“The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism,” the book explains. But there was good news, too: “The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.”
Building a better world has been the progressives’ goal from the very beginning. And Klein says that climate alarmism is the “existential crisis” that gets us there. A documentary based on This Changes Everything came out a year after the book, and in the accompanying trailer, Klein asks what she calls “the big question”: “What if global warming isn’t only a crisis? What if it’s the best chance we’re ever gonna get to build a better world?” Then she delivers an ultimatum: “Change, or be changed.” In other words, help us build our better world willingly, or we will force you into it.
But what can Klein force us to do after all? She’s a prominent progressive theorist, yes, but she doesn’t make policy. And the people who do make international climate policy really must care about the environment. Surely they can’t share such a radical aim as the destruction of the world’s economic system . . . can they?
As it turns out, yes, they can. Here is what Otto Edenhofer, a former official on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told a Swiss newspaper while he was serving as a co-chair of one of the IPCC’s working groups in 2010:
[O]ne must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
Edenhofer also said that an upcoming international conference, ostensibly about climate, was “actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”
This was not just an isolated remark by one radical former official. The current top climate official at the UN has confirmed that the goal of bringing about economic change through climate policy remains in place. In February 2015, Christiana Figueres, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told a press conference in Brussels that the goal was to “intentionally transform the economic development model.” She went on: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.”
The economic model that has been dominant since the industrial revolution is, of course, capitalism. And the UN has vowed to “intentionally transform” that model through climate policy—to dismantle capitalism.
Besides ignorance of basic economics and blinding ideology, what drives this cadre of scientists, CEOs, politicians, and bureaucrats to dismantle capitalism under the guise of saving the environment? It’s fear. But not the kind you might think. They aren’t afraid of actual harm to the planet. Yes, some passionate but ill-informed environmentalists might really believe that we will all die in a hail of fire and brimstone brought down by a vengeful Mother Earth, but those at the top who are pulling the strings of the movement are afraid of something much greater: the balance of power tilting back toward individual liberty and away from state control.
The free market has remained the dominant economic model for the last century and a half for a good reason: it works. Progressives have tried to fight it tooth and nail in any number of countries under any number of banners—from socialism to communism to progressivism—but they have never succeeded. Temporarily, perhaps, in some places, but never completely.
They fear the choice that the free market offers. There are too many possible paths for humanity to take, too many “wrong” roads to go down. Progressives don’t like giving the masses too many options, because normal people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions.
That is the fundamental, though never stated, reason behind the embrace of the UN and its climate policies. It’s the ultimate weapon in a last-ditch battle against the free-market system. Progressives have realized that they probably can’t win the ideological battle—people will keep choosing freedom over authoritarianism any day—so instead they must use economics as a force. Millions of hardworking Indians and Chinese wouldn’t choose to stay in poverty; they want electricity, cars, and all the perks of modern life that we are blessed to have. So, true to their nature, progressives opted for carrying out their revolution behind the scenes rather than in the open.
Climate policy has simply provided a convenient cover for an otherwise fairly standard progressive agenda item. The climate affects the entire world, so naturally, the UN should wield worldwide authority, they reasoned. And with that authority, progressives can build their “better world” by slowly regulating the free market out of existence, thereby eliminating the choice they fear—until their new world is the only choice left.
It’s Cloward-Piven on a global scale.
LIE 3
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PROGRESSIVES RESPECT THE CONSTITUTION
We believe in the wisdom of our founders and the Constitution.
—HILLARY CLINTON, NATIONAL CONSTITUTION CENTER, 2013
America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents.
—BARACK OBAMA, FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 2009
THE LIE
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Progressives have been able to remain a force in American politics because they present themselves as “typical politicians.” As we’ve seen, they can’t show the true nature of their ideology because if they did, the vast majority of the American people would rise up and outright reject it. Unlike, say, self-declared socialists or communists, progressives don’t call for open revolution to achieve their goals; they prefer “progression,” gradual change over time. The progressive revolution will not be televised. In fact, if they do it the way they want to, most people won’t even know it’s going on. One day, we’ll all wake up, and the “fundamental transformation” will be complete
Progressives need to blend in. They need to “talk the talk” and “walk the walk” so that they don’t stand out from their more moderate colleagues. A big part of talking that talk is proclaiming their passion for the Constitution and the traditions on which America was founded.
But while progressives may pay lip service to the Constitution, their ideology actually calls for its subversion. In the progressive mind-set, the Constitution is—at best—flawed, outdated, and not up to the task of solving the problems of modern times, not helpful to the “progression” they are attempting to hasten along.
Woodrow Wilson talked a lot about a “living” constitution being “Darwinian in structure and in practice.” Wilson believed that “Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All the progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”
Franklin Roosevelt called the Constitution “the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.” And now Barack Obama carries on the tradition.
When Obama stepped forward to give his inaugural address on January 20, 2009, throngs of admirers standing on the bitterly cold National Mall, along with millions more across the country and around the world, waited with bated breath to hear what he had to say. He was already a historic figure, the nation’s first African-American president, but he was also the figurehead of a movement, someone who had vowed in his campaign to “fundamentally transform” the country.
With some of the first words he spoke as president of the United States—the sixth sentence of his inaugural address, to
be precise—Obama paid tribute to the Constitution and our founding principles. In times of trouble, he said, “America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents.”
It was all there. The purposeful appropriation of the phrase “we, the people” from the Constitution’s preamble, the lofty language about “ideals of our forebears” and “our founding documents.” It was exactly what the public would expect from someone who had just taken an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. And in this case, the constitutional connection was even more appropriate: the incoming president was supposedly an expert who had even taught classes in constitutional law! Surely someone with that background would respect the primacy of the document on which all of our laws were based . . . right?
Obama’s second inaugural address saw him reach another historic milestone: he was the first president in modern times to be reelected with fewer votes than in his first election. Considering the rancor of his first term and the controversies over Obamacare and other items of his policy agenda, that was hardly surprising. It’s important to note that in 2013, Obama went right back to waxing poetic about the nation’s founding principles, but he later pivoted to a more nuanced and perhaps more revealing view.
The president began with a reference to the “enduring strength of our Constitution.” He spoke of the duty of every generation since 1776 “to keep safe our founding creed.” Fair enough. But shortly thereafter, he presented a slightly different view, suggesting that our “founding principles” might be flexible after all: “[W]e have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. When times change, so must we.”
That was starting to sound awfully relativist, awfully progressive. And just in case there was any doubt, Obama later circled right around to the word itself: “Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.”
In his view, stale “debates about the role of government” (debates that help keep our republic vibrant and alive) were simply stumbling blocks to all-important progress. Who had time for debates when we had to “act in our time”? Who cared about what the Constitution actually said when action was more important? In fact, in Obama’s logic, being “true to our founding documents” meant we should set aside our differences and just “act” in the name of progress.
THE TRUTH
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In his second inaugural address—beginning a term in office when he would be free from the bother of having to persuade the American people to elect him ever again—Obama expressed a more flexible attitude toward our founding principles and their applicability to modern times. It would follow, then, that this same attitude was extended to the document in which these principles are enshrined: the U.S. Constitution.
Isn’t that a bit of a leap? some of you may be asking. Fair question, but let’s look back at a few comments Obama made long before his presidency for a glimpse into his real thinking on the usefulness of the Constitution.
In 2001, while serving in the Illinois State Senate and teaching constitutional law classes at the University of Chicago Law School, Obama gave several interviews to Chicago public radio station WBEZ. These first came to light and made some waves during the 2008 campaign, but they seem to have largely faded from public view since then. Though still early in his career, Obama had clearly formed sophisticated views on the Constitution by this point, no doubt one reason he was invited on the program in the first place.
In one interview, which got some attention because Obama decried our country’s inability to achieve “major redistributive change through the courts,” he also spoke about the Constitution in general, blaming it for blocking major judicial activism. He stated that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, one of the most liberal phases in modern Supreme Court history, “didn’t break free from the essential restraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.” In the context of the interview, it’s clear that Obama wished Warren had. He continued: “[G]enerally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties that says what the states can’t do to you, what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the state governments or the federal government must do on your behalf.” Obama clearly believes it is inconvenient that the Founders set up the Constitution with a limited government in order to protect citizens from federal overreach, instead of laying out what government “must do” on behalf the people.
Another radio appearance that same year saw the future president participate in a panel discussion on the Constitution and slavery. Obama and the panelists discussed the debates and compromises over slavery in the Constitution’s history, as well as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments added after the Civil War, which outlawed slavery and further expanded individual freedoms. After a fellow panelist, a history professor, noted the importance of judging the Founders’ preservation of slavery in the Constitution in the context of their time, Obama offered his take, calling the Constitution “a remarkable document” but also “an imperfect document . . . that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.”
Obama went on to talk about the Founders’ lack of concern for African-Americans, but it soon became clear that he was not confining his criticism to simply the historical, pre–Civil War Constitution:
I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.
What is this “fundamental flaw”? Obama never clearly explained, but what is clear is that he thinks there are still problems with the Constitution today. For most of us, the amendments added to the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War represent a great triumph of how our constitutional system is supposed to work. The country rejected once and for all the brutality of slavery and enshrined that rejection forever in our founding document.
Yet Obama still sees the Constitution as fundamentally flawed more than 150 years later. Does that make it easier for him to subvert or ignore its constraints in the name of progress? Perhaps. Did his view of the “fundamental flaw of this country,” reflected in its Constitution, lead him to run for president on a promise to “fundamentally transform” that flawed country? Perhaps. But in any case, the idea that the Constitution has outlived its usefulness is not new. If Obama does in fact believe that, then he is merely continuing in a long tradition of progressive scholarship.
Herbert Croly, an intellectual godfather of the progressive movement in the early twentieth century and founder of the New Republic, one of progressivism’s main journals of record, was a friend and inspiration to progressive politicians such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, reading Croly’s 1909 progressive tract The Promise of American Life was a direct factor in Roosevelt’s decision to run as an independent “progressive Republican” candidate in the 1912 election. And Croly had some interesting views on the Constitution.
In The Promise of American Life, he argued that the Federalists who drafted the Constitution represented “chiefly the people of wealth and education,” and as such they “demanded a government adequate to protect existing propertied rights.” This resulted in a Constitution that, according to Croly, “did succeed
in giving some effect to their distrust of the democratic principle.” To Croly, the Founders were rich men looking out for their fortunes who were “distrustful” of democracy.
If Croly planted the seeds of the constitutional suspicion in 1909, he doubled down on them in 1914 in Progressive Democracy. In the introduction to that work, he complained: “Ever since the Constitution was established, a systematic and insidious attempt has been made to possess American public opinion with a feeling of its peculiarly sacred character.”
Croly also approvingly cited the work of Charles Beard, another progressive scholar, who once wrote that the Constitution was created by “a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors,” because they were losing money under the earlier Articles of Confederation government. Croly found that “Professor Beard’s investigations do indicate that the Constitution was . . . ’put over’ by a small minority of able, vigorous and unscrupulous property owners” and concludes himself that “the American democracy rallied to an undemocratic Constitution.”
This almost Marxist interpretation of the Constitution as a tool to advance the economic fortunes of the Framers would certainly render it a flawed document in the progressive calculus. But even before Croly and Beard, one of their progressive compatriots anticipated these ideas. Writing in Congressional Government in 1885, the book that was developed from his doctoral thesis, Woodrow Wilson criticized “blind worship” of the Constitution. He excitedly proclaimed that his generation was “the first Americans to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which it was intended.”
Obama echoed Wilson’s sentiments in a slightly different way during his second inaugural address, saying, “When times change, so must we.”