And David Cavena wondered about the constitutional justification for a recent Biden Administration move to effectively confiscate 13 million acres in Alaska.
The Feds' Unconstitutional Land Grab
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for all of our articles over at The Pipeline!