Identifying attributes of millenarianism

From Straight to Hell: Millenarianism and the Green New Deal by David Adler.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as AOC, is the youngest member of Congress and she is preoccupied with the coming Apocalypse. The world, she warns anyone who will listen, is going to end in 12 years. “Like, I’m sorry to break it to you,” she announced during a live Instagram broadcast as she made dinner in her Bronx kitchen. “If we do nothing, there is no hope. There is a global threat to the planet. We are dying now.” Her Green New Deal, she insists, is the only way to avoid this looming catastrophe.

AOC’s apocalyptic warnings are not mis-statements nor are they tangential to her thinking, even if she has recently backtracked on some specifics. Although her Green New Deal is ostensibly a strategy designed to address climate change, much of the content isn’t green at all. Instead it is rooted in apocalyptic theology and the radical secular millenarian movements derived from it. These political movements, once they gain power, usually end in a cataclysm, although not the one they have been so busily warning us about.

The Millenarian Promise

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow,
nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain:
for the former things are passed away.
~Revelation 21:4

Millenarianism comes in many forms, and it usually forewarns of imminent devastation. However, it also tends to denote rebirth, followed by a period of glory and restitution (usually 1000 years) for the elect. The most powerful expression of Christian millenarian thought can be found in the Book of Revelation, which foresees the defeat of the Beast and his prophet by the armies of heaven. Satan’s defeat in the final conflict will bring about the end of history, when the new Jerusalem descends on earth so that God may dwell among his people.

Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of John, is a profoundly ominous book, and its meaning has been the subject of much debate among religious scholars. The Medieval conception of the Apocalypse was largely shaped by the ideas of Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202), sometimes referred to as the “mad monk.” Fiore was convinced that Revelation was literal prophesy, and that the catastrophe it promised would usher in an era of unprecedented peace which he called “The Third Age.”

Adler explicitly links millenarianism and the Green New Deal, but I think the observation is more expansive than that. Certainly it applies to all the AGW faithful. But really, millenarianism informs the entirety of the social justice, critical theory, postmodernist crowd.

The Historian Norman Cohn, in his 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, found that Millenarian movements always picture salvation as:

Collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful as a collectivity.

Terrestrial, in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some other-worldly heaven.

Imminent, in the sense that it is to come both soon and suddenly.

Total, in the sense that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the new dispensation will be no mere improvement on the present but perfection itself.

Miraculous, in the sense that it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies.

It might have been expected that millenarian thinking would disappear with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. But Cohn found that these ideas and the manias they inspired reemerged in the twentieth century’s secular totalitarian and revolutionary movements.

One would hope millenarian thinking would disappear with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.

Jonathan Haidt has made a similar point about millenarian thinking such that universities are dividing between those which are institutions of higher learning, research, knowledge, and truth, and those who have chosen to become temples of millenarian belief in social justice. Temples of sacred victimhood.


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"Two incompatible sacred values in American universities" by Jon Haidt.

Adler's is a useful essay. I become accustomed to viewing the social justice, critical theory postmodernists as simply totalitarian enemies of freedom seeking power against everyone else. And for some core group that is a usefully true way of looking at them.

But there is a larger group, might one call them fellow travelers?, who are not power hungry per se. They are cripplingly empathetic, they are seduced by evil ideas of victimhood, by the promise of a better world. They are not inherently totalitarian but they are necessarily millenarians. Adler reminds us of the role of millenarianism in totalitarianism.