American Conservatives are getting really bent out of shape about the Great Reset. I realize that — given the way conservatives have been behaving over the last 5 years — you might think that the Great Reset is a conspiracy theory or you might think the Great Reset is a good idea. Unfortunately, neither of those things are true. The thing that conservatives are mistaken about regarding the Great Reset is that it is socialism. It is not socialism, but rather another example of disaster capitalism — wealthy capitalists see a disaster as an opportunity to gather more power. The current form of the Great Reset was created in response to the climate crisis, but was quickly retooled as a response to COVID-19.
First off, the Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory. It is being discussed out in the open. There is a book about it that you can buy on Amazon by Klaus Schwaab and Thierry Malleret of the World Economic Forum. Basically, they put forward the case that the financial disaster created by COVID-19 creates an opportunity to “build back better”. The World Economic Forum is something that “engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”. In short, they are the global capitalists that everyone hates, but that conservatives seem really determined to misunderstand. If you think “globalism” means “socialism” then I encourage you to read my previous post about that.
Second, the Great Reset is a project of big capitalism. It is not a socialist program. The purpose is to reform capitalism for the purpose of overcoming the challenges of climate change. Socialists want to get rid of capitalism, not reform it. It might be a bit confusing because socialists certainly want to address the climate crisis, but they want to address it using the money of the wealthy. In contrast, global capitalism wants to address climate change by using the normal tax revenue stream — i.e., the money of working people. Because the World Economic Forum is fundamentally a tool of wealthy capitalists, it will preserve the wealth of rich capitalists and throw you under the bus.
Third, the Great Reset is not a good idea. I know that when you look around at people who think Satanic lizards secretly control the world, and they tell you something is bad, that your first inclination is to think that maybe it’s actually pretty good. Global capitalism is what created this crisis, though, and those people are not willing to do any of the things required to actually address the crisis.
It isn’t a surprise that the wealthy are using this crisis to their advantage, but what they’re not telling you is that their intent is to destroy the relevance of the nation state and move governance from those semi-democratic governments to organizations controlled by extremely rich people. This makes the entire planet into sort of a Roman Republic, with these important capitalists taking the part of the patricians who make the decisions for the rest of us, the plebeians. Unlike the Roman Republic, this has layers and layers of deception designed to get you to believe you are still participating in a democracy; at least in the Roman Republic, you knew if you were a plebe.
The Biden administration is completely on board with the Great Reset. It turns out that when Biden says, “build it back better,” he means the Great Reset. Please pardon the conservative source (the author is director of the Heartland Institute), but here’s an article about John Kerry recently confirming that the Biden administration wholeheartedly supports the Great Reset. It’s a better approach to climate change than what conservatives are offering (i.e., nothing) — at least Kerry acknowledges that the Paris agreement came nowhere close to adequacy — but the Biden administration’s fundamental support for the extremely wealthy means that it cannot fully address climate change and will try to find a way to make working people pay for it.
The Green New Deal was originally a project of political centrism — a balance between the desires of the rich and the needs of working people. When the near-right Biden camp says it supports the Green New Deal, you can bet that it is a Green New Deal that puts the desires of the wealthy first — so not really a Green “New Deal” at all.
The New Deal is literally the one thing that America’s wealthy (regardless of party affiliation) are most united in opposing. Their animosity to the Sanders campaign was specifically driven by their devotion to never again allowing government to serve the people to the degree that New Deal programs (like Social Security and Medicaid) serve us. Their constant maligning of socialism is motivated by the same thing. The Green New Deal is an idea based on the New Deal. So, they may not be opposed to the “Green” part (as long as it can be made profitable), but they’re certainly never going to allow another New Deal. That means that the Biden administration’s Green New Deal will be repurposed to serve the wealthy.
However, even though the Great Reset isn’t a good idea, it is certainly better than the American conservative response to climate change, which has been to just stick their heads in the sand. Their primary motivation for that has been that they feared that any action against climate change would involve socialism. That fear is based on a complete misunderstanding of what socialism is, and a toxic belief that human nature makes goodness impossible. In reality, conservatives, leftists, and even those people who voted for Biden have a common enemy: The rich.