DEAR OCASIO-CORTEZ, IDEALISM? YES. BUT...

Photo: AP/Kathy Willens

I do not have anything harsh to say about Representative Ocasio-Cortez of New York. She is candid about her idealism and her socialist (not necessarily democratic) ideas. She is a poster child of the New Democrats. Cheesy smile, photogenic looks. Heterosexual men and lesbians will no doubt be seduced. If old Ronald Reagan could still pull the wool over the eyes of those who remembered his movie career, this young starlet will go far.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal resolution has been condemned by those with feet on earth as ludicrous, while those who are into enabling millennials by reflex say she has renewed the environmentalist cause. So be it.

The skeptic looks at nations which have gone down the path of drastic social and economic reform by way of revolution. That view is not a pretty one. Soviet 5-year plans which never yielded mass prosperity. Chinese agricultural plans which have not stopped that nation's need to import vast amounts of food. The miserable 19th century of French history. Our own revolution may have yielded a new more-democratic model but it also yielded a brutal Civil War which may have killed as many as 750,000 Americans out of a population of 31 million, less than the current population of California.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seems to ignore the fact we are a country immersed in global capitalism and trade. This makes our unilateral solutions to climate problems intrinsically impossible. Sad but true. We breathe Chinese air as the Chinese breathe Russian air, and so forth. Our seas are the seas of Brazil and India ultimately. And the developing world is just beginning to embrace Western-style corporate capitalism ... with enthusiasm.

If asked, I would recommend Ms. Ocasio-Cortez study the beginnings of capitalism in Western history. I would point her in the direction of the Reformation in Amsterdam in particular. There the first semblance of regulated stock exchanges were developed. And out of that came a form of capitalism which was imbued with the ethics of newly established Protestantism. 

That Protestant Ethic reigned in the U.S. long after it was corrupted in Europe. Mass migration from Europe during the late Industrial Age accelerated the corruption of the Protestant Ethic in the U.S.. However, that corruption probably started with the arrival of large numbers of Irish famine survivors in the 1840's and 1850's. These starving Irish came with desperate determination to find their own place in America after escaping an attempt at forced labor or genocide at the hands of the English aristocracy.

The Protestant Ethic emerged from Amsterdam's wealthy tradesmen. They were gentlemen, but many were self-made at a time when wealth and bloodlines were synonymous in the rest of Europe. And they were not all Protestants. Amsterdam hosted an exiled Jewish community which had been expelled from Catholic Europe, in particular Spain and Portugal, by the Inquisition. 

The Dutch Protestant Ethic in business took hold in New York, itself a Dutch holding before becoming British and then American. 

The Protestant Ethic was grounded in a belief in social integration of finance, the separation of business from person-hood, and a moral skepticism toward wealth and its effects on the human soul. In its best form, money was indeed simply a currency for social betterment, and it was marked by an avoidance of needlessly ostentatious displays of personal affluence.

Today's corporate capitalism is not based in this Protestant Ethic by any means. Its expansion into global capitalism has led to its infection by cultures which have no deep ethical base in business practices. It has morphed into a form of ostentatious power politics between oligarchs. 

But personal capitalism still exists here in the shadows of tall buildings owned by corporate giants. It is under threat. Perhaps its greatest threat is from within. The entrepreneur hype of the post-Reagan era has turned self-supporting personal commerce into a larval stage for those who dream of oligarchic grandeur. 

This is a shame, especially when considering the environmentalism of people like Representative Ocasio-Cortez. Why?

A vibrant and healthy small-scale capitalism would be more likely to support the more effective environmental remedies that idealists crave. It is the capitalism of functional villages and small cities, where people can walk or bicycle to whatever services they need. Corporate big-box malls rely on metropolitan populations with cars to survive. Corporate online outlets (Amazon, Ebay) rely on physical separation of customers from easily accessible goods. Corporate headquarters require freeways to transport executives and tech personnel from wealthy suburbs. 

Corporate capitalism is a symptom of bad human population growth and distribution. It thrives on the actual causes of environmental deterioration. Cars, jets, fossil fuels needed to heat/cool massive infrastructure, plastics, steel, concrete, etc.. Corporate capitalism is becoming less and less ethical because it is becoming less and less social or personal. 

Combine the isolating tendency of generally accepted corporate capitalism with the millennial need for constant social acceptance and belonging. What you get is a generation of people like Representative Ocasio-Cortez who have no sensible model for how capitalism and environmentalism can transition together to a practical future. They base their idealism in an assumption of some ethical basis in modern global capitalism, while accepting the post-modern ideologies they have been taught in college. This is called "cognitive dissonance". Cognitive dissonance is the root of many forms of mental illness.

As a former socialist to the core of my idealist youth, I cut Ocasio-Cortez some slack. Idealistic socialism is less toxic than cut-throat materialism and individualism by a long shot. But it is also more dangerous than realistic social pragmatism, wedded with scientific advancement. The fact is that not all people are going to participate productively in an idealistic socialist culture. Knowing that can prevent failed good intentions which may lead to the kind of misery we have seen throughout human history.