The 2020 presidential election is shaping up to be a flood of hallucinations. The same can be said of the coming City election here in Boston. If what is published, or spoken at rallies, is any example, proposals are being made that range from the merely unworkable to the outlandish. None of the City Council trial balloons, however, surpasses the radicalism and downright insanity of what is being touted by national office holders and seekers.

It’s a given that Mr. Trump offers falsehoods and chimeras, denigrates whole classes of people, and longs to take us back to the era of coal and smog. This, we’re used to hearing. We’ve dismissed it all, as we should. What is new is the equivalent nonsense being proposed by the “socialist” wing (their word, not mine) of the party that we are counting on to defeat Mr. Trump. Anyone who has read through the so-called “Green New Deal” will find there what critics, with much justice, call “enviro-fascism.” Cars are to be taxed out of existence, gasoline as well; trains are to replace everything else, including airplanes (I kid you not). All in the name of “saving the planet from climate disaster (their phrase). Anyone who has lived by bus or train, as I have, knows the frustration of only being able to go where the bus or train takes you, of having to wait for one to come, and of the near impossibility of going to two, three four different destinations on a day. The freedom of being able to take yourself where you want to go, when you want to go there, and the flexibility it provides to your life, well, those are just old fashioned tastes, I guess.

Gimme a break,.

I don’t know about you, but I find the Green folks’ panic just as absurd as any other stampede. If this proposal is what the voters will be offered in 2020, it will surely re-elect Mr. Trump, because as terrible as he is — and he is really really terrible — we have devised the political means to hem him in. There will be no such means if the climate panic crowd gets its way.

This is not a choice any ordinary voter wants : Trump’s cruel bigotry, Russian pandering, and industrial hallucination on the right hand — and government control of every inch of your life on the left hand . (And I do mean control of everything. The same folks who experience climate panic want to dictate what you think about race matters (you really should abandon skin color prejudice, but you have to do it because you want to, not because a thought cop tells you). They also want to impose inquisition justice upon those accused of sexual harassment. They think it crucial to force professors out of jobs, and writers out of publication, because they disapprove what is said or to be published. The rule of law, with all of its safeguards for the accused ? That’s sexist, I guess. The First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech ? Obsolete.

As yet we have not devised a political mechanism for deflecting these assaults upon individual freedom and the wisdom of the law. As I said at the beginning of this paragraph, no ordinary voter wants this choice.

To return to Boston’s City election for a bit. Here’s what an up and coming Boston political aspirant posted on his facebook page yesterday by way of supporting Councillor Michelle Wu’s call for making the MBTA fare-free (!!)

How to Make the MBTA Free while also helping the environment.

1. Increase the Gas Tax to 30 cents
2. Congestion Pricing for driving in/out of Boston 
3. $10-15 fee per flight at Logan
4. Surcharge for each UberX or Lyft (not shared) taken to/from Logan

Back of napkin: $600-700 Million
*This does not include the savings from not having to do fare inspections, purchase turnstiles (and maintain them), fare vending machines, etc.*

This alone would be more than enough to cover the fare revenue, increase ridership, and generate stakeholder value.

Beyond the specific proposals, each of them political suicide, what does this amount to ? As one respondent said, it simply transfers MBTA payments from one class of person to all others. That’s the purpose behind much of the ideology being submitted to the City Council : since prices of real estate are going up, transfer the price from owners to everybody else. It’s an absurd policy, one that assures failure — it was the theory behind rent control, which Boston tried in the early 1970s and which killed Boston real estate — because you cannot stop a bull market that doesn’t want to be stopped, you can only move its value bits from here to there. And what the blazes is “stakeholder value” in the T ? Enlighten me.

I have written elsewhere about the Council’s responses to our real estate boom. The answer lies not in penalizing landlords or owners of pricey homes but in finding paths to increasing the wages of our workers. I don’t want to rehash what I have already written; just let me say this : ( 1 ) we aren’t going to raise the gas tax by 30 cents ( 2 ) we aren’t going to put surcharges on Uber and Lyft, which are wildly popular transportation choices ( 3 ) we are not going to impose flight fees on millions of travelers, who have the vote just as do the proponents of taxing and ( 4 ) we’re probably not going to penalize drivers who drive during congested hours, because that’s when the work day ends. (This last proposal might have legs if the economy can find a way to institute staggered work hours.)

Why should riders on the MBTA not pay a fare ? The T exists for their convenience. Taxpayers subsidize much of the T budget because many taxpayers also use the T and because the T allows workers to get to their job more efficiently than driving (and paying a $ 20 fee for garage parking). I doubt that T ridership would increase if taxpayers were to be saddled with 100 percent of its cost, because the cost of parking a car downtown is ten times that of a T fare. People use the T already. Moreover, the T is money- limited by the huge costs it faces to bring the entire system to a “state of good repair,” a job that Governor Baker estimates won’t be finished until 2023. Taking away T fares just makes the job that much longer to accomplish. Again, there WILL NOT be a gas tax hike, because so much of Massachusetts lies outside the T service zone and has no interest at all in paying for it.

Drats. Foiled again !

Now back to the 2020 election and its world of Edward Lear. The manifestos being bruited by some Democrats are about the Democratic party, not about the nation. It’s a battle to wrest control of the party away from the “corporate” Democrats who actually work with business and think that the economy benefits from having businesses prosper. Democrats who oppose that view — who think that the profits of a business belong, as of right, to the line workers, not to the investors who risk their capital — have found a fair measure of support in our big cities, and the surprise success of several urban Democratic candidates in 2018’s Congressional primaries has juiced them to assault the party itself : because control of the party means control of its campaign money and its rules of nomination. These Democrats have seen how the Evangelicals took control of the Republican party and thereby had the track to impose their restrictive agenda — much of it unConstitutional — upon party and nation (not yet completely, thank goodness). They’ve seen it and want to replicate it, and to the same end : to impose government control of your life upon you.

This is why a wise old head like Senator Markey, who is up for re-election next year, has decided to do a Democratic equivalent of Senator Lindsey Graham embracing Mr. Trump. He is afraid of being primaried by a “progressive,” and his fears are well placed, given the shocking defeat — by 18 points — of Congressman Mike Capuano in last year’s Democratic primary. In the Republican party, you have to be totally Trump, or else; symmetrically, in the Democratic party, if you’re not as opposite of Mr. Trump as possible, you’re the enemy of “change can’t wait.” Especially if you’re nearing age 80 and have been in Congress since 1972.

Can we the ordinary voters, who want wise reform but mostly cannot get it from either of the parties, find a way to make our aspirations and common sense the dominant agenda ? Because reform can be done. The Massachusetts legislature and our Governor prove that, every day. Yet nationally, and in the City, I am not sure we can. There, all the current momentum is to the extremes, to proposals each more radical than the last, to government control of everything, including our thoughts. Even the Constitution — our last line of protection — is not safe.

— Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere