Thread by @asymmetricinfo

I'm not going to try to tweet storm my whole column tonight on the Green New Deal. Instead, I will address one question, and make one point.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-…

The question is "Oh, so we can't try bold action? It's people like you who have held back progress throughout history!"

"Bold action" is not some self-justifying magic incantation that obviates the need for asking whether your bold action can work.

Leonardo Da Vinci's attempts to design a human flight machine were bold. Anyone who had steered one off a cliff while sneering at the naysayers would have crashed to earth at fatal accelerations.

Read science fiction from the 1950s, or for that matter, watch the Jetsons. Many things people assumed would happen did. Many others turned out to be impossible, at least as envisioned.

The observation is related to @jonathanchait's point that the GND is written as if Bernie Sanders were the median Democratic legislator.

Many people have implied, or stated outright, that AOC is completely oblivious to the need to do political coalition-building. I may have been one of them. But that's not quite right.

What the GND shows is that AOC is keenly alive to the delicate task of coalition-building, logrolling, and all the other necessities of political action.

It's just that the coalition she's trying to hold together is the progressives.

She's trying to marry the socialists and the environmentalists, keep the anti-nukers and the AGW folks happy ... none of them have any reason to dislike this document.

(@jonathanchait makes this point in his excellent column: nymag.com/intelligencer/…)

The result is, policy-wise, a mess. It requires her to literally just assume away the problem of paying for all this. And to set nutty deadlines. And say stuff that's going to alienate large parts of the voter base, and the Democratic coalition. But it serves its primary purpose.

The question is whether in doing so, it also serves its ostensible primary purpose, which is to actually do something about climate change.

I tend to think not.

A legislative coalition will require votes from politicians who could not, ever, vote for a tenth of what she's promising, because their voters wouldn't stand for it. Those voters aren't going to replace their politicians with progressives who will gut local industries.

Moreover, to the extent it actually gets attention, this stuff is going to freak out those voters about Democrats, thus making it less likely you'll have control of any branch in which you could attempt to get the GND rolling.

What this document is good for is building a coalition to get elected in a very liberal district. If that's the problem you're trying to solve, and are willing to sacrifice the chance to make progress on AGW in order to reach that end, mission accomplished.

And in fairness, the politics of emissions reduction are terrible, China and India are still out there even if you solve them, and despair seems to greet you at every turn, so why not at least get some political mileage out of a nihilistic recognition that the task is impossible?

No, that's too cynical. Better: half-measures, and quarter-measures, and one-one-hundred-twenty-eighth measures all fail, why not get political mileage out of standing for what you think we should do, rather than an inadequate band-aid that also won't pass?

So in some ways, this document makes AOC look much more politically sophisticated than she is generally given credit for.Though other aspects (the incredibly sloppy composition and release of the document), still support the case that this was simply amateur-hour.

Anyway, that's all I've got for tonight. Read the column here. washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-…