By Phillip Anthony McCoan Thornhill
The Harris/Walz campaign promote themselves as joyful warriors with a vision of a joyful positive future. The right wing meanwhile declaims in urgent fearful tones that Americans should be afraid. That they should be terrified of hordes of illegal migrant murderers, rapists and drug-traffickers, that we should live in dread of an avalanche of radical wokeness that will destroy everything we hold dear, of a takeover of the country by aliens, of children coerced into gender-changing surgery at school ... and so on and so on.
The right wing is right is saying we should be panicked and fearful: this election should be all about dread for the future and the way the world is heading. But they are right, of course, for all the wrong reasons. In a rational world this election would be all about the enormous, overwhelming and terrifying threat to everything we hold dear by the catastrophic destabilisation of the global climate which (while it has not yet reached the incontravertibly visible and obvious catastrophic level it is heading for), is now well under way and looking harder than ever to stop or slow down.
In a rational world it would be all about that and what we can do about it. This would have to include a level of active global cooperation not seen before (we all share the same single atmosphere), a starting point for which must be an ‘international-rules-based order’ which means at a minimum not dragging us back into the 19th or early 20th century when sheer brutal force could be used by strong counries against weaker ones to advance chauvinist national(-ist) interests that are seen as paramount. This last seventy or so years has hardly been perfect peace but no country has invaded another one in Europe. At least up to 2022.
The solution to that threat to world order (and implicitly to vital global cooperation) must be to stop and punish – above all not reward - the transgressor.
The radical right wing in America is threatening democracy itself in an increasingly open way. The implicit message is that democracy has failed us and we need a ‘strong man’ to stop the blight and solve our problems. They are right that democracy has failed. As I say that I do not want to ignore all the very wonderful things that democracy has given us – the freedom to speak our opinion as just one of them – especially at the moment when we are at risk of losing them, along with democracy itself. But democracy has not managed to deal with what fate and physics has thrown against it: the catastrophic destabilisation of climate. It has failed and failed again so that what should have been done thirty years ago is not being done even now.
Take a cold hard look at what the scientific experts are saying and the crisis looks like it is increasingly unstoppable, unravelling out of control. That means suffering and death on a huge scale, to be clear. Asking whether it is ‘too late’ now is beyond the point. It is not a question of ‘stopping’ it now; it is a question of minimising it, to whatever degree is humanly possible. And in this situation, to people already on the edge and at greatest risk in poorer countries (those who are smart enough to appreciate what’s unfolding) democracy might look like a luxury for rich countries that the world as a whole can ill afford.
But of course, the aternative to democracy right now looks worse, infinitely worse – especially as seen in these terms. Even if we are talking about pathetic inadequacy on the one hand we are talking about insane levels of horrific and hyper-aggressive wrong-headedness, motivated by obscene levels of myopic greed on the other. Along with all the other lies and fallacies of early twent first century neo-fascism, increasingly high on the list comes ‘climate denial’. This has a lot to do with the unholy alliance between hard right populism and the short term greed of corporations and the super-rich that control too many of them.
One might imagine that the firm hand of a benign dictator might guide us out of global catstrophe but that is hardly what is on offer. One could add that even if you are lucky enough to get an Augustus there is no way left to prevent a Caligula or a Nero from following on, after. But that is anyway besides the point because we are right out of time: in the race againt unravelling climate catastrophe what is done this year is worth twice as much as what is done ten, five or two years, later. So we need to support whoever can do whatever can be done in the short(est possible) term. And keep pushing for more: ideally – and I appreciate the daunting enormity of the task - to get people to panic about what they really need to be panicking about. At this stage not only for their childrens’ future but also their own. And we cannot afford to relapse into a world at war with itself in which brutal predatory force is unchecked.
In America the neo-facist right is showing its ugly face in an increasingly overt way just as the authoritarian right, populist nationalism and rule-by-force is, in so many other places around the world – not least, but rather foremost, in Putin’s Russia, leading the pack. People can see echoes from the 1930s and the ugliness of totalitarian repression and the conflict caused by populist nationalism and dictators without restraint – of the dominance of brute force in the domestic and international arena - is in the final analysis something not entirely unfamiliar.
But this time there is another, yet darker threat, that looms behind the obvious, starkly apparent, menace of demagogues and war-waging dictators. Actually there are two, because one of them is the threat of global nuclear annihilation, that was not there in the earlier part of the twentieth century although we have been living with it for some time since then. The other does not require simply avoiding some horrific miscalculation: it requires positive, active global engagement, right now. That is global climate meltdown and an environmental catastrophe on a scale that that will make it worse - and more deadly - than even the loss of democracy.
Phil Thornhill denies that he wrote this, in a fit of angst caused by watching too much US news when he should have been washing carrots for a volunteers' kitchen in Lviv.
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The author is a prominent climate activist. As with all Lviv Herald articles, the opinions expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Lviv Herald which encourages opinion pieces from across the political spectrum.