A sad fact of the world is that the rise of fascism—in the US, in Israel, in India, in Russia, in a host of European countries—is a predictable response by global elites to the challenges to their wealth and privilege posed by the climate catastrophe.
This isn’t to say that things are hopeless, but rather that things will get worse before they can get better, and that defeating any particular instance of that fascism doesn’t make that threat go away.
@HeavenlyPossum Isn't blaming the global elites for everything one of hallmarks of fascism?
Such simplifications are very appealing, dangerous (look, somebody in the comments already thinks all of the world problems can be solved by hanging a dozen people on the lampposts) and wrong (no, this is not how you solve the construction crisis).
When fascists complain about elites, they always means someone who isn’t actually a member of the elite, but holds some position in society that they want to construe as elite.
ie, educators, artists, journalists, etc, as opposed to actual elites—the capital-owning class and their political functionaries.
@HeavenlyPossum Quasi fascist parties in Europe are railing against "the elites" all the time, this is literally the main enemy of RN (ex FN) in France. Who knows what exactly they mean, but they instigate the same belief that a small but powerful group of people is responsible for all the ills of the world.
It's also exactly what the 8th sign of fascism in Umberto Eco's list is about.
The fact that fascists use terminology incorrectly because they lack a real understanding of the power structures of society or any meaningful mechanism for self-reflection does not automatically invalidate critiques of actually powerful people as fascist.
Eco’s point about fascism’s “enemy” is precisely mine: the enemy that fascism identifies can’t actually be powerful, because the enemy must be defeatable. Fascists like to pretend their enemies are the all-powerful authors of the ills that fascists promise to fix. However, fascists tend to be, and tend to ally with, the actually powerful—capitalists, military leaders, politicians, etc.
Annoying reply person "basic agreement but harps on slight difference" response: neoliberalism basically started when the USSR fell and liberals had no global ideological competitor left, so it started before the climate catastrophe became apparent. They were already immiserating the working class more and preparing the way for fascism: climate catastrophe accelerates the process.
I don’t disagree at all—the neoliberal turn that you’re describing (which I’d argue began in the 1970s) was already straining the status quo to the breaking point, entirely independently of the climate crisis. It seems like a sick coincidence of history that they both converged at the same time (at least, I can’t find a causal relationship between the two crises).
@HeavenlyPossum@RichPuchalsky the causal relationship is that the exploitation of the people and the earth, especially the Big Neoliberal Lie that consumerism is the pathway to happiness, is what's led inexorably to the climate crisis. They converge because they're linked.
The reason I’m not entirely sold on this is that the climate crisis was set in motion more than a century ago and reflects the cumulative carbon pollution of many decades, which just happened to reach catastrophic crisis levels now.
We could say that capitalist exploitation during the last few decades accelerated the timing of that catastrophe, but I don’t find that a satisfying explanation of the coincidence of both the crisis of capitalist immiseration and of capitalist-accelerated climate catastrophe happening at roughly the same time. I feel like we could have just as easily had one with out the other.
We are definitely accelerating and it is not a coincidence that has brought climate change effects sooner than modeled and that the acceleration of industry is showing up in the climate.
We knew it was going to be a problem in the 80s/90s — capitalists fought that knowledge with disinfo and accelerated.
I guess what I mean is that a less intensified capitalism—maybe some perpetuation of the New Deal framework—would have still produced the same climate catastrophe without it necessarily coinciding with a collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own immiseration.
@HeavenlyPossum@RichPuchalsky Perhaps. I think if there had been a perpetuation of the New Deal framework, it would have disempowered the forces that helped obscure the problem and perhaps we would have started solutions back in the 70s/80s (remember solar on the White House? Most people don't cuz Reagan ripped it out). If we'd started solutions earlier, we might have avoided even getting to the 412ppm CO2 we have now.... So again... intimately connected.
It's a feedback loop where the crisis of capitalism and the climate crisis feed each other's acceleration. The closer the climate crisis gets, the more frenzied the capitalist looting becomes as they try to snatch all the resources they can grab before the music stops. Which intensifies the environmental damage, which kicks up the urgency-- they have to seize more power and wealth before too many people notice how bad things are getting and try to stop them, while also trying to out-compete all the other capitalists trying to do the same thing.
Like a feeding frenzy. Blood in the water.
Even if any of them realize how destructive this is they probably rationalize it like, well, if I slow down to fix anything the other guys who don't will win, so we'd better win and then save as many of the people (our chosen people) as we can, after all we're the good guys so our mineshaft will be nicer than the other guys' mineshaft, we must not allow a mineshaft gap etc.
The people who didn't appreciate the New Deal decided they would never let anything like it happen again, and then used the massive profits and goodwill they won from WWII to secure their hold on power, systematically tearing apart the left with McCarthyism, the red scare, the assassinations of the 60s, COINTELPRO, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, propaganda and so on and on, employing strategies and techniques they picked up from the Nazis.
But they've been careful not to repeat the Nazi mistakes of getting too loud and moving too fast. They keep up the veneer of civility and democracy and plausible deniability so people don't get spooked. Hitler's reign was over in 12 years. Neoliberals have been systematically tightening their grip with the patience of a constrictor, a kinder gentler frogboil strategy that's sustainable for generations.
I think the coup Smedley Butler tried to warn us about truly did happen. Just under the surface. They kept the political theater right on going to keep us thinking nothing big had changed. Like a distracting puppet show.
I think I agree with all of this (consumerism, neoliberalism as ideology beginning sort of in the 70s): what I mean is that even though neoliberalism existed previously, it couldn't really take off until there was no ideological competitor to itself and it could turn the screws all the way without worrying that people would be driven to something else.
FDR managed to interrupt this spiral the last time, which I respect as a political achievement even if it was unsustainable. I don't think that liberals are going to produce an FDR now not because I believe in a great person theory of history, but because FDR was aided by a live threat to his left.
(Was the existence of this particular ideology to the left in itself good? Well, I'm an anarchist, not a state socialist.)
I believe neoliberalism took off through concerted effort by conservatives to influence ideological thought assisted by the free flow of cheap fossil fuels to power everything from cars to globalization. I wouldn't say there was no ideological competitor — I would say it actively strangled the consensus opinions of the FDR era.
But the neoliberal lies can only persist so long as the FO part of FAFO hasn't shown up (like it has now in wages/climate).
Well, this is where we actually disagree to some extent. Neoliberalism is a form of liberalism. (Other forms are classical liberalism, New Deal liberalism, ordoliberalism, etc.) I don't think that liberalism shifting from one form to another was because of an intervention by conservatives: it is implicit in liberalism itself and will always happen unless there is some external reason for it not to.
@RichPuchalsky Well, except that they formed a global network of think tanks and poured tons of money into it. Ideas aren't magic or a force of nature. They're pushed by individuals/organizations with purpose and the more organized (and well funded) they are, the more successful they'll be, given various constraints of course (works for the bad guys as well as the good).
There are always definitional questions, but I'm willing to treat liberalism, conservatism, and fascism as 3 different things. The real problem with "conservative think tanks made liberalism transform into neoliberalism" is that these think tanks or their equivalents have always been around. FDR was certainly opposed by big business: the people who talk about Trump as a singular American coup proponent are not correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot). Given that this pressure from the right was always there, there is a reason why it was successful at a particular time.
Also, liberals generally don't understand how seriously they themselves treated Communism as an opposed ideology that constrained them. Just as one example, they killed a million people in Indonesia over it in 1965-1966 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method). It is quite possible that the US never would have become a universal franchise democracy if liberals hadn't felt like they had to do it because otherwise the US would look bad internationally.
My own quibble with this is that fascists by and large deny climate change -- at least for now. If the conclude that they can blame it on the minority group of their choice, they will quickly become ecofascists. I worry that people of good will could be duped by this.
I am not surprised that fascists lack a theory for their concurrent global rise, because I don’t think their worldview allows for that kind of self-reflection. So of course they deny climate change, even as it’s a major driver in their intensified political presence.
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