I disagreed with TreeHugger Brian the other day, about what is driving the Tea Party madness in Washington. He said money; I said ideology. Here’s why.
In my spare time, I am active in the Heritage Preservation movement; I think old buildings and communities are more than relics from the past, they are templates for the future. For the last year I have been trying to determine the cause of a remarkable rise in the belief that property rights are sacrosanct, even in Canada where they were consipicuously left out of the constitution and have not ever really existed. Where heritage preservation used to be derided by many as conservative and reactionary, a bunch of old whiners trying to stop change, now it is suddenly socialist. The more I read, the more I kept coming up against a new term: Agenda 21. And it underpins the ideological opposition to everything from streetcars to planning to lightbulbs to climate change.
The actual Agenda 21 document from the United Nations started goes back to Rio in1992 and is pretty innocuous, given that nobody really pays much attention to these things, and they are not exactly the law of the land. It includes goals such as:
But as Tim Murphy of Mother Jones recently posted in First They Came for the Lightbulbs, in the mind of a Michele Bachmann it becomes the intellectual basis for her war on lightbulb legislation.
Interview with Tom DeWeese at CPAC 2011 on Vimeo.
One of the main mouthpieces of the Agenda 21 conspiracy is Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center. In fact I think he is the American Policy Center. He explains Agenda 21 in One Easy Lesson, concentrating on Sustainable Development, and writes about how it is a growing movement:
He then proceeds to explain how just about everything this TreeHugger believes in is part of a plot.
In fact, it seems that just about everything we write about on TreeHugger is an Agenda 21 plot.
Well that certainly defines my agenda, the stuff I care about. Anything “green” or energy saving is evil, part of the agenda of control. Another writer attacks what I would call responsible planning, urban design and energy use:
And why do people like me go on about the suburbs and the role of the automobile in our society? I have to repeat the whole very long paragraph.
Or, as one website summarized it,
From an ideologue’s point of view, Agenda 21 is a beautiful thing, the Theory of Everything. It ties it all together into one neat package, making climate change, light bulbs, transit, smart growth, fuel economy, everything a plot. I became concerned about it because it makes our work as historic preservationists more difficult, since we are now seen as socialist elitists trying take away property rights and stop economic growth, distributing the pleasure of admiring an old building among the many in the face of the right of the owner to do what he wants.
But it is much more than my historic preservation or Michele’s light bulbs. It is a spreading conspiracy theory that is becoming the underlying ideology of the crazy right and that has serious legs. It is no joke.
