The Blue Wave helped to wash ashore the Green New Deal, which is far pinker than the American electorate will tolerate.
Democrats' progressive base loves it, and since that base is (presumably) essential to any candidate hoping to win the party's presidential nomination, many of the hopefuls — Harris, Warren, Booker, Gillibrand, and, of course, Sanders — have opportunistically embraced it. And the GND is as practical as was Huey Long's Share Our Wealth plan.
As Jon Chait understates it: "The Green New Deal is a document that defines the party’s entire domestic agenda. Turning that over to a member of Congress who’s been in elected office for a few weeks and whose views are a radical outlier within the party was a bad idea."
Programatically, the GND is a tangled mess. The Washington Post's Catherine Rampell notes that it glories in "emphasizing empty slogans instead of evidence-based policy, rejecting experts in favor of cranks [Chait: 'very few environmental experts consider the targets laid out in the plan to be remotely attainable'], handwaving away questions about implementation and promising that an expensive policy will magically 'pay for itself' through economic growth."
Politically, the GND is even worse. The "manifesto … promises the free lunch that we’ve come to expect of policies from the other side of the aisle," continues Rampell. Trump proposed a surefire national security plan to be paid for by a foreign government, congressional Republicans proposed all the benefits of Obamacare with none of its costs, and modern conservatism in general is but a collection of extravagant, toll-free fantasies on stilts.
The GOP has proposed such intellectual atrocities only to satisfy its radical, or at best, vastly unrealistic, base. These "ideas" sprang not from serious think tanks, but often from the party's backbencher crackpots who wouldn't know serious policy from the phone book. Nor would they care. Just getting elected and then staying in office by pandering to the electorate's lowest common denominators and most simplistically minded was their peculiar call to, uh, national service.
Now, as I have vaguely fretted before, so frets Rampell more pointedly:
"Ocasio-Cortez is a freshman representative, not a presidential candidate. She doesn’t hold a senior Democratic leadership position. So who cares about her fuzzy math...? That’d be a reasonable response, if so many of the actual 2020 Democratic contenders hadn’t already endorsed her Green New Deal — presumably because, as with Medicare-for-all, the slogan sounds nice, and they’re terrified of crossing their base. Plus, they may have concluded that shallow thinking will be rewarded."
That way — the contemporary Republican way — lies doom. A vastly unrealistic "conservative" party calls not for a counterbalancing, unrealistic progressive party. It calls instead for thoughtfulness, prudence, and what old-school George H.W. Bush labeled "the vision thing." The real thing.