PAUSE FOR A MOMENT over the “public option” and what it means. It means that the government, and more than likely a single government agency, would eventually have access to the health and financial information of every American—all 330 million—and would also control their ability to gain life-extending drugs and medical treatments should they need them. “Death panels” are an inevitable element of any government health care monopoly, which inevitably requires a rationing of services. It means that unscrupulous government bureaucrats would have vital information about any individual to use as blackmail against political opponents. This is the basis not only for a socialist state but for a totalitarian one in which every individual is at the mercy of the rulers.
That a totalitarian infrastructure, in which the life of every individual comes under government scrutiny and control, should be the endpoint of progressive schemes should surprise no one. Ever-expanding control of the individual and “the private sector” is integral to the Democratic Party’s agenda to create a progressive future and remold the people who inhabit it. This should be cause for concern for everyone. Progressives are results-oriented and control-driven. Their dedication to social engineering brings with it a disdain for constitutional order and, in particular, for deliberative bodies, like Congress, that reflect the diverse, unruly, and frustrating predilections of the population at large. The constitutional architect James Madison warned of this danger in Federalist #47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”1
As two National Review writers point out, an especially clear illustration of this threat is the Obama administration’s implementation of its environmental agenda, which Clinton promised in her campaign to expand. “Without congressional authorization,” write Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponneru, “the administration has used the Environmental Protection Agency, the supposedly independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and other agencies to pressure energy producers, the auto industry, power utilities, and others to toe the president’s preferred line. In one particularly egregious instance, the EPA moved in 2014 to require the states to regulate electricity production and consumption to meet a set of arbitrary carbon dioxide–emission targets—under threat of restricting their residents’ access to electricity.”2
The environment provides the perfect pretext for progressives in Washington to expand their control over the lives of Americans, whom they obviously regard as subjects rather than citizens. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever.3 The environmental movement to “save the planet” is a textbook case of the dream of a secular redemption that inspires the left and fuels its appetite for power. If the goal is saving the planet, why allow constitutional obstacles like the separation of powers or the sovereignty of the people or truth to get in the way? While poll after poll shows that climate change ranks way down on the list of Americans’ concerns, progressive elites are confident that the public is wrong.
For the true zealots of the environmental left like Bernie Sanders, “climate change” is, in fact, the greatest threat to national security—greater than ISIS or al-Qaeda. Sanders actually made such a statement during the second presidential primary debate. When challenged about the extravagance of the claim, he stood by it: “Absolutely. Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism and if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re going to see countries all over the world . . . struggling over limited amounts of water and land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of conflict.”4
Hillary’s view of the environmental challenge was nearly as dire: “Climate change is an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time. It threatens our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures.”5 Such an urgency translated into Clinton’s opposition to fracking, the Keystone pipeline, and support for her party’s general war on fossil fuels—in other words, a continuation of the progressive drive to remake America’s energy infrastructure without the consent of the people.