For decades, Democrats have been telling us that the climate apocalypse was just around the corner. If we didn’t adopt renewable fuels and energy sources immediately, we would all bake to death from global warming.
Democrats didn’t care about the jobs or economic growth they would destroy to appease their climate gods. “Learn to code,” they said.
Unfortunately for Democrats, the company making the most popular electric car in America is Tesla, owned by the Left’s newest bete noire, Elon Musk.
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They hate Musk because he and his Department of Government Efficiency are cutting off the gravy train of federal funding of left-wing nongovernmental organizations — the taxpayer-subsidized entities that allow unemployed leftists to protest while you and I are at work and that provide jobs to otherwise unemployable grievance studies majors.
So, faced with a choice between saving the environment and opposing Musk, what did Democrats do?
Easy. Democrats decided to look out for themselves. Musk has to be stopped, no matter what it means for the environment.
Democrats went from ostentatiously buying Teslas as a symbol of their virtue to ostentatiously selling Teslas as a symbol of their commitment to the party. Whether buying or selling the car was worthwhile didn’t matter to Democrats; for them, everything about Tesla is performative.
In typical progressive fashion, protesters weren’t content with just protest. No, they had to burn cars, deface dealerships, and vandalize parked Teslas. One wonders just how much carbon dioxide those car fires released into the atmosphere.
There’s a lesson in all this: Nothing matters to progressives.
If forcing electric cars and alternative fuels on people means undermining capitalism and imposing degrowth, progressives are all for it. If it means supporting Musk, Tesla must be destroyed.
If “Believe All Women” might scuttle the nomination of a conservative Supreme Court justice, progressives insist we must believe all women. If “Believe All Women” means acknowledging the vicious sexual crimes of the progressives’ darlings — Hamas — or holding illegal immigrant criminals who have committed sexual assaults until Immigration and Customs Enforcement can take custody of them, well, now, we must consider nuance and context.
If tiki torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, might cost Donald Trump an election, we must have an endless national conversation about right-wing violence. If swastikas appear at a Democratic Socialist rally (on Oct. 8, no less) or keyed into the side of a Tesla, well, nothing to see here, move along.
If billionaires are supporting a Trump administration, we must fight the oligarchy; if billionaires are funding soft-on-crime district attorneys, environmental kookery, or other fashionable left-wing protest, they are righteous.
If a Republican shouts during a State of the Union address, it’s a horrendous and possibly racist breach of decorum. If Democrats engage in obnoxious displays during a presidential speech in the House chamber, well, that’s just noble 1960s-style protest.
Progressives don’t care about anything that doesn’t further their own power and feather their own nests. Not the environment. Not the civil rights of people they disfavor. Not the decorum of the House chamber during a presidential speech. Not getting money out of politics.
The Tesla episode is just the latest demonstration of how progressives care about nothing and stand for nothing except the proposition that they are smarter and more virtuous than the rest of society and, therefore, entitled to govern. They resemble nothing so much as 1970s-era Soviet apparatchiks, focused solely on preserving their prerogatives and power without any concern for those they govern.
It’s no coincidence that unreconstructed 1970s-era socialists like Bernie Sanders and their latter-day acolytes like “the squad” are the center of gravity of today’s Democratic Party.
Progressives have turned Democrats into the Party About Nothing. It might make for a good sitcom, but for anyone forced to live under the Democrats’ leadership, it is no joke.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Michael E. Ginsberg is a former member of the executive committee of the Republican Party of Virginia and a national security attorney based in Northern Virginia.
