The most vocal are often the least serious

Lies actually

By sheer chance, I happened to stumble upon this snippet on Bloomberg over the week. It discusses Bill McKibben, a major figure in the environmental activist world, asking fellow activists to cut Harris some slack for her support for fracking. He favors banning fracking, but wants to do everything he can to keep Trump out of the White House. That’s good on his part, but his overall approach to climate change exemplifies basically everything wrong with the environmental movement.

He first became famous for opposing the Keystone XL pipeline and now has made his new crusade fighting to block the approval of LNG export terminals. His whole approach centers around trying to block fossil fuel projects from going forward. It’s a dead end both substantively and politically, but it’s great for riling people up, getting attention and donations.

In McKibben’s case, he not only makes blocking fossil fuel projects his main priority, he opposes permitting reform efforts, including the one being pushed for in the Senate right now. He has begun to come around on nuclear power, but opposed it for decades and fought to shut down the Vermont Yankee power plant. Rhetorically, he has been a doomer for as long as I’ve known about him.

The combination of apocalyptic rhetoric and opposition to doing anything of substance is not unique to him nor is it unique to the environmental activist world. I have written many times about the problems of mistaking the preferences of professional activists for the preferences of voters. Lately, that has been a bigger problem on the left, but it has been a problem on the right before and will be again sooner or later.

My overall point in writing about the problem of listening to activists is that the most vocal are seldom the most representative even though it’s tempting to think the opposite. Here, I’m going one step further. I’m arguing that not only are the most vocal not the most representative, but they are also often the least serious about addressing the problem they claim to care about.

When I say the most vocal, I’m not just talking about activists and advocacy groups. I’m talking about elected officials and candidates for office, too. The three issues I’m going to discuss here, climate change, immigration and the federal deficit, are all things where activists, elected officials and candidates have been big offenders in not really caring about what they say they do.

Combining apocalyptic rhetoric with opposition to doing anything substantive is not a new phenomenon. Arguably the original doomer was Thomas Malthus. For those not familiar, he was a cleric and economist best known for a book written in 1798 that predicted the world population would grow too fast for food production to keep up and there would be mass starvation. If he really was worried about that, an obvious solution would have been birth control, but he opposed it on the grounds that it was morally wrong.¹ His prediction of mass famine turned out to be wrong, but the mentality behind it is still with us and is often a driving force behind NIMBYism and other zero sum beliefs.

I apologize, but I have to do some shameless self-promotion here before we proceed. I am consistent in what I believe. When I say I care about something, I walk the walk. For example, I care about climate change, which is why I’m a die-hard supporter of nuclear power and permitting reform. When someone claims to believe in a higher ideal beyond a specific matter, I will hold them to it. When they don’t follow through with it, I will go Joe Pesci on their ass.

I’m a sucker for consistency. I have no patience or tolerance for those who say they believe in something when they clearly don’t. Just be honest! If all you care about is a specific matter and don’t believe in a broader ideal, then just say so. If you have another agenda you’re pushing, don’t lie about it.

To use an example of what I’m talking about, let’s look at Israel/Gaza, a subject where everyone is completely rational and no emotion is involved at all. I have written critically about many critics of Israel. That’s not an endorsement of the Israeli government or any specific policy. My beef with many critics of Israel is that they don’t really believe in what they claim to.

It’s common to hear accusations of genocide. I have found that a large majority of those claiming that reserve almost all their anger for Israel. Few of the most vocal have anything bad to say about Hamas and many of them are even supportive of what they did on October 7. Hamas deliberately places their operations and fighters among Palestinian civilians so that they will go down with them, but I seldom hear the most vocal critics of Israel even acknowledge that.

What really is going on for those who do that is not a concern for Palestinian lives. It’s hatred of Israel. If someone doesn’t really care about Palestinians and just wants to hate Israel, that’s their right, but they should be honest about it. I understand why people aren’t honest about it because it’s morally disgusting, but it’s what they believe and nobody should be fooled.

Similarly, I wish those on the right who claim to be concerned about antisemitism would acknowledge that it’s a problem on their side, too. Since October 7, there have been many antisemitic incidents and many groups and individuals have been vocal in calling it out on the left, where it has been a problem. I’m all for calling it out on the left, but someone who truly opposes antisemitism (and all forms of hatred) calls it out no matter where it comes from.

I have heard non-stop outrage from those on the right over campus protesters, but I haven’t heard many of them say anything about the Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina or Trump’s many antisemitic remarks. You’ll have to forgive me, but I think those are much bigger deals than some idiots LARPing on college campuses. If someone is only concerned about antisemitism when it comes from the left, that’s their right. I just ask that they be honest and say so.

Climate change

This is a subject I write about frequently. As regular readers know, I have very little in the way of nice things to say about most of what passes for the environmental movement these days. It’s a rare moment when activists and groups aren’t doing something wrong. The most significant climate change legislation ever passed, the Inflation Reduction Act, was the work of Joe Manchin not the Sierra Club. The advancements in clean energy technology have had nothing to do with groups like Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

It’s environmental groups pushing for unpopular ideas like blocking fossil fuel projects and banning fracking that has done real damage to the Democratic Party’s prospects in parts of the country. There are many people and groups in the left-wing advocacy world who I think are dumb and annoying, but I don’t care about them beyond that. Nobody cares about the latest culture war fight of the hour, but people do care about energy prices. I think the lowest moments of the Biden Administration were when they were flailing when gas prices surged and couldn’t decide if they’d rather upset a few activists or get wiped out at the polls.

It was the environmental crowd that was demanding Biden go way out into left-field and block LNG exports and declare a climate emergency. This was after Biden had made climate change a priority and signed the IRA. Rather than taking the W, they immediately started making new demands, which is a telltale sign of bad faith actors. Someone arguing in good faith knows when to take the W. If they ask politicians for something and get it, they thank them for it and get to work in helping them get reelected.

As I mentioned recently, almost every major environmental group is opposing the permitting reform bill being pushed for in the Senate now. Many of those groups, like the Sierra Club, are against nuclear power, too. Congress recently passed and Biden signed legislation that will help advance smaller nuclear reactors and I heard nothing about it from any of the usual suspects. That’s just as well because I’m sure they’d have opposed it.

These groups and activists are simultaneously arguing (a) climate change is an existential threat, (b) we only have a few years left to solve it or we’re doomed, and (c) are fighting every obvious solution to it. There is no way to solve the problem of climate change without clean energy of every type having a chance to succeed. There is no way clean energy of any type will reach its potential without substantial changes to permitting rules. There is no way existing technology will be enough to get us anywhere close to a clean energy economy.

What’s really going on here? Psychoanalyzing a large number of people necessarily involves making generalizations and assumptions. Environmental activists are virtually all leftists. It’s not enough to tackle climate change. We have to dismantle capitalism, as Greta Thunberg likes to say. That’s one reason so many environmental activists hate Elon Musk. He’s shown that capitalism is the solution to climate change and no socialist revolution is needed.

If permitting reform is enacted and clean energy thrives, it will be great for many reasons. What it won’t do is lead to a collectivist system of any sort. The capitalist system will be very much alive and kicking. For those who want to burn it all down, that’s awful, hence their opposition to anything that doesn’t involve fundamentally remaking society in their image.

For most people, protesting is just about being a part of something. Permitting reform is abstract and boring. Railing against a pipeline is much more concrete and can be visualized more easily. It’s much more emotionally satisfying to believe stopping one pipeline from being built will save the world than it is to do the tedious work of trying to get clean energy legislation passed and dealing with the inevitable tradeoffs.

Immigration

This is an issue where the big offenders are on the right. For the longest time, it was almost entirely those on the right calling for border security measures. Trump is the best example of it, but plenty others do it, too. It’s become a rite of passage for every Republican politician to make a trip to the border and talk about how it’s the most dangerous place on earth.

Republicans in Congress had a golden opportunity to prove they really meant what they said. Last October, Biden requested additional aid to Ukraine. Congressional Republicans balked at it and demanded an immigration bill as a condition for it passing. Biden agreed and a bipartisan group in the Senate was formed to craft legislation. The legislation introduced was exclusively about border security and did everything from hire more border patrol agents to drastically change the process for claiming asylum.

For Republicans and those on the right who claim to care about securing the border, that bill was their dream come true. Not only did it give them almost all of what they wanted, it was endorsed by a president from the other party. Its odds of passing with large, bipartisan support and not generating a backlash at the polls were very good. All they had to do was take yes for an answer. That’s not how things unfolded.

I wrote about it in detail at the time, but the quick version is Trump told congressional Republicans to not support the bill because he wanted it as a campaign issue. That might be the first honest thing he’s ever said. Bowing down to their cult leader, congressional Republicans immediately opposed the bill, including many who supported it five seconds earlier.

All kinds of pathetic excuses were made for opposing the bill, but it’s clear that campaigning on the issue is much more important than solving it. Harris still supports the bill and says she will sign it as president so maybe it will get a new lease on life if she wins. If Trump wins, there is no chance in hell it will pass² and no congressional Republicans or anyone in the right-wing media ecosystem will so much as utter a peep about it.

For those who make a living off of railing against immigrants (or anything for that matter), the worst thing that can happen is they succeed. Like protesting against pipelines, railing about the border being a hellscape is much more fun than passing legislation to fix it. For right-wing entertainers, there are few issues more galvanizing to their audience than immigration. If legislation is passed and problems at the border go away, that’s good for the country, but terrible for their bottom line and that’s what they care about the most.

For Republicans and those on the right, Trump is the dominant figure and they have followed him wherever he goes. Trump doesn’t care about the border and never has. Pleasing their cult leader is the highest priority for Republicans and the right even if that means abandoning things they were pushing for right before he said not to. Dear Leader can never be wrong, he can only be wronged.

Unlike the environmental crowd being inconsistent with what they claim to believe, there is no other agenda being pushed for here. With a few exceptions, Republicans in Congress and those on the right aren’t interested in governing or policymaking. Republicans love to campaign on issues, but don’t actually want to address them because it would be unpopular (entitlement cuts), they don’t want to do the work of crafting legislation and dealing with tradeoffs (health care) or they just never cared about it in the first place (the federal deficit).

Federal deficit

The federal deficit fell off the political radar when Trump showed up, but it will return eventually. During the early 2010s it was all the rage. Democrats and Republicans loved to talk about how important it was and how we needed to get our fiscal house in order. Not a day went by when I didn’t hear the phrase “fiscal responsibility” every hour.

It’s true the nation’s fiscal trajectory is not likely sustainable. Payment on interest alone is now bigger than what is spent on the military. With an aging population, the federal government is only going to spend more over the coming decades. Revenues are not big enough to cover what is spent now and have no prayer of being enough in the future absent significant changes.

It was wrong in the 2010s to focus on the federal deficit because interest rates were low and unemployment was high, but that’s the course that was taken. It was during that time when Paul Ryan became a household name. Nobody claimed to be more concerned about the federal deficit than him. He warned that our day of reckoning was coming.

Given the supposed gravity of the situation, you might think he was in favor of doing everything possible to avert it. You would be dead wrong. Ryan opposed any increase in revenues and supported only spending cuts. In particular, he wanted to convert Medicare into a voucher program. He wanted to chop up Medicaid and gut most the rest of the safety net. On taxes, not only did he oppose tax increases, he wanted massive tax cuts.  

I’m using Ryan as an example, but he was hardly the only one. Almost all Republicans in Congress opposed tax increases of any sort and supported spending cuts only. Republicans were in an unusual space then. There has been a lot of attention paid to Democrats going out into left-field during the Trump years, but Republicans did the same during the early Obama years. From 2009-2012, Republicans, especially in Congress, became doctrinaire right-wingers.

That was different from George W Bush and Trump. Trump opposed any changes to entitlement programs and Bush presided over a big expansion of the federal government. Trump and Bush both presided over a big increase in the federal deficit. That’s normal for how Republicans govern when they’re in charge. The early Obama years were an aberration.

The Republican presidential candidates in 2012 ran on chopping up the federal government. Ideas campaigned on included a flat tax, elimination of the minimum wage, elimination of capital gains taxes, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare vouchers and ripping up Medicaid. Rhetorically, it was all about business founders and owners, i.e., “job creators.”

This is all to say that what Ryan and Co. really wanted was not fiscal responsibility. Having the federal deficit explode was not something they cared about per se. What they really wanted was to gut social programs. In their eyes, the safety net was bad. It made people lazy and was rewarding takers while punishing makers.

That’s what was really going on. What mattered was gutting the safety net. If that meant the federal deficit continued to increase, that was okay. It’s was a belief then and is still a belief now that deficits caused by tax cuts are fine. It’s only when deficits are caused by spending increases that it’s bad.

Unlike Republicans and those on the right today, Ryan had another agenda he was pursuing. He truly wanted to fulfill it and believed social programs were bad. In the end, though, his vision was killed not by Democrats and the left, but by Trump.

In a funny twist of fate, it was people like Ryan who did more than anyone else to help pave the way for Trump. How we got Trump is something we’ll be arguing over forever, but I think it’s simple. We got Trump because Republican primary voters chose him and they chose him because he reflected them much better than the others candidates running did. While the other candidates thought rank-and-file Republican voters wanted Ryan’s agenda, Trump saw they had no interest in it.

Trump saw that nobody cares about the size of government. For years, Republican candidates had spent their time catering to the interests of donors and ignoring their voters. That left a huge void, which Trump filled. If Republicans had an agenda that addressed the concerns of their rank-and-file voters and if their leaders hadn’t been so hopelessly out of touch, Trump probably never would have been nominated in the first place.

1. Apparently mass starvation was the morally superior option. I’d like to know who taught him ethics.

2. Democrats in Congress were willing to hold their noses and support it. They wanted to defuse it as an issue in the election. If Trump wins, they won’t have any incentive to cooperate and won’t want to help him out on anything without major concessions.