Cults of personality have huge carbon footprints

Conservatives are often surprised by the intensity of leftist personality cults, particularly the one surrounding Barack Obama.  Voting for a politician you admire or agree with is one thing, but we marvel that any self-respecting person could sit quietly while Jamie Foxx tells them Obama is their “Lord and savior,” or Lena Dunham talks about him like a hot prom date that ends in the voting booth.  

In a similar vein, it’s hard to believe that devotees of the Church of Global Warming don’t bat an eye when their leaders build gigantic mansions and ride huge carbon-spewing limousines to the airfields where their private jets are parked.  Recently we learned that actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who chartered a jet (along with the aforementioned Jamie Foxx) so he could fly across time zones and enjoy multiple New Years Eve parties, is “taking a break from acting” so he can “fly around the world and do good for the environment.”  Now we’ve got Derek Jeter attending the Davos Economic Forum to bleat about climate change, which he fantasizes – contrary to the actual statistics on storm activity – is causing more hurricanes.  He’ll jet back from Davos to relax in a mansion larger than Downton Abbey.

None of the global warming groupies will bat an eye at any of this.  They were only very briefly and mildly distressed by the spectacle of Al Gore, the Pope of Global Warming, lining his pockets with oil money.  

This is not a coincidence or an aberration.  It’s a recurring feature of statists and totalitarians, an inevitable consequence of the worship of centralized power.  The central premise of the Total State is that a very small group of people is smarter and wiser than the benighted masses packed into the grimy back alleys of an ugly “free market.”  Of course those people are aristocrats and demi-gods.  Who else would be fit to command the ranks of liberals, who in turn fancy themselves superior to the denizens of flyover country?  

So of course the maximum leaders are supermen – an early exponent of Obama-style government was described, in approving tones, as “wearing out a different horse every day and a different woman every night” by his contemporaries.  And of course the big stars and top politicians get to fly overhead in luxury jets, while the rest of us kick our inert electric cars in frustration, consoling ourselves with the thought that our sacrifices are “saving the planet.”