The Climate Leadership Council is an organization of Republican Party elders with an extremely solid proposal to immediately reduce carbon emissions through a carbon fee, which is a market-based mechanism to reflect the true cost of carbon at the source.
I would have applauded this...a decade ago. The proposal itself is a fine thing, but heralding it as 'the right strategy for our political moment' (1) is asinine.
~1/3 of the population has bought into the idea that climate change is a hoax, and that Tea Party conservative demographic has essentially wrested control of the Republican party from the well-intentioned paternalists that used to run it. Appeals to rationality and institutional consensus are unlikely to be effective when you have a large demographic that has lost trust not just in the media but in the notion of the university (2).
While the authors of the proposal are entirely right about both the current political conditions and necessity of bold action, they are no facing an intractable political problem: generating the political capital required to make this a reality demands large-scale public buy-in, most of which will naturally come from the more liberal side of the political spectrum. But the more they do so, the more intense the opposition will be, and this is a made-to-order target for the right: taxes go up! on gas and oil, the previous bodily fluids of the our psychic economy! at the behest of global elites! You can hear the cries of 'Agenda 21!!!' already.
This is a reconstructive policy, and that's great, but it is going nowhere until our existing political crisis is resolved, which is probably 5 years at a minimum.
Force the constitutional convention that the right is advocating for ahead of their schedule and encourage peaceful mass assembly for the airing of various grievances. Institutional consensus has evaporated and the US is in dire need of an administrative and political reboot, so the choices are between doing that in an orderly way through the existing constitutional mechanism or waiting for it to just happen, which will be a lot messier.
Right wing political strategists have sought an article V convention for years, ostensibly to introduce a balanced budget amendment but in all likelihood with other strategic considerations in mind. The liberal left abhors the idea, both because of (wholly legitimate) suspicion at the origin and motivations of the proponents and (less creditably) because of basic conflict/risk aversion.
The right's national electoral strategy is to maintain power through the 2018 midterms (expanding it in a midterm election is historically rare) and control enough state legislatures by 2020 to trigger the convention, at which point all bets are off. I judge that they have a moderately good chance of succeeding with this strategy, not least because of superior political skills at procedural manipulation, but largely because of a smaller and more homogenous winning coalition.
Democrats and the left in general have been resisting this pull, but have lost the strategic initiative. They should, therefore, reverse course and seek to accelerate the process as rapidly as possible - because once the Convention is underway, procedural norms go out the window and power politics take their place. Employing the right's political momentum against them, within the scope of the existing constitutional framework, is by far the best strategic option. The alternative is at least a decade of political trench warfare, civil unrest, and international and institutional drift which could result in a catastrophic decline.
~1/3 of the population has bought into the idea that climate change is a hoax, and that Tea Party conservative demographic has essentially wrested control of the Republican party from the well-intentioned paternalists that used to run it. Appeals to rationality and institutional consensus are unlikely to be effective when you have a large demographic that has lost trust not just in the media but in the notion of the university (2).
While the authors of the proposal are entirely right about both the current political conditions and necessity of bold action, they are no facing an intractable political problem: generating the political capital required to make this a reality demands large-scale public buy-in, most of which will naturally come from the more liberal side of the political spectrum. But the more they do so, the more intense the opposition will be, and this is a made-to-order target for the right: taxes go up! on gas and oil, the previous bodily fluids of the our psychic economy! at the behest of global elites! You can hear the cries of 'Agenda 21!!!' already.
This is a reconstructive policy, and that's great, but it is going nowhere until our existing political crisis is resolved, which is probably 5 years at a minimum.
1. https://www.clcouncil.org/the-right-strategy-for-our-politic...
2. http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisi...