Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
How to Fight
Climate Change and Fascists at the Same Time
Kate
Aronoff
January
14, 2021
The
New Republic
Politicians in the
United States have long had a single, instinctive response to crises both
real and imagined: make new kinds of cops. After 9/11, the Bush
administration created the Department of Homeland Security. Amid a
ginned-up border crisis two years later, it created the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement. Now, after last week’s raid on the Capitol,
President-elect Joe Biden is being pushed to create a Cabinet-level
appointee tasked with fighting domestic terrorism, bolstered by
the bold new statutes criminalizing it that he’s promised. That’s
despite the fact that there’s a much better way to defang the violent far right
and countless other crises boiling in our teetering republic. The best way to
contain the militant GOP, while helping the U.S. face global warming and more,
is to expand democracy—not the national security state.
The people who
stormed the Capitol last week and the politicians who incited them should be
held accountable, a process begun by yesterday’s impeachment vote. But we
already have laws for dealing with domestic terrorism. The relevant agencies
just haven’t wanted to enforce them, preferring almost always to target either
whole categories of people—predominantly, nonwhite people—and forms of small-d democratic
dissent like nonviolent protests. Anti-pipeline protesters, for instance, have
found themselves on the losing end of a rash of new
legislation making sit-ins and other peaceful disruptions to “critical
infrastructure” a felony. New counterterrorism measures may be framed
as protecting democracy, but more often they constrain
it.
White nationalist
thugs feel empowered in American society for much the same reason that passing
comprehensive climate policy feels like an endless uphill battle: Our electoral
system was never meant to govern a majoritarian, multiracial democracy. The Founding
Fathers’ fears of democracy leading to mob rule spawned a number of
undemocratic institutions—from the Electoral College to the Senate itself,
which grossly overrepresents white, rural voters over the 63
percent of the population that lives in cities. Exemplified
by the election victories of a Black man and a Jew in Georgia, the last
few months have unsettled those who fear what might happen if a government
built to be run by white property owners and businessmen starts representing
other people, too.
Still, every
structural incentive remains for Congress to misrepresent public opinion, where
sizable majorities both hate Trump and want the government to act swiftly
on climate. Thanks to gerrymandering that has rendered some 70 percent of
congressional districts uncompetitive—and insufficient campaign finance rules
that let shadowy corporate contributions run wild—quick cash injections
can elect ever-more-extreme Republicans ready to go to war against
emissions-reductions rules or anything else that might threaten their
donors’ corporate profits. While some Republican voices have
been loudly debating this week how to seize the party back from Trumpism, the
truth is that moderate Republicans are a dying breed. Conservatives
who don’t deliver can always be primaried from the right. It’s an ideological
race to the bottom, where the end point—if there is one—is a GOP far more
extreme than the one that carried out the attack on the Capitol last week.
“Without a
political reconstruction and deep reforms to that antebellum electoral system,
there is no stopping Trumpism as the dominant force in the Republican Party,”
Waleed Shahid and Nelini Stamp wrote this week. The good news is that
there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to help the U.S. better represent its people.
The filibuster allows the Senate minority to hold up any legislation
it wants to. With 51 votes, it could be abolished. Washington, D.C., has a
population bigger than Vermont’s and Wyoming’s, yet no voting representation.
So long as there’s a Senate, making D.C. a state could make that body a more
democratic one. The kinds of commonsense democratic reforms embodied
in H.R. 1—automatic voter registration, the restoration of the Voting
Rights Act, and guards against partisan gerrymandering—would help keep
politicians from being able to choose their voters, making districts more
competitive and allowing more people to vote. Its campaign finance provisions,
in particular, would help limit the fossil fuel industry’s outsize influence
over policymaking, with federally financed 6–1 matching funds that would allow
small donors to compete with polluting megadonors. It would further support a
constitutional amendment to end the system established by the Supreme Court
decision Citizens United, which opened the floodgates to
unchecked corporate influence. It would also help slow the revolving door
between government and the private sector, among other reforms. Yet peeling
back the laws that favor minority rule in the U.S. also means a more
fundamental change to its outdated political system.
Shahid, who serves
as the communications director for Justice Democrats, and Stamp, the
national organizing director of the Working Families Party, recommend H.R.
4000, the Fair Representation Act. The act would establish nationwide
ranked-choice voting and require districts either to elect multiple
representatives from each district or, if too small for that, to elect
representatives on an at-large basis. Passed into law, they explain, these
provisions “would create a multi-party, proportional-representation system
in the House similar to the kind many other democracies around the world
enjoy,” with new, larger districts spanning the urban and rural areas
currently segmented off into separate constituencies. Some 74 million people will
still have voted for Trump in the last election. But such a change would make
Republicans have to compete for the 81 million who didn’t, too.
A functional and
representative government is a worthy goal in itself. But democratic
reforms should also be considered a form of climate adaptation
policy. Today’s Republican candidates might waffle on the issue of outright
climate denial but enthusiastically campaign on barely veiled
white supremacy. Taken together, it seems likely that their response to this crisis
they’ve declined to curtail—and which will displace millions—will be simply
to criminalize climate migration and double down on racism and xenophobia.
The security state
built after 9/11 already defines how the U.S. responds to climate emergencies. In
2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was incorporated into the
paranoid Frankenstein monster known as the Department of Homeland Security. As
a result, its staff often have more resources to handle terrorist attacks than
the sorts of disasters becoming ever more frequent as temperatures rise. John
Kerry’s new post is housed within the National Security Council, and he’s
talked frequently about the need to conceptualize the climate crisis as a
national security threat.
Building up the
military-industrial complex hasn’t been great for national security
itself, as disastrous forever wars and the inflamed diplomatic relationships
they’ve created show. It’s even less well-suited to stem either the climate
crisis or the unhinged right. But expanding our already grotesquely bloated
national security state in the name of climate change would be an aggressively
on-brand way for the U.S. to deal with that problem, playing right into
the worst elements of the Republican Party.
In the coming
weeks, there’s guaranteed to be talk of whether fighting the American far
right, and holding Donald Trump accountable for inciting a raging mob, will
detract from the Biden administration’s ability to make progress on Covid-19
relief, climate policy, and other urgent priorities in the first hundred days.
The beauty of democratic reform is that it would help the country move toward
all of these goals simultaneously. Even the most ambitious of democratic
reforms are no quick fix for what ails U.S. democracy, and won’t necessarily
put robust climate policy within reach. But it’s hard to imagine a
sustainable twenty-first century without them.
Kate
Aronoff @KateAronoff
Kate Aronoff is a
staff writer at The New Republic.
The New Republic
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Source URL: https://portside.org/2021-01-15/how-fight-climate-change-and-fascists-same-time
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
