THE NEW GREEN SERFDOM: The Green New Deal is a path to a more militarized and authoritarian society.

Much has rightly been made of the Green New Deal’s fuzzy-headed utopianism and its impossible goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero in 10 years. But we should also pay close attention to the plan’s authoritarian impulses, particularly in light of its historical inspirations: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the command economy he established during the Second World War.

If proponents of the Green New Deal are serious—and there’s no reason to doubt them*—then they’re proposing a return to a militaristic America where Uncle Sam’s heavy hand intervenes in all aspects of life, curtailing individual freedom in pursuit of their collectivist goals. And like the planners of the Roosevelt years, their intentions are clear and grandiose: They want the power to regiment a society of nearly 330 million people in pursuit of a pipe dream they liken to a war for survival.

Well yes, the moral equivalent of war has been the unifying philosophy of the left for over a century, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in a February article titled “Everyone a Conscript.” “[E]ver since the philosopher William James gave his lecture ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ in 1906, the agenda of 20th-century liberalism has been an exercise in trying to decouple the benefits of war from the bloody bits.”

To be fair, there’s good reason to doubt how serious AOC is: So AOC Was Just Kidding When She Said We Only Have 12 Years Left?