Amerika

One hefty modern politics is that underlying needs get caught up with the issue, or the political method at hand on which we are voting.

Conservatives, always champions of the environment through something not coincidentally named conservation, are portrayed in our media as opposing all environmental reforms.

It just isn’t so. Instead, there’s a split about method:

• Liberals prefer centralized-government, bureaucratic, and wealth-redistributing solutions.
• Conservatives prefer decentralized, incentive-based, and (if anything) meritocratic solutions.

By “meritocratic” I mean that in such a system the motivated and capable individual can rise above others and gain more for themselves; I do not use the term in the modern parlance to mean we dumb down the playing field so every snowflake is special.

The liberal introduction of class war politics into the environmental issue has poisoned it for most conservatives, even though they were the ones who initiated real reform:

Republicans in the US show no mercy when it comes to environmental issues. They refer to climate change as the “big swindle” and some of them view efforts to increase high-speed train service as a way of decreasing automobile traffic as “socialist.” What’s more, most of them would like to see the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dissolved.

During the Nixon administration, Reilly joined the staff of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality before going on to head the World Wildlife Federation (WWF). When severe heat and widespread air pollution became major issues in the 1988 presidential election, George H.W. Bush, its eventual winner, appointed Reilly to lead the EPA…Reilly and Bush Sr. succeeded in toughening the regulations of the Clean Air Act, the effects of which are still felt today. – Der Spiegel

There is no logical reason for conservatives to oppose addressing environmental issues. In fact, unlike the left, the right is likely to see the whole issue, not just a portion of it that is so broadly construed it may well turn out to be wrong:

“Man-made Environmental Destruction” includes the wrecking and over-consumption of our natural resources, the poisoning of myriad environmental communities and the disruption of important bio-networks. As such, measures for negative man-made “climate change,” or eco-holocaust or pollution include: oxygen levels, CO2 levels, the state of bio-habitats, the state of the soil, the severity of weather patterns, the bio-stock, the food-stock, vegetation-stock, the air-stock, the water-stock, and general meta-bio-networks on which our food, bio, air and water stock are themselves dependent on.

“Global Warming” only measures how cold or warm our globe has gotten and further attempts to gauge from those temperatures what impact mankind’s destruction of his own environment has had on it. The single measure here is a quantitative one. – “Reverend Manny”

The left loves global warming because it allows them to do two things:

1. Advance the class warfare agenda. The problem isn’t too many people, it’s consumption by the wealthiest; thus our solution becomes to penalize the wealthy and transfer that money to the developing world and the poor instead. Nevermind that the wealthy nations are the source of all of our innovation, and the place where most of our intelligent people reside.
2. Ignore the problems of the leftist agenda. Leftists create a society designed for commerce: a society based on individual desire, with as few consequences as possible. This produces neurotic, destabilized and desperate consumers. The leftist agenda will produce a world of 12 billion people who want to drive SUVs to the shopping mall.

The right-wing is ready for green politics, but not in the form (or strawman “issues” like global warming) presented by leftists.

For the right to participate, we must fight environmental damage without sabotaging our economy or creating more bureaucracy. We must instead design environmentalism into the system. This leads to some conclusions that dismay liberals:

• No welfare, entitlements or well-intentioned social programs. The point is to reduce population, not subsidize those who aren’t making it. Job insurance and job loss carryover would be supported by a right-wing environmentalist, as those support the people who truly encounter misfortune. But welfare, entitlements and do-gooder social programs end up being subsidies for incompetence.
• End to class warfare. The more people we elevate to wealth, the more they live these opulent lifestyles. Let the cards fall where they are and build a meritocracy, but stop trying to pull people up by bootstraps they don’t know they have.
• No third world aid. Our population is stable everywhere except in the third world, where it’s booming; people are going to want to have those nice opulent first world lifestyles and they are having many kids apiece to help guarantee that.
• War against competing economies. We don’t want anyone else industrializing, as that puts a heavy load on the environment. As a result, when we do come in conflict with places like Libya or Iraq, part of our agenda should be to blast their infrastructure to bits and slaughter their engineers so they do not rise to industrialized status.
• Conserve land. The only way to reverse our environmental decline is to set aside land for natural species to interact “naturally,” for lack of a better term. As a result, we need to both give huge tax breaks to richer people who set aside land, and use government to purchase or seize all other undeveloped land. This will force existing land prices to rise, with a heavy penalty on the poor.

They sure won’t like that, but when you look at it critically, the above are ways we can actually fix the problem.

This in turn explains why the media religion of Global Warming exists: left-leaning politics cannot solve the real problem, so they invented a surrogate to disguise the elephant in the room.

If we look too critically at it, we see that liberalism created the consumerist gold-rush that defines our modern time. It created it by putting individual desires ahead of standards like culture, class and custom.

When we are all empowered individuals, beholden to nothing but our own wants, nature has no voice — and the collective interest of all of us in a stable society has no voice. The only thing that has a voice is the individual, clamoring for whatever someone else has that it does not.

Modernity was created by the liberalism that put the individual first and if we’re honest, we’ll recognize that it brought about a century of unmitigated disaster, outside of our technological progress:

What’s actually happening is this: we’re realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending.

It’s one thing to read about the changes the internet brought, it’s another to experience them. People who thought they had a valuable skill or degree have discovered that being an anonymous middleman doesn’t guarantee job security. Individuals who were trained to comply and follow instructions have discovered that the deal is over… and it isn’t their fault, because they’ve always done what they were told.

This isn’t fair of course. It’s not fair to train for years, to pay your dues, to invest in a house or a career and then suddenly see it fade.

For a while, politicians and organizations promised that things would get back to normal. Those promises aren’t enough, though, and it’s clear to many that this might be the new normal. In fact, it is the new normal. – Seth Godin

We’re kicking around with global warming because few want to admit that change is upon us, and it’s undoing what we knew as the 20th century.

All of our neglected crises — class war, ecocide, toxicity, crime, multiculturalism, corruption and cultureloss — are coming back to visit us at the same time. It’s like we beat them all in fistfights years ago, but now that we’re tired, they want to fight us as a gang.

The result is that our comfy oblivious-to-reality modern lifestyle is going away. Gasoline prices are never going to go down again the way they were in the past; neither will food prices. The supply of both gasoline and land to grow food is finite, as is water and transportation.

And since there are only so many “designs” a civilization can have, we’re going to revert to older ones:

In the 1970s, people had deep thoughts about what energy meant to society. All kinds of people hoped that decentralizing our energy sources — using lots of individual solar panels, say, instead of one big power plant — would create a society in which political power was also spread farther. Lewis Perelman, however, argued the opposite. He contended that a society running on renewable energy would descend into feudalism that looked like this: “wealth and power based primarily on land holdings, political decentralization, a steady-state economy, and social stratification by class or caste.” And we’d go theocratic, too, after the materialism of our non-capitalist society fell away. – The Atlantic

The coming century is not a liberal one. It is a conservative one, in the meaning that existed before the term conservative was created to describe opposition to the near-unanimous support of liberalism. It is a traditional society.

To prepare for this, it only makes sense that we “green” the right. Not as window-dressing, like the left with its wealth redistribution and elite greenwashed products does, but as a fundamental value. We are the party that conserves all good things, and nurtures them. We will guide people safely into this new brave new world, while we say goodbye to the old and corrupt brave new world that brought us such stunners as revolutions, two world wars and a nuclear standoff.

The right however cannot be compromised by this greening, because integrity is the main benefit the right has to offer — instead, we need to remove the hypocrisy of this sick era of public image, popularity contests and slick marketing, and then use that newfound honesty to look at the green problem:

We have not become more tolerant, but we have become more cautious. The more the taboos are broken in private, the more they are hypocritically upheld in public. Popular culture upholds liberal taboos and then violently lashes out at those same protected groups anyway. Repression breeds hypocrisy. The more empty public speech becomes, the more authentic taboo breaking speech comes to seem. Liberal artists walk a curious line between conformity and abuse, trading in the forbidden bigotries, while agitating against them. The best productions do both at once, displaying the garish spectacle of bigotry in order to formally condemn it, much as epics depicted lavish displays of prurient sin as cautionary examples, All in the Family and South Park are obvious examples. The bigotry is always more glaring and more colorful than its pious denunciation.

It is not mere multiculturalism that is to blame, but the dissolution of any single moral code, putting the ball in the hands of countless political and religious factions, all intent on imposing their own form of control. Some merely want to control the portrayal of their own people. Others aim for grander things. Government imposes sanctions on behalf of some groups, but not others. The clash of priorities between different groups can only be resolved by valuing one identity over another, sexual freedom over religious freedom, or racial privilege over gender equality. In such a clash one group must be degraded and the other elevated. The false victims distinguished from the true victims. And which are the true and which are the false is not only a matter of perspective, but of a political value system. – State Brief

Our goal is not to tack “green” onto our existing programs, as the left has done with wealth redistribution, but to make the foundations of a new type of society which is inherently green. A society in which appearance does not (fully) trump reality, and the individual trades some lax freedoms for a certain sense not just stability, but an honesty and doing right by the world.

As the illusions of modernity come to fruition, and reveal how they never were workable plans at all, we have a new mandate for change. We should take advantage of this opportunity not just to seize power, but to finally fix the deep inner sickness of our society and in doing so, birth a new bright age.