BARONE

From page 4 modating individual choices, they want to boss everyone around.

Those family farmers they extol will have to wait to get to town if their electric vehicle is out of juice because the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining and they're still waiting for the “affordable public transit” to reach their farm. Maybe they can use bike lanes.

And it's not at all clear that coastal sophisticates will be content to be stuck on slow-moving trains and stuck off on sidings for 20 or so hours out in what they like to call flyover country until someone cleverer than Gavin Newsom can gin up the federal printing press to pay for high-speed rail tracks between Manhattan and Hollywood.

Those on the political left — whether struggling Generation Z bartenders from Queens or rich homeowners in Brentwood, California — share a withering contempt for and thinly veiled hostility toward ordinary middle-income people, raising families and shopping at malls and navigating enormous SUVS (needed for kids car seats) into the fast-food carryout lanes.

Leftists love to confine vulgar people to rail lines — highspeed rail or urban subways — and force them into high-rise apartments, which they design. They hate single-family-home suburbs and the automobile that let ordinary people go where they want to go, when they want to and with as many stops as they like.

Voters feel differently. In France, where most people live beyond walking distance of the Paris Metro, the gilets jaunes have led a successful rebellion against a carbon tax, i.e. a tax on driving. In Washington state last November, voters, even in the county that includes Seattle, soundly rejected a carbon tax.

Now Markey says it's unfair to bring the Green New Deal to the Senate floor. The label polls well. But, he suspects, the substance won't. So why have presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren endorsed this foolishness?

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.