Matthew Huber’s May op-ed in the New York Times went off like a bomb inside the increasingly jilted community of climate activists. The Democratic Party’s candidates — many of whom were once committed to a wholesale renovation of the entire American economy, its modes of transportation and housing, and even its very social contract to combat climate change — don’t even talk about the issue anymore. Nor should they, Huber wrote. Democratic office-seekers’ “first task must be to regain credibility with working people by tackling their more immediate, material concerns.”
Huber was describing an organic phenomenon that he merely observed. But it wasn’t long before the activist left swiftly determined that the diminution of climate change as a source of political currency for the Democratic left was something that had been done to them — the flowering of some malign conspiracy cooked up by the reviled establishmentarians.
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