ECOFASCISM IS HERE

Climate denialism was always leading us to one place: a disaster that would then be capitalized on by the deniers

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Yes they can control the weather, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on Saturday. Anyone who says they don’t, or makes fun of this, is lying to you. By the way, the people know it and hate all of you who try to cover it up.

Certainly people made fun of it. After all, Taylor Greene is a notorious fabulist who has made her career on talking about “Jewish space lasers” and trumpeting whatever conspiracy theory is trending at the moment. But this is far from something to laugh at. It is a marker of something very, very serious.

The devastation resulting from Hurricane Helene has been heart-wrenching. For myself, I spent a decade in Georgia, have plenty of people I care about in Florida and in Asheville, North Carolina. Watching it rip through my former home and through the homes of these people was devastating. Then, the aftermath was its own hell. People I knew went without supplies and assistance as our power structure tried to respond. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, the struggle was then made worse by a plethora of conspiracy theories.

Taylor Greene’s absurd claims aside, the GOP and the Right Wing media have once again capitalized on a tragedy by using it to fearmonger and tailor their own reality. While continuing to deny climate change, they are scapegoating immigrants and claiming that the Biden Administration, as a puppet of “the Deep State” that is dedicated to flooding the country with immigrants, is intentionally sacrificing Americans. It is a rather tired and predictable claim that follows all of the traditional Right Wing conspiracy theory traits.

1. An activating moment or controversy is pounced upon for political capitalization and profit

2. Fault for the moment or controversy is deflected from those who caused it (inevitably the oligarchs who created the environment that facilitated the situation and who also fund and direct the Right) to vulnerable communities and political rivals

3. Existing prejudices (white supremacist paranoia, patriarchal insecurity, religious fear of persecution, xenophobic uncertainty) are used to fuel reaction as voters and supporters are told there is a conspiracy against them being carried out by “shadowy forces” (Jewish puppetmasters) conspiring with traitors (Democrats and the Deep State) who are both using “manipulable populations” (immigrants, people of color, etc) for their own purposes

This framework (which I detail in THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM: A HISTORY OF POWER, PARANOIA, AND THE COMING CRISIS and the accompanying YouTube series THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM LECTURE SERIES) has been the main operating system of the Right for millenia now, and it is applied to every possible scenario and event and will be until we push back against it. The climate change crisis is no different. Each and every preventable disaster that erupts from it from now on will be pulled into this framework and those tactics will escalate.

Put simply, Ecofascism is here.

Rather than address climate change as the existential threat it is, the Right will continue to deny its existence while shifting our reality as it takes place in real time. This is the same as financial crises, so-called “immigration crises,” political crises, cultural crises, you name it. Every time the Right will refuse to engage with the consequences of the capitalist system and instead reframe it to suit their purposes and the purposes of the oligarchical class it serves.

This means, unless things change in a massive, massive way, which is what the climate crisis actually requires, the disasters will grow worse and more omnipresent. And, with each disaster, whether it is a hurricane or flood or drought or fire, the Right will automatically shift attention from the root causes while blaming political enemies and vulnerable communities, creating a series of escalating crises that necessitate authoritarian oppression.

At the heart, is a battle over resources. The Neoliberal Consensus has created an environment of austerity and almost nonexistent aid to citizens in favor of co-opting government into an agent of redistribution, defense, and enabling of accelerated accumulation of capital by the wealthiest few. There is no room for helping people hurt by hurricanes like Helene or Katrina before it. Neoliberalism requires precarity, or a constant threat of losing everything. A robust system of aid is not only not in the plans, but runs counter to the continuing project.

As more and more of America becomes unlivable and unsustainable, the debate will continue to focus on who deserves to live and who deserves to die. Rather than creating a country where inherent human dignity is promoted and served, the concept that there is a limited amount of resources will continue to permeate all debates and all politics. Climate change will not be recognized as a radical re-orienting phenomenon, but instead its outcomes will be dealt with, on a moment-by-moment basis, as side-effects of the conspiracy theories that people like Taylor Greene and Trump communicate. As this happens, the fight over resources and the right of life and safety will reign.

To make matters worse, the GOP has solidified control over many of the states and regions that will be most affected by climate change, creating a worsening cycle. Life in so-called “Blue State” enclaves has gotten too expensive, creating a captured cultured where those who will suffer the brunt of these disasters will continue to live in hyper-austere conditions while our polarized, Electoral College-driven politics reinforces this and leaves millions to look at those populations as “deserving” of their plight. The precarity only makes this worse. We are encouraged to thank our lucky stars that it’s not us in the crosshairs, even as the consequences spread and affect all of us.

There’s very little about any of this in our current election. Climate change is given a scant few minutes in debates and we hear very little in speeches. The main issues are the economy and immigration, which are both fabricated and misleading. To aid this economy is to continue the conditions that gave rise to climate change and the political/social environment of exploitation and precarity. The “immigration crisis” is a Right Wing-fabricated pseudo-issue that hides the larger economic truths that neither party wants to admit or even address. To make any of this better would take a sea change the likes of which most people aren’t able or willing to comprehend.

And, as a result, Ecofascism will continue to grow. The way immigrants are scapegoated, demeaned, and targeted will continue, but it will also soon find purchase in talking about the victims of climate change. Because that’s how this works. And as the pressure builds, inevitably climate change and its consequences will add to the drumbeats of war, because that’s how this works as well. The “solutions” the Right offers are destructive, but effective, and the masters they serve as well served. The conspiracy theories will continue and change and mutate as conditions necessitate. The last thing we’ll actually address are the material conditions facilitating the crisis, and the Right has no ability and no desire to do that.

It will take an act of political courage to actually address any of this, and we do not live in a time of widespread political courage. It is denial, both in the vehement denialism that fuels the Right and their base but also the passive denialism within the Democratic Party that refuses to level with the people and put forth a plan or agenda that actually deals with this problem before it reaches its inevitable conclusion.

Over time, the usual divides will come to the forefront. First, it’s immigrants and people of color as white supremacy works as the divider. Then, it will have religious aspects that showcase supernatural explanations for natural phenomenon, as the Right echoes past narratives like Pat Robertson claiming an earthquake in Haiti was caused by a “pact with the Devil.”

To this end, people are blamed for their suffering and the world is divided into those deserving help and those deserving their suffering. This divide is the difference between living and dying, and fascists are happy to draw that line and enforce the penalties to their own benefit.

Once more, we have entered a new phase. It was sadly predictable and the future is as well. We have choices. Hard, unpleasant choices, but choices all the same. Knowing what we know, seeing what we’ve seen, we are confronted with decisions. For decades now we have been warned that, barring some radical and necessary changes, we would suffer the consequences of climate change. That was obvious. What we didn’t know, or rather what we weren’t told, was how the Right and capitalism would react to those facts and their unfolding.

Well. Here we are.