Democrats Can’t Stop Climate Change. They Can’t Even Stop Trump.
The most influential voices within the Democratic Party have publicly fallen in line behind his position that we should let Joe give it another go. That’s probably partly due to the West Wing liberalism that prevails among party “leaders,” superseding any actual ideological commitments regarding how the country should be governed: Get enough smart and well-intentioned people into positions of power, and they’ll figure out solutions to the issue of the week. More than any particular vision for the future of the country—or keeping Trump out of office—Biden and his closest advisers seem invested mainly in the idea that they are precisely the right smart people for the job, however little chance they stand of actually winning.
There is no Democratic Party deep state–style establishment waiting for the right moment to step in and choose the best candidate for the job. While they’ve routinely meddled in undermining progressives, the closest party leaders ever got to grand strategy was intervening to keep Bernie Sanders from winning the presidential primary in 2020. Despite Biden’s obvious faults, senior party members have let him continue on, demonizing critics. Whatever combination of hero worship, donor demands, learned helplessness, or garden-variety intransigence is motivating that, the outcome is the same: There are no adults in the room.
Despite claims to the contrary, the same is true on climate. Captains of industry and the Democrats they donate to have for decades assured the public that they can get the job done, promising some new silver bullet technological solution, tax, or subsidy scheme that’ll turn it all around and finally put the country and the world on the path to net-zero. That hasn’t happened. For the last 12 months, the planet has been 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer. No one is coming to save us, and the top Democrats who’ve insisted that they will don’t seem particularly alarmed about how much worse things are getting. They can’t even keep themselves in power.
