Opportunities Abound! The Democrats Have Gone Brown!

The crown of California is lying on a filthy sidewalk, waiting to be picked up with a pooper scooper.

What happens when you let homeless people camp out in your city parks and sidewalks? What happens when you stand aside and let anarchists (the bad kind) occupy neighborhoods for months at a time? What happens when you put a revolving door on city jails and let crime run rampant?

Answer: people with family and/or property move out to the suburbs. The Democratic Party has become the party of suburban sprawl and long commutes.

Living close together requires Law and Order. It requires greater attention to externalities: noise, smells, germs, and ugliness. When people give up their yards for apartments and townhouses, they need public spaces to meet and play in. Who wants to sit in a park bench that has been occupied by an unwashed homeless drug addict? Who wants to hang out and play chess in the public square when pestered by bums asking for beer money? And who wants to let their kids play in a public park where crime is high?

Dirty, high crime, cities are not family friendly! Even if you can run fast or fight hard, you are at a serious disadvantage if you have a toddler in tow. This is why the first waves of gentrification of run down neighborhoods tend to be homosexuals and young hippies.

If you want families to live close to work, you need to make the urban neighborhoods family friendly, and that means low crime. And if you want people to ride bicycles to work, you need low crime all the way from home to workplace. Remember, it's not just your car; it's your two ton urban armored personnel carrier.

Cutting crime and demanding basic standards of civilized behavior is green. You don't have to go full on fascist to do this. You do need to make mental asylums great again, however. And for those who find this Oppressive, you can also have some halfway facilities for those who prefer alcohol to prescription psych meds. Let them have spartan quarters on small group farms where they can grow their own beer or wine. Think Medieval monastery. But don't let the bums have the downtowns or the best beaches.

Conservatives have it in their power to be greener than the Democrats by a wide margin. This is the key to taking back the Left Coast. To paraphrase Napoleon, the crown of California is lying on a filthy sidewalk, waiting to be picked up with a pooper scooper.

Eco Conservatism is the Natural Political Alignment

Capitalism creates wealth. After home, food, car, and other basic needs are met, luxuries come to mind, including clean air, beautiful vistas, and trips to the wildlands. Californians are green because they were capitalist; the state has incredible wealth (though the Democrats are trying to destroy that wealth).

Once upon a time the green political party was the Republican party. Think Teddy Roosevelt. The Republicans were green because they were the party of wealthy urbanites. They were money rich/nature starved. The Woke capitalists in California are the sort of people who used to be Republicans. The Republicans lost that demographic when the Republican Party went Brown in the 1970s.

As the Republican Party morphs into a populist party, it can afford to be a Brown party. Brown plays well in the Rust Belt and among rural voters who are surrounded by an abundance of nature. But a completely populist party is a party without a highly educated brain trust. The Right needs its elitists as well. Having a Green faction within the Right is an important key to being a real presence on campus as well as taking back California.

But many committed capitalists will complain about the EPA, ridiculous regulation, and endless lawsuits which keeps businesses from getting things done. Fair enough.

Good Environmentalism vs. Bad Environmentalism

It is the job of environmentalists to complain about pollution and habitat destruction. It is the job of Leftist politicians to turn those complaints into excuses for more Big Government programs and reams of regulations. It is the job of puritanical satanists to turn those complaints into excuses for pointless lifestyle downgrades. It is our job to craft environmental policies which are compatible with capitalism, liberty, and traditional American culture.

As the human population grows, there is less room for wild critters unless we figure out how to get along. Left environmentalism says restrict property rights, squeeze people into urban growth boundaries, and have the government buy yet more land. I say we make cities more livable and use positive incentives to get people and endangered creatures and plants to live side by side. How about a bounty for hosting an endangered creature on your land instead of penalties for habitat destruction? A bounty encourages self-reporting, and doesn't have the incentive to Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up.

What about toxins? In many cases, the problem is the quantity of the naughty chemicals. The Left environmentalist response is to hire a bunch of experts to figure out where the chemicals are truly necessary and where we can do without; then they craft reams of regulations to tell companies what to do. This is a back seat driver approach to toxin reduction. A market based approach would be to have a tax on toxic chemicals and let producers and consumers decide the cost/benefit ratio. While I know Republicans hate taxes, I keep pointing out that we had a trillion dollar per year deficit under Trump before COVID-19 hit. We need to tax something.

But sometimes direct government involvement is necessary. Governments are involved in most sewage treatment plants. Here, my metric of merit would be less about level of government and more about level of inconvenience. Modern dishwashers don't work properly because they took the phosphates out of dishwasher detergents. Laundry soaps and other cleaners also work less well because of phosphate concerns. Where minerals and soaps must coexist, phosphates are really handy -- and non toxic. The problem with phosphates is that they are fertilizers.

So why not use the treated water from sewer plants to fertilize plants? Grow algae to make biodiesel? Or grow cattails to make starch to make ethanol? Yes, this would require some expensive plumbing to pipe the effluent to where the biofuel farms are located. But in return you get fuel, and you get to recycle the phosphates -- including the phosphates from human waste. And maybe, just maybe, the process of making biofuels will also get the artificial estrogens out of the water, and we can reverse the gurlimanification of America. (More research is needed here.)

This is Part 2 of Rule 11: Exploit the Environmentalists.