Calling the plan “reform” is laughable- it LITERALLY REBUILDS the world. Radical demand for a GND learns from exclusionary aspects of the New Deal but maintains its AMBITION

(Kate Aronoff is a fellow at the Type Media Center and a contributing writer to the Intercept. Alyssa Battistoni is an editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in political science at Yale University. Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College. , 2-5)

From the New Deal to the Green New Deal The original New Deal offers both inspiration and cautionary lessons. As a set of policies, it created the foundation of the American welfare state as we know it. For the first time in American history, the government took responsibility for ensuring social welfare, in the process curbing the power of capital and recognizing labor’s right to collective bargaining. Huge new public programs undertook interventions in industrial policy and employed millions in work ranging from bridgebuilding to public art. Today, the New Deal seems radical compared to the past forty years of neoliberalism. But for socialists, it saved capitalism from itself. Brokering a class compromise that ensured decades of labor peace, it recreated the conditions for economic growth and, eventually, an era of mass consumption that substituted the credit card for the union card. Even the New Deal’s liberal promise of moderate equality was betrayed by the reproduction of gender and racial inequalities. Because the New Deal coalition relied on Southern Democrats, its labor protections excluded domestic and agricultural workers, reinscribing patriarchy and a racial division of labor. And New Deal housing policy laid the foundation for lasting segregation and the massive wealth gap that divides white and black Americans to this day. Nor was the original New Deal an environmental model. Yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal investment in the Civilian Conservation Corps helped restore forests and other ecosystems all across the country and should be revitalized today. Urban investments in public goods, from public swimming pools to experimental theatre in working-class black communities, are a model of sustainable urbanism. And a surprisingly democratic engagement with Puerto Rico, after a brutal 1932 storm, still stands as a model for post-disaster recovery. But, along with the mobilization for World War II, the New Deal model yielded an unprecedented era of fossil-fueled growth, accelerating environmental devastation. The segregated suburbs that flowed from the New Deal were also an ecological disaster. White Americans fled the cities for a landscape of leaky homes, car-choked blacktop, and giant malls. Suburbs’ demography is today more complex, but their ecological costs are still daunting. And yet, we find ourselves turning back to the New Deal example. Two of its core features stand out as particularly useful today. The first was the spirit of bold, public experimentation, led by the federal government but responsive to militant mobilization, and often fostering local democracy. Looking to the original New Deal, we can appreciate how practical its efforts were in the very best sense: getting things done. Its second core feature was its scale. From massive landscape interventions through programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority, to the millions or unemployed put to work by social service agencies, the New Deal went big. It transformed American life in profound ways, from how people worked to how they grew old. It remade life in the factory and family and it reshaped forests and farms. It literally rebuilt the country, and a good chunk of the global economy along with it. Not all of those changes were for the good. But today, facing down a merciless climate timeline, when “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are called for, a New Deal scope of ambition is what we need. The GND can’t just be a bill or two. It needs to be the framework for politics for the next few decades. That fight starts now. It must be ambitious. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy isn’t enough if we leave untouched the patterns of production and consumption, housing and transit, agriculture and trade that fuel global capitalism. If you could press a button that decarbonized the world in an instant, we’d still be facing massive ecological crises: a great extinction, planetary deforestation, rampant freshwater pollution, plastic contamination of rivers and oceans, a wrecked nitrogen cycle, and mountains and islands of garbage. We need to challenge a capitalist growth model premised on racial and gendered hierarchies, colonial extraction, and environmental destruction. That doesn’t necessarily mean pitching the GND as an anti-capitalist proposal, although Republicans will surely do that for us. There’s a huge amount we can do in the next few years to make climate progress under capitalism, while gathering strength to press for more. But we do need to think creatively about the world we want to build in the long-term — and who will build it. The white male breadwinner and his family were at the heart of the original New Deal; the GND is a vision for today’s multi-racial working class — women of color working in the low-carbon care and education sectors, immigrant workers whose ranks will grow as climate change wreaks havoc across the globe, the growing number of people who can’t afford to live on meager wages. The GND’s big ideas transcend what feels immediately feasible, offering a vision to expand the sense of possibility and motivate action: guaranteed jobs, ubiquitous wind and solar. But leaning into the nitty gritty helps refine both the world we hope to build and the political strategy for getting there. That’s why we’re running pieces digging into the politics of what a truly transformative GND would look like. We’re at the beginning of a long and complicated fight. The series’ contributions reflect the scope of what it will take to win it — green energy and good jobs, to start, but also taking on the fossil fuel industry and green tech’s extractive underbelly, the significance of indigenous leadership and the revitalized labor movement, struggles for energy democracy and racial justice, demands for public goods from finance to housing to transit, and more. These days, all politics is climate politics. Nothing will shape the lives of working people in the decades ahead more than climate change. Extreme weather is coming. But the greatest changes will come in how we respond. How quickly, how intensely, and how democratically we decarbonize prosperity will be the economic story of the century. If billionaires steer climate investment to protect their wealth and private luxuries, it may be the last century we get. The alternative is to build another world on our one planet, harnessing wind, sun, and water to smash the hierarchies that oppress us and win back our future.