IT’S COME TO THIS: David Brooks of the New York Times decries elitism.

The authors of [the Green New Deal] fantasy are right that we need to do something about global warming and inequality. But simple attempts to realign incentives, like the carbon tax, would be more effective and more realistic than government efforts to reorganize vast industries.

In an alienated America, efforts to decentralize power are more effective and realistic than efforts to concentrate it in the Washington elite. The great paradox of progressive populism is that it leads to elitism in its purist form.

The impulse to create a highly centralized superstate recurs throughout American history. There were people writing such grand master plans in the 1880s, the 1910s, the 1930s. They never work out. As Richard Weaver once put it, the problem with the next generation is that it hasn’t read the minutes of the last meeting.

But I’m sure Brooks would agree that they really know what they’re doing when it comes to sharpening their trouser creases.