The Coming of Avocado Politics: Why the Climate Crisis Will Likely Strengthen the Right

American conservatives are obsessed with ‘watermelon’ politics:  Green on the outside, Red on the inside. That’s their basic criticism of the Green New Deal and other big plans to deal with the climate crisis—that they’re leftist plots to impose socialism on America. 

American liberals to some extent agree. They think that going green is inherently progressive.  Eventually conservatives will have to bend the knee to science and accept a liberal program that reins in the fossil fuel industry and redistributes wealth to a new generation of solar panel installers.  

Maybe. But maybe not. The American Right is different from the European Right—and even here it is changing.  American conservatives for the most part remain lovers of the free market and small government.  This is why they dismiss climate science, because to accept it would be to accept the need for big government programs and regulations.

This particular idiocy, however, does not claim the European right.  There, a strong state is seen as a good thing, necessary to protect borders and build national cultures. Tough-minded leaders mobilizing the Volk around big national projects is in the nationalist wheelhouse.  So the facts about climate change are not generally rejected.   

It is true that in Europe Green parties that combine environmentalism with liberal views on human rights have been gaining ground. But so have right-wing parties that want to stop immigration and protect Europe from foreign infection.  Marie Le Pen, who is trying to make her neo-fascist French National Rally party more attractive to young voters, has said that someone “who is rooted in their home is an ecologist,” while people who are “nomadic … do not care about the environment” since “they have no homeland.” For the right, the climate crisis is starting to be seen as a useful lever to gain youthful support while justifying a strong state, empowered to take draconian measures:  a new Avocado politics, Green on the outside, Brown within. 

In American right-wing circles similar ideas are taking root. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto, for instance, justified killing immigrants on environmental grounds.  (As did the Christchurch shooter).  Tucker Carlson said in December that “illegal immigration comes at a huge cost to our environment.”

At first glance a strong climate program would seem uncongenial to nationalists.  Greenhouse gases don’t respect borders, and an effective climate policy needs to build global cooperation and strengthen multinational institutions, the exact opposite of a nationalist agenda.  But climate policies can be envisioned that further right-wing goals.  For instance, the climate crisis can be seen as strengthening the need for strict control of immigration and borders.  As the global south bears the brunt of coming droughts, sea-level rise, and other effects of climate change, Europe and America must gird themselves against refugees.  They must not let themselves sink under an unmanageable wave of the world’s have-nots. 

In addition to defense, the Right argues that Western Civilization must go on offense. White nationalist thinkers agree with liberals that humanity cannot survive if the billions in the developing world use energy and other resources at the same level as the First World. But their conclusion is different.  Rather than sharing wealth and technology to try and midwife a transition to a higher but sustainable standard of living, they want to clamp down on further development.  Here is the analysis of American white nationalist and pseudo-intellectual, Greg Johnson, in support of a right-wing environmentalism (informed by several years sojourning among European nationalists):          

• “So yes, we do need to have a two-tier world economy; we need to have a developed First World—and by the First World what I mean is Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of East Asia, places like Japan, Korea, and China—they have the capacity to do that as well—and the less developed parts of the world need to be, basically, contained. We need to stop feeding them; we need to stop increasing their populations or allowing their populations to increase; we need to basically exercise a certain benevolent control over these people, just like we exercise benevolent control over wildlife.”

In other words, if Indians and Africans try to build coal-fired power plants, or buy more cars, we should stop them.  The more urgent the crisis, the more drastic the response. As Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute wrote recently: “…ratcheting up the rhetoric about the urgency of the climate crisis — “We only have 11 years!!” — can just as easily be used to justify the necessity of avocado policies. Indeed, what seems more politically achievable: creating a globally coordinated and democratically inclusive set of new institutions that will enable the resolution of all the difficult trade-offs associated with a “socially just” approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or shooting brown and Asian people?”

We need to recall that the roots of the modern environmental movement are far from benign.  Many early environmentalists were social darwinists and eugenicists whose prescription for protecting nature was to keep the inferior races from procreating.  The early-20^th century American Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (one of Hitler’s favorite books), was also a founder of the National Parks Association. This is only to say that a passionate desire to protect the planet is not inherently and inevitably linked to a love of social justice and concern for marginalized peoples. 

At some point as the climate crisis grows in intensity the US will shed its climate-denying neoliberalism.  But It would be blindly optimistic to imagine that this will lead to a liberal, globalist, inclusive solution set.  The US and other rich first-world societies, gripped by fear, and facing demands from the world’s have-nots to cut back on their polluting ways while sharing more of their wealth, are likely to batten the hatches and begin jettisoning superfluous luggage.  Among the superfluities will be liberal democracy. It is already on the ropes. As the seas rise and the forests burn, a strong hand will be wanted to oversee a wrenching domestic shift to a low-consumption society. It will be doubly demanded to protect against foreigners seen as wanting to share space in the lifeboat. 

A climate-emergency government could take a left or right-wing shape.  The left version will blame capitalism, nationalize major industries, and sharply restrict individual liberties in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A right version will do much the same, but with special emphasis on the need to rid society of dangerous minorities.

Both versions will need to face off against the developing world by pressuring countries like Brazil and Indonesia to preserve their rainforests, stopping new coal-fired powerplants, and preventing the rest of the world from imitating our destructive lifestyle.  A leftist approach, however, is more likely to try to achieve this cooperatively with aid and carrots; a nationalist environmentalism would be more brutal, more confrontational, and much less concerned with the consequences for the rest of the world. 

A critical variable will be which side of this divide China falls on. China needs no changes to its political system to implement a full-scale climate emergency program, and Chinese nationalism as promoted by Chairman Xi in many ways mirrors the Western right in its civilizational hubris. Will it identify with the First World, as Greg Johnson hopes? If so the full weight of the world’s most powerful states will be behind measures designed to keep the have-nots in their place.  If instead China chooses to be the defender of the developing world (something today’s China does when convenient) we will see a confrontation between China and the West, in which climate fears are added to the already considerable tensions related to China’s growing wealth and power.  

Of course the future does not have to look like this.  But avoiding it will take political courage and leadership that is so far not in evidence. People in rich developed countries need to be provided hope in the form of programs that promise a positive way forward.  They need to be convinced that their fate is intertwined with that of the rest of humanity.  If we do not quickly put in place a humane and inclusive framework, the climate crisis will be hijacked by avocados.