Earlier this month, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey released a broad new proposal dubbed “The Green New Deal.” This bill is a series of policy initiatives that lay out the future of so-called Democratic socialism, championed by people like the freshman Congresswoman from New York and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. The Green New Deal proposes many ideas, including drastically reducing the burning of fossil fuels so the United States is a carbon-neutral producer by 2030, replacing most to all air travel with high-speed railways and providing a universal jobs program the likes of which has not been seen since the original New Deal. While some of these ideas may sound beneficial and necessary in order to reduce the effects of climate change, most ordinary Americans find them far too ambitious.
Perhaps the most visible example of this is a video by Campus Reform. In the video, a man asks college students at the University of Miami if they like the Green New Deal. Everyone who is featured expresses initial support for the proposal. However, when the interviewer explains to them three of the most drastic proposals, they all balk and say that they do not think this would be feasible. Everyone featured in the video decided by the end of the explanation that they are significantly more skeptical about the policy than they were when they first heard about it.
This should concern Democratic socialists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. College students are very left-leaning, with 35.5 percent of them aligning as “liberal” or “far-left” compared with the rest of the population, where only 26 percent of people consider themselves to be liberal. I think that this video is a microcosm of all Democratic socialist ideas: While the proposals sound great at first, people do not support the proposals after actually looking into the issue....
