Today’s Left has a religious aversion to the most normal aspects of life: having kids, driving a car, charging a phone, or grilling burgers in the backyard. If you are wondering why your college freshman is convinced that everything you are doing—and, in fact, the entirety of Western Civilization—is evil, look no further than the climate. The Left’s anarchic rage is almost entirely a result of climate panic.
According to the Left’s narrative, the West is ending the world by causing a climate apocalypse. If the West is immolating the entire planet, then, of course, capitalism is evil, anything is permissible to end the crisis, and liberal democracies like Israel and America are the villains.
The Right shouldn’t waste time responding to these conclusions with reasoned arguments. We should lead by example and use every tool available to build and innovate in the energy space. If we don’t, more generations of young people who care about the planet will be lost to ever-more -aggressive forms of environmental extremism that assume there is no alternative way to imagine (and build) the future.
One of the easiest ways we can start to build in the short term is by leveraging the Department of Energy’s Loan Provisions Office. There could be hundreds of billions of dollars available to direct loans (not grants) to whatever technologies the Trump Administration wants to pursue.
In the House version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Republicans were looking to cut this program completely, which would functionally give away an immense opportunity to build the energy dominant future that conservatives want. That is exactly the problem with so many in the modern GOP: even after President Trump came in as a total rejection of the neoliberal consensus that reigned for decades, our leaders return to it.
Thankfully, some of the Office’s financing ability was saved, and some was moved to Section 1706, now called the “Energy Dominance Financing Authority,” in the Senate version. However, the fact that this was a fight at all gets to exactly the frustration with elected Republicans: their knee-jerk is to just cut, cut, cut without thinking.
Conservatives spent the decades between Reagan and Trump repeating the same stale talking points about shrinking government and largely ceded talk of our energy and environmental future to purple-haired baristas who hate prosperity.
We had hoped that our efforts to shrink government would have deprived the Left of weapons with which to beat us. But not only have our conservative predecessors allowed the state to get bigger—D.C. even grew under Reagan—they have failed to disarm the Left as well. By 2016, the atmosphere was ripe to try something else.
The strength of New Right thinking in the age of Donald Trump is drawn from the idea that, while we should cut spending and remove harmful government programs; it’s time we actually use the powers of government to do something good as well.
Conservatives are correct that the administrative state is largely unconstitutional and a major burden on building things. However, the threat to America is not so much a bureaucratic paper pusher—however annoying an impediment red tape is —but the Left’s rabid activist base: an army of half-educated twentysomethings.
The response of “cutting government” to counter that threat, among other vague efforts, will not resonate sufficiently with the younger generation, and, ultimately, fails to meet the political moment. We need a conservatism that builds, that is focused on making government effective and focused on human flourishing, not just arbitrarily reducing spending in a quixotic effort to keep taxes low. The climate panic will continue, and the Left will continue to obsess over their anti-growth, anti-natalist, and ultimately anti-human agenda to the detriment of their country. The only kind of shift that will sufficiently reveal just how flawed the Left’s approach is is pro-growth, pro-human, and pro-building.
Humans understand the world in narrative form, so we need a better story to tell. A negative story focused on what we cut or counterfactuals about how the amorphous “free market” will not capture the imaginations of the next generation of leaders. We can still increase efficiency and cut regulations, but those are largely not seen and felt in daily life. Tangible progress, construction and observable growth, is visceral. Especially if the construction site says, “Made Possible by President Donald J. Trump and the U.S. Department of Energy.”
If we focus on building, it will eventually become growth, and despite what radical activists say, growth does not mean a dirtier environment. In fact, it usually means a cleaner environment. America’s environmental standards are much higher today than they were 50 years ago, despite having 130 million more people and triple the GDP. Building in America means building it more cleanly than it can be built anywhere in the world.
The more we build at home, the better it is for the environment. And if the government can be used to support innovation and speed up our entrance into the technology of the future, while achieving those goals, then let’s do it.
After all, we should want to build and generate electricity as much as we can right here in America—for economic, national security, and even for environmental reasons. This is because the world’s worst polluter is not the United States, but a communist country: China. Moving economic activity to China from the United States—as a bootleggers-and-Baptists alliance of big corporations and environmental activists seem to want—is not only an economic and cultural disaster, but an environmental disaster, too. Yet the Left remains determined to tamp down economic activity in our country, ultimately driving energy production abroad where environmental standards are lower.
It was once comforting and easy to laugh off the cringe antics of the campus crazies or the economic illiteracy of socialists like Bernie Sanders, but it is becoming less every day, because the crazies have taken over the Democratic Party. The Cold War consensus, when the two major political parties had the same ultimate goals but respectful disagreements on how to achieve them, is long gone.
Fortunately, a new era of conservatives already stands ready to use every power at our disposal to achieve an optimistic, pro-future, pro-growth, and pro-environmental future that everyone can believe in—even the climate kids (at least before they’ve been fully brainwashed).
Conservatives can’t tax-cut their way out of this one. We must take on elitist nihilism and unapologetically embrace American dominance in every form of energy from solar to natural gas to nuclear. Being YIMBY—being pro-building things—should be central to today’s conservative ethos. Clinging to zombie Reaganism and empty promises of spending cuts will make us lose our country to the Left and the world to China. That is an apocalypse that is all too believable.
Chris Johnson is President of the American Energy Leadership Institute, a conservative advocacy organization championing America First energy policy. He also serves as a senior adviser to the National Federation of College Republicans. Aiden Buzzetti is the President of the Bull Moose Project and the 1776 Project Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @AidenBuzzetti.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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