The website Grist published an excellent article by senior editor L.V. Anderson, entitled “Authoritarianism is on the rise. Is climate change to blame?” with the byline “There’s evidence that global warming creates fertile ground for political strongmen to come to power.” Main points the author makes are based on the environmental disasters and the political reaction they triggered in the Philippines (President Rodrigo Duterte), India (Prime Minister Narendra Modi), Brazil (former President Jair Bolsonaro) and United States (former President Donald Trump):
They’ve advanced at a time when climate change has become increasingly visible and harmful as worsening storms, droughts, and wildfires affect more and more people. This might not be a coincidence. Although it’s difficult to prove that climate change contributed to the ascent of these strongmen, political scientists, economists, and psychologists have found evidence that the dangers of global warming can push individuals, and nations, in an authoritarian direction.
Faced with the threat of climate change, “most people can’t build bunkers in, you know, Hawai‘i or what have you,” said James McCarthy, a professor of economics, technology, and environment at Clark University in Massachusetts. “But they can vote for people who will promise to put their national interests and their economic interests above everything else in the world — and who will promise to try to secure a future that looks a lot like the past.”
Most convincing for the countries of the global north-west, where the state and democratic institutions are stronger, seems to me the defense mechanisms to protect privileges and the way of living (mainly of white male) – up to rebellions and violent attacks against state institutions and democratically elected representatives:
Similar experiments have found that exposure to threatening information about climate change increases people’s conformity to collective norms, racism, and ethnocentrism — in short, that it pushes people to identify with groups that they belong to and denigrate groups that they don’t belong to. A recent survey of some 1,700 white Britons found that participants who were exposed to threatening information about climate change, and who felt that their country was unlikely to tackle climate change, had more negative feelings about Muslims and Pakistanis than a control group primed with neutral facts.
The danger for democracy seems to stem from the combination of both, the search for a strong (authoritarian) answer to face climate disasters, and the search for strong (authoritarian) leaders that protect existing privileges. The common denominator is the fear of people to loose ground, literally with rising waters, but also politically by loosing the control and domination of their interests in the political system.
McCarthy (professor of economics, technology, and environment at Clark University), who edited a special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers on authoritarianism, populism, and the environment in 2019, thinks the alarming proliferation of dictators and aspiring dictators in recent years shows that it’s a hypothesis worth taking seriously. “I think you have accelerating climate change contributing incredibly strongly to a growing sense of insecurity and inequality: fear about the future, fears that the future is going to be less stable and secure than the past, fears that the world is increasingly going to be divided into winners and losers, and you can’t trust society or collective institutions,” he said. In response to these fears, people understandably want to secure their own safety. “In that context, I think that the appeal of the strongman who promises simple answers to complicated things actually makes a lot of sense.”
McCarthy urged people who are concerned about both climate change and authoritarianism to resist the urge to see the erosion of democracy as an inevitability as the Earth gets hotter and hotter:
“Doomerism and nihilism is a terrible direction politically. It’s obviously a self-fulfilling position. However dire our politics, and however difficult things look at the moment, politics is ultimately about what people decide to do together. The future is not written. It’s what we make it.”
by Roland Brunner, Blue Community .net
Read the full article on Grist: “Authoritarianism is on the rise. Is climate change to blame?”
To continue reading: ‘You can’t shoot climate change’: Richard Seymour on how far right exploits environmental crisis in The Guardian
