Leftist outlets like The Atlantic seem to have a bad habit of yanking the most insane political ideas out of the ether to make them sound less nutty than they are. Its recent treatment of “degrowth communism” to fight climate change is no exception.
“Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism,’” read the magazine’s head-turning May 28 article. The author, Atlantic writing fellow Christopher Beam, tried to soften the expected blowback from such an off-the-wall idea being popularized by leftist Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito. Saito “knows he sounds like a madman,” Beam wrote. “That’s kind of the point,” he continued. “The crazy idea” of “degrowth communism,” Beam summarized, is based on the proposition “that there will always be a correlation between economic output and carbon” emissions. In essence, wrote Beam, “the best…
