A Q&A with media scholar Hanna E. Morris on her new book, ‘Apocalyptic Authoritarianism’

Malcolm Harris on the Radical, Liberating Possibilities of Realism

 Hello and welcome back to Drilled Season 14: obstruction. In our Carbon Bro season, we talked about one way that climate obstruction intersects with the far right, the rigid enforcement of gender norms, and the feminizing of a politics of care. Care for the environment and for each other. Today we're digging into the history of far right approaches to the environment in general and how that history informs how right wing campaigners in the US and beyond approach climate issues.

I'm joined in the first half of the show by Jesse Bryant, a researcher at Yale University who studies far right conceptions of nature, and in the second half by Dieter Plehwe, a lecturer at University Kassell in Germany, who studies the intersection of far-right politics and environmental issues in Europe.

I found both [00:01:00] conversations absolutely fascinating and really helpful for understanding the context we're dealing with in many parts of the world at the moment. I hope you find them helpful too. Here we go!

 My name is Jesse Callahan Bryant. I'm a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of the Environment.

 Okay, so, one of the first questions I wanted to ask is to have you explain the difference between conservatism and far right culture.

 Yeah, I can try my best. You know, I will say that this is like a distinction that even in the broader [00:02:00] literature, I think is a tough distinction to make. I think, you know, the way that I think about it though, first is that both categories, need to be situated geographically and historically.

Conservatism and the far right I think are useful categories, but they mean really different things in the United States, as they do in Europe, as they do in China, as they do in India. And so I think the first thing when we're talking about these categories, is to be pretty culturally specific.

Because what matters to, I think, conservatism is a commitment to the status quo in many ways. In the United States context, I think there are many ways in which the center left mainstream Democrats even are quite conservative actually. If you sort of step back and let our partisan identifications and then, and identities dissolve a little bit. Um, you know, there are a lot of ways in which Hillary Clinton, Barack [00:03:00] Obama, um, bill Clinton especially are, we're deeply conservative figures, um, and, and are sort of oriented towards upholding, um, you know, whatever, uh, social order exists now.

Um, so that's how I sort of think about conservatism. You know, there are, um, touchstones in this sort of ideological canon. Edmund Burke is often pointed to, um, as a figure that's important to conservatism, a sort of sincere conservatism that's, you know, slow, slow change, tradition, um, sort of humble, humble politics.

And I think when you think about the far right or radical right, or extreme right, um, I think the first thing that comes to mind in contrast to conservatism, which is a politics of stasis, is just the politics of change. And when we think about something like, the second Trump [00:04:00] administration, well the first as well, but what the MAGA movement has.

Become, I mean, it is a politics of change. There are a lot of things that they would like to change, and the question, you know, in distinguishing between conservative and far right is, is just like, okay. Are these people looking to switch the social order in some way? If so, then they might be far right.

And then the question is, are they on the right? And it's sort of like, yeah, they seem to be on the right. So I think it's totally fair to call, the current maga coalition a far right movement. And another good example I think is, um, you know. What I think people often refer to as fascism in early 20th century Europe.

Nazism is different, but like Nazism itself was a very, in some ways progressive movement at the time. It was. Towards, it was change oriented. It was about a new [00:05:00] vision for the social order, as was Mussolini's fascism in Italy. And so if you're dealing with the politics of change, um, for me at least, I, I, I will say people will disagree with this.

You're not dealing with conservatism, you're dealing with something else. That's something else. Could be a lot of things. It could be far right, it could be far left, it could be some other thing.

 And one thing I'd say, yeah, it's weird. I think it, it, it all, this is infinitely fascinating for me and also complicated because, because right now if you look at the MAGA coalition, you, you can say yeah, the, it is a politics of change for sure. But when you think about the kinds of change at play, for me, there are two really distinct.

Uh, almost like imaginaries at play. There's on one hand an imaginary that is much more related to a Nazi imaginary, which is this nostalgic, uh, a sort of conservative nostalgic revolution. So there's a part of the [00:06:00] maga. Coalition that I think imagines this sort of like, you know, the American chestnut will return and, um, like the nuclear family will return.

And then of course there is the totally unrelated, uh, winds of change that are extremely future oriented. In the form of, Elon Musk wanting to build, a new society on Mars and Peter Thiel and the rest of the tech bros trying to imagine.

Um. You know, new forms of technologically driven futuristic societies. Both of those are far right in, in the sense that they're pro change and in my estimation, super pro hierarchy, super pro inequality. , But they're different one's driven by nostalgia. It's a change of nostalgia. And, and the other is driven by a change of sort of futurism and, um.

So within even sort of, you know, there's conservatism, which is sort of stasis [00:07:00] within the far right there is a politics of change, but within that politics of the far right, there is this really important cleavage right now between the sort of politics of nostalgia and this politics of futurism. Um, and I think we see that play out in the United States like literally every day.

 Totally. You know, related to the climate stuff too, I was thinking about the, the Peter Thiel kind of end of the spectrum. This, cyber libertarianism and there's this group called the, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

I'm sure you've heard of them, I don't know, there's so many of these groups, but this

 started a couple years ago. Jordan Peterson is nominally in charge of it, but it's like funded by the people who funded Brexit, and it includes like a bunch of, right wing politicians from the us, Canada and Australia.

And then a ton of anti-trans people and then also climate skeptics. It's a really interesting crowd. And then a bunch of nationalists as well. The guy who like used to [00:08:00] be in, Mumford and Sons and

 left because he is like a far right guy now. He's in there.

 It's so wild. But anyway, I'm obsessed with this group 'cause it's such a random mix of people and they made their annual conference available for, a streaming pass this year. So I bought one so I could, tape all of it. There's this guy, Eric Weinstein, who was the head of Peter Thiel's venture capital firm for years. And then they had sort of a like falling out, but mostly because Peter Thiel's so weirdly sensitive about his public perception, even though it's like everyone thinks you're a giant weirdo dude,

 Genie's not going back in the bottle on that one, you know,

 but he's really sensitive about it and some of the bro podcast universe started to turn on Eric Weinstein 'cause he had a bizarre appearance on the Joe Rogan [00:09:00] podcast. Anyway, this guy, Eric Weinstein gave this talk at the ARC Conference and it was so unhinged, but it totally made sense in the world of these guys, where he was just like, we can't share an atmosphere with these people anymore.

 You think you have been through the culture wars, which is some sort of cute internet conflict that seems really draining, exhausting.

No, no. This is actually something that has recently been termed hybrid war. It's a 2007 concept from Frank Hoffman, and it says that in the current situation, non shooting wars have no border and no end. Anything that can come through the internet means that there is no frontier. We are all combatants to the people who practice hybrid warfare.

We can all be manipulated from abroad. Tokyo arose as everywhere.

Cyber attacks, diplomacy, psychological attacks, information warfare.

The new culture war hypothesis is, is that the culture war is domestic hybrid war.

I've called it the no name resolution [00:10:00] revolution since 2017.

Right now, where we are, is four light years from the nearest star. There is no way to get to the speed of light or even close. We are marooned in our solar system with only two habitable rocks that aren't the Earth and that's with a lot of work. We cannot stay with all of us on one planet with one atmosphere.

With people this crazy and tools this powerful.

 But the thing that I find interesting about them from a climate perspective is that they have almost the opposite, opinion as all the climate deniers where like, they very much believe that climate change is happening and they're, freaked out about it. And it's part of the drive to leave the planet, build bunkers, invest heavily in like AI 24 hour surveillance so they can deal with the uprisings that are coming.

 It, it is, I mean, it's, it's for sure a politics of escapism. And it's for sure a lifeboat politics, [00:11:00] and it's for sure, a never waste a good crisis sort of situation for those guys, I think. I mean, yeah. Right. Like Elon Musk, he's most famous for like renewable energy technologies.

You know what I mean? Like, what are we doing? But the way that they're reacting to that, of course, is that they really just do believe themselves, like categorically in terms of even ontologically, just as a separate species of human from the rest of.

 that they are totally fine generally with leaving everybody behind. And I, I'm not sure what else is the goal. If, if not that, like, I don't understand why, for instance, like if that is not true, Elon Musk isn't using his fucking huge brain to, uh, create a really good healthcare system or something else, because like, it, I mean, to me, it is just a rebirth of the turn of the century super conservative and fucked up [00:12:00] progressive politics. From like the late 18 hundreds of the sort of like the elite should rule everybody we're gonna like, have a sort of eugenics program and sterilize the dumb people. And then like the species will have a higher level of fitness and we're obsessed with IQ and like, that's it.

It's just, that's what it is. The idea that there is some, there's some virtue attached to this dimension of this, of the far current far right movement or mega coalition in the US is like absurd to me.

 I was just writing a paper. I say that I'm writing a fucking blog post about this, but about a transition in societies that has happened since the beginning of western civilization.

I mean, Aristotle was writing about exactly this, you know, 2000 years ago of the transition of, in any society when the selection of elites shifts from the virtuous to the wealthy. That is a degeneration that happens in every [00:13:00] society, and it leads to the downfalls of societies. And these people aren't virtuous.

They just like believe themselves to be better than everybody else. And it's a function of wealth. And there's a lot in, I would say logics within American culture, going back to social Darwinism, that sort of translate wealth into virtue and it's very sensible. Like people love Elon Musk in the U.S. you know, he is an extremely successful, popular celebrity.

And if it were true that in American culture, we didn't think that wealth meant to virtue then he would not be popular because there's nothing appealing about this person,

 or virtuous in any sense of the term. Even if he believes himself to be part of like western civilization in some meaningful way.

No figure of virtue in in whatever you think of Western civilization in the past, would look at this guy and be like, this is a virtuous person. He's just a wealthy guy. Who [00:14:00] like, you know, to his credit, does believe in climate change. Does think it's a big thing, but is using this crisis in order to escape his responsibility, along with the rest of sort of the right wing elite, I think

 Yeah, Okay, so, I wanted to ask about the arguments against climate action being made by religious and particularly Catholic groups in the us. So I don't know if that's something that you can speak to.

 Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think, the question in the US right now of Catholicism I think is like super underaddressed currently, like in the U.S. you know, a prototypically, protestant, individualistic, rugged individualism, bootstraps sort of country. That literally like a hundred years ago was targeting Catholics with terrorist groups like the KKK , and the first American president who was Catholic, JFK, was, [00:15:00] assassinated. And Biden was the second Catholic president. And you know, we have JD Vance now who's very outward about his Catholicism.

 Leonard Leo. Huge amounts of dark money. Yeah, huge amounts of dark money. And it's sort of unthinkable a hundred years ago in the United States, and yet here we are. With Catholic power increasing in the United States, the first American Pope in Rome is like a massive deal in the religious history of the United States.

And so I'm of two minds with the sort of Catholic orientation towards climate change. In part because the last Pope, I think, uh, with Laudato Si and, hosted huge climate conferences at the Vatican, had a lot to say about climate change. And I think right now it's not entirely clear what direction, that will go in as power is changing in [00:16:00] Rome, and conservative Catholic power is ascendant in the United States. And you know, I actually have spent the past, like living in Spain, I've become semi obsessed with Catholicism.

 Yeah, because isn't that really the origin of Opus Dei is from Spain,

 yeah. Well, oh, oh, oh my God. Yeah, totally. And there's a book that was written kind of recently about the collapse of Opus Dei in Spain the ascendance of Opus Dei in the United States. Right the recent sort of like Dark Money Leonard Leo Catholic Information Center in DC sort of vibe.

The president of the Heritage Foundation right now is a former president of Wyoming Catholic College. There's a lot, there's a lot there that I think is actually pretty under-addressed I think when it comes to climate change. I think the questions become weirder or something because on the one hand, my understanding, especially in the United States, but I think more globally [00:17:00] alongside this rise of this concept of national conservatism, this sort of drive towards national sovereignty and against global sovereignty. But you know, that translates into everything from cynicism around the UN to international aid as we see with the, destruction of U-S-A-I-D. What's interesting about that is that from like a more Protestant perspective,, that is fundamentally skeptical towards massive structures of global power.

You know, that was the whole point of Protestantism was to

 The global overreach of the Catholic church. Yeah. So like, uh, that makes sense to me. This sort of isolationist paleoconservative, we don't wanna meddle in other people's shit and we don't want them to meddle in ours, that feels more aligned with this traditional climate skepticism, which is just screw the UN screw COP.

Why are we paying for, , on one hand climate adaptation in Peru and on the other hand funding [00:18:00] wars wherever. But now with the sort of ascendant power of Catholicism in the US which Catholicism is a global concept, it is imperial. , It does have a global imagination.

It is not against anything in particular, you know? So, uh, it, it almost complicates the picture and makes, I think, especially in the United States,, this is not true in European countries, but like, it makes the rise of Catholicism and isolationism in the US simultaneously and how that manifests both in politics in general, but climate change in particular feels like a new turn, I guess.

And one that feels to me less coherent than the, you know, more Protestant, um,

 the Catholic church, screw any global solidarity. We're just doing our own thing. I have my own relationship to God. Like I have my own little church. We believe whatever, you know, so, yeah, I dunno.

 [00:19:00] Yeah. I was thinking about this. In general, I feel like the, Protestant focus on an individual relationship with God is sort of a huge underpinning of hyper individualism in the US in general, which seems like such a huge

 problem. Amidst all the things right now, an underpinning of so much of this stuff.

Is this, idea that all that matters is like me and my family and our direct relationship with God, you know?

 Yeah. And that maps on what's weird right now is that that maps onto our politics, you know, pretty well. Like

 Protestantism is the majority Christian religion in most of red America. And it's just the opposite in most of Blue America. Catholicism is the is the majority, form of Christianity in, the Northeast and the Midwest and, parts of California. And so this alignment with certain kinds of power, certain imaginations of [00:20:00] global solidarity and capitalism, it sort of makes sense. But to understand exactly how certain figures thread that needle like JD Vance, who I find absolutely fascinating.

 I think if you read too much into the way that he threads that needle, like a lot of pe people in the sort of Trump orbit, like the logic all falls apart, right? It's not coherent.

 Yeah, kind of relatedly, certainly not unrelatedly, I wanted to ask you about how and why climate got pulled into great replacement theory and like

 I have a lot of thoughts for sure. One of my papers right now that I'm writing is about, intra Republican polarization on climate change, not between the parties, but within the parties over the past 30 years. And what you see when you look at the right over the past, [00:21:00] since climate change became a thing that was important to people, and controversial is that from the beginning, it's a question of sovereignty.

It's not a question of the science for. Like the main distinction within the right, you know, not between the right and left, you know, that that does have these sort of anti-science denial sort of things. But, the really salient and durable aspect of the climate question, at least in the United States and in Europe also increasingly is a question of sovereignty, national sovereignty.

It projects so cleanly onto questions of the global versus the national. In ways that other things do not. And a lot of those, what I see in my research is that a lot of those same policy frames, sort of like public projections of the question that was really underlying a lot of the right wing versus conservative discontent about climate change for about 20 years really translated itself into the immigration question.

Now in MAGA politics, which is [00:22:00] to me the main policy. Problem in the imagination of the American, right? Today, it's really the thing that holds the whole coalition together. If there was not a, an invasion on the southern border, there would be no MAGA politics. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's not, there isn't any other policy imagination

So, so the way that I think about this is that, the question of national sovereignty is very important to right wing politics globally and to American right-wing politics today, although it wasn't literally 20 years ago, climate change sort of like, I think was a almost laboratory for these, these policy framings, sort of like how do you tie sovereignty to policy questions.

For throughout the nineties, this was true of the paleo cons, the paleo conservatives in the United States. Um, it kind of disappeared during Bush when we all did our sort of flag waving nine 11 stuff for a while. Emerged again with the Tea Party and really sort of gained [00:23:00] power in, in MAGA. And the role of the great replacement theory in that politics is to suggest that there is some, elite, cabal, vaguely Jewish, but global, that is causing this or is exerting agency in driving this loss of national sovereignty, this poisoning at the southern border, this dilution of whatever, wasp Protestant thing that people imagine the United States to have been or to be, which is, you know, only half true at any point in history.

Um, but, it's a way to translate the realities of , a global capitalist economy, which necessarily just looks for cheap labor and moves people around and tries to like, you know. For the cheapest possible thing. And that means like importing a ton of cheap labor from wherever the hell you want to.

It translates that into a more legible [00:24:00] story for the average person to understand that there is some person or people or cabal, uh, that is intentionally doing this kind of thing as opposed to what is for me more true, which is just the sort of diffuse agency of actors within a giant system of capitalism that like, of course, like brings, you know, cheap.

Quasi enslaved brown people into the United States to do cheap labor. That's the whole point. So it, it makes a better story out of a reality that's too complex really to tell, um, to a general public. , And it's really powerful. It works like it works everywhere. It's, it's a thing that works in France. It,

 um, I mean, so it's, it's whether we like it or not, it's a story that.

Transcription

Jesse Bryant (Yale) and Dieter Plehwe (University of Kassel) join us for a look at the intersection between the rise of rightwing populism and increasing resistance to acting on climate, with a particular focus on rising authoritarianism in the U.S., UK, and Europe.

For more on this topic, check out the book Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment (also downloadable free after Oct 14th!): 

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/climate-obstruction-9780197787151?cc=us&lang=en&

Climate Obstruction

S14, Ep3 | The Psychology of Misinformation: Why Does It Work So Well?