George McGovern proposed something similar to the current idea of a Green New Deal in the 1960s. A Yale historian says it had some momentum but was derailed when the Vietnam War broke out.

In 1964, McGovern sponsored legislation for the creation of a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) to transfer jobs in defense to peacetime work, for example, civil engineering and commercial manufacturing. On the surface, the NECC’s purpose was rather simple: to help unemployed defense workers find jobs. But McGovern’s ulterior motive for the commission was to reallocate military spending to fight environmental problems, to give defense workers “green jobs,” to use an anachronistic term…

But then came Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Southeast Asia derailed McGovern’s vision. Whereas in 1963 the world seemed at the precipice of a new era in the Cold War, Vietnam revived ideological tensions between Democratic proponents and opponents of Cold War foreign policy. Hawkish Democrats became enemies to the NECC, afraid of diverting monies away from the war. The stiffest opposition to the plan came from the Johnson administration, which criticized McGovern’s idea for a 10 percent cut to a $300 billion-dollar defense budget as “radical.” Moreover, defense contractors failed to see the utility of McGovern’s commission as they were now awash in new, albeit temporary, defense contracts to fight the war. When the NECC would be revived over two decades later as the Cold War was finally coming to an end, it would be a smaller, private endeavor focused on public education about economic conversion and disarmament and stripped of its earlier environmentalist goals.

I’m sensing some urgency this time around over climate change, which is good, but military and national security spending seems to be largely unquestioned. For that to change, I suspect it would take some bold action in Congress like a war tax and/or an insistence that war must be declared before American troops or equipment are committed abroad. Ironically, I think maybe a compromise could be based on stepped-up border security in exchange for closing foreign military bases. That would seem to have something for everyone.