New Consensus (NC) is a pro-Democrat activist organization which was established in 2017 by Zack Exley and a number of people who had supported Senator Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential bid in 2016. Prior to his work with NC, Exley had co-founded the New Organizing Institute in 2005; served as a key leader with MoveOn.org around that same time period; and advised the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean (2004), John Kerry (2004), and Barack Obama (2008). He also co-founded Brand New Congress in 2016, and Justice Democrats in 2017.
Other key personnel associated with NC include:
NC’s mission is to promote the development of “a truly beautiful world” where neither “poverty [n]or pollution” exist, and where “prosperity and dignity for everyone” is the norm. This goal can be achieved “in a single generation,” says NC, if only mankind will end its reliance on fossil fuels and commit, instead, to harnessing the “unlimited energy [of] the sun” as the basis for all its industrial and economic pursuits. Condemning the “entrenched, backward-looking political elites” who “fight to keep the world as it is” by defending “neoliberalism” (capitalism) and “the Washington Consensus,” NC stands in the vanguard of “New Consensus thinkers” who “are exploring how government and other public institutions can lead [America’s] transition to a green economy.” Such a transition, NC explains, would “kick-start new high-wage industries,” thereby “clos[ing] wealth and income gaps between groups.”
The centerpiece of NC’s political and economic agenda is its commitment to a “Green New Deal,” environmental legislation designed to: initiate a massive, “World War Two-scale mobilization” that would rapidly eliminate all fossil-fuel use from the U.S. economy; make “massive public investments into domestic wind turbine and solar cell industries”; create a basic income program and a federal jobs guarantee that provides a “living wage” to every person desirous of one; implement a government-run, single-payer health care system; and replace free-market capitalism with a socialist framework.
Additional objectives of the Green New Deal, as NC describes it, are to: “replace or upgrade every U.S. building to achieve maximal energy efficiency … and durability”; “build new energy-efficient … affordable housing … on a scale unprecedented in U.S. history”; “overhaul U.S. transportation systems … by investing in zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing … and accessible public transit and high-speed rail”; spend trillions of dollars to “repair and upgrade U.S. infrastructure to address climate change and eliminate pollution”; and “make massive [public] investments into U.S. manufacturing industries to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions” – a task that can best be achieved by a government that is committed to promoting “public benefits,” rather than by private-sector leaders motivated by “private profits.”
NC claims to have advised both Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement “on the issues and mechanics that will be involved” in implementing the Green New Deal’s “sweeping economic mobilization to build a clean and just economy.” (Indeed, during a single weekend in December 2018, a number of NC members joined likeminded members of both those organizations — plus staffers of Ocasio-Cortez — in drafting the text of this Green New Deal.)
Further Reading: “New Consensus” (LinkedIn.com); “People [of New Consensus]” (New Consensus.com); “The World Needs a New Worldview” (NewConsensus.com); “Green New Deal” (NewConsensus.com); “New Consensus Policy Group Will Help Deliver A New Day” (Our Time Press, 11-30-2018); “Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’ to Transform the U.S. Economy Was Drafted over a Single Weekend by a Bunch of Millennial Staffers, Activists” (Daily Caller, 1-18-2019).