ECO-FASCISM. WHY, IT’S AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE!

Our friend R gave us a subscription to the London Review of Books, which includes a blog that pops up in my email from time to time.  An article by Elizabeth Chatterjee called Green and White Nationalism caught my eye.  https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/september/green-and-white-nationalism?utm_source=LRB+blog+email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20190910+blog&utm_content=ukrw_subs_blog&fbclid=IwAR2qBbOQc7YlsJd_LbjukeYIgv9mI9NCFmjReCyfiIgrd2toWZl-iJv2A_U  It’s about eco-fascism, the connective tissue that binds together themes that have been floating around in my mind and this blog for some time now:  white nationalism, racism/eugenics, and immigration.  But more than that, Chatterjee links these to climate change and warns:

The political left has spent decades urging the right to take climate change seriously. We may live to regret it. Faced with the climate crisis, what kind of political solidarities can transcend the appeal of nativism and nation?

The idea that the right-wing arm of the GOP (is that now redundant?) will co-opt the climate crisis to advance its nativist, racist agenda is something I find deeply troubling and absolutely predictable.  Lest you think this is hysterical hyperbole on my part, see Dinesh de Souza’s tweet above and Adolph Hitler’s embrace below of The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant’s seminal book on exclusionism and the superiority of the Nordic race. 

Chatterjee isn’t the only person writing about eco-fascism today.  Peter Beinart in The Atlantic https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/595489/ and Gaby Del Valle in The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/environment-climate-eugenics-immigration/ also report the cynical adoption of environmental issues by white nationalists.  Citing the manifesto, entitled The Inconvenient Truth, uploaded by the El Paso Walmart shooter, which rants about “cultural and ethnic replacement” and warns of a “Hispanic invasion,” (sound familiar?) while praising the self-proclaimed eco-fascist New Zealand mosque attacker, Beinart writes:

…the so-called manifesto includes another theme, which fits less obviously into the white-nationalist script: environmentalism. The American lifestyle is destroying the environment, the author declares. But the answer is not to ask native-born white Americans to change their ways. It is to rid the country of Latinos.

The manifesto references an earlier document written by the gunman who killed more than 50 Muslims this spring in Christchurch, New Zealand. It too offered environmental justifications for white nationalism [image above]. Non-Europeans are overpopulating the planet, the Christchurch killer insisted, and killing them will save it.

Right-wing pundits are talking the same trash—literally.  From Del Valle’s superb piece:

On his prime-time show in August, Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared that his opposition to immigration partly stems from his deep love for the environment. Instead of banning helium balloons, plastic straws, and other “things that bring ordinary people joy,” Carlson suggested, liberals would be better advised to get tough on immigration. “I actually hate litter, which is one of the reasons I’m so against illegal immigration: It produces a huge amount of litter—a huge amount of litter,” Carlson said.  [Query whether the litter refers to the immigrants or their trash.]

Ann Coulter recently warned The Daily Caller’s readers that they’d soon have to make a choice “between a green America and a brown America,” asserting that the problem isn’t just “the number of people traipsing through our wilderness areas; it’s that primitive societies have no concept of ‘litter.’” Concern for the environment, Coulter wrote, is “a quirk of prosperous societies. The damage to our parks shows these cultural differences.”

 

The link among xenophobia, eugenics, and environmentalism isn’t new.  In fact, it’s as American as apple pie.  It started with Madison Grant (above) and his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race.  Grant was a blue blood (with a helluva mustache) educated at Yale and Columbia Law School.  He was a passionate conservationist who helped found the Bronx Zoo, Glacier National Park, and the Save the Redwoods League.  Which was constructive.  But he also dabbled in eugenics and believed that the Nordic race—people from Scandinavia and parts of Northern Europe and Russia—were genetically superior.  Which was not only specious pseudo-science, but destructive.  

Grant’s idea of conservation extended to the need to keep America for the native Americans--not to be confused with the real Native Americans, mind you, but the earlier European “Nordic” settlers.  To that end, Grant successfully lobbied Congress for the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act.  The law passed handily through the House and the Senate with only a few nay votes.  It established immigration quotas based on nationality and set immigration levels waaaaay back to what they were in 1890—before what one Congressman called the “low grade stuff” started to arrive from Eastern and Southern Europe.   

By the way, the 1924 Act was the basis of the refusal by the U.S. in 1939 to let the ocean liner, the S.S. St. Louis, carrying over 900 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, dock in Florida after being turned away in Cuba.  The boat was forced to return to Hamburg, where at least 250 refugees ultimately perished.  The 1924 Act remained in effect until 1965 when, according to Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions, who praised the Act in a radio interview with Steve Bannon, everything went to Hell in a hand basket.  Or words to that effect.

For Grant, preserving the bald eagle and the redwoods went hand in hand with preserving the Nordic white race.  Del Valle explains the connection between Grant’s xenophobia and environmentalism:

These days, Grant’s dual concerns—conservation and eugenics—might seem like an unusual mix, especially given a political context in which the party of immigration restriction is also the party of deregulation and climate change denial. But according to Jonathan Spiro, who published the definitive biography of Grant in 2009, these seemingly antithetical ideals were perfectly consistent at the dawn of the 20th century.

For Grant, Spiro explains, eugenics was a way of ensuring the survival of those who had made the United States a prosperous country, while conservation was a way of preserving the land with which nature—and natural selection—had endowed them. “Grant dedicated his life to saving endangered fauna, flora, and natural resources; and it did not seem at all strange to his peers that he would also try to save his own endangered race.” 

But these days, blending eugenics with conservation—even climate change--might not be an unusual mix at all.  Indeed, co-opting climate change, a politically left issue, and making it a conservative one, could prove crucial to the survival of the GOP as a viable party.  

However, before I get into that, I’m sure you’re dying to know about Adolph Hitler’s embrace of The Passing of the Great Race.  On the centenary of the publication of the book, Noel Hartman writes in https://www.publicbooks.org/the-passing-of-the-great-race-at-100/ :

The Passing of the Great Race has had many uses over the years. The Führer himself raved about The Passing, calling it “my Bible,” and it was entered into evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in defense of Hitler’s personal physician to show that specifically American theories of white racial superiority supported the crimes against humanity with which he was charged—forced sterilization, for instance, or unnecessary and experimental surgery performed without anesthesia.

I found it quite interesting, to say the least, to learn that the Nazis didn’t invent the concept of the Master Race, nor were they the first to systematically exclude “the low grade stuff.” On the contrary, it was Hitler and the National Socialists who looked to the U.S. for guidance on race supremacy and exclusion.  As Adam Server quotes Hitler in The Atlantic at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/adam-serwer-madison-grant-white-nationalism/583258/ :

 “It was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times … just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”

What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,” observes James Q. Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School…. “ It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.” Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white.  [Sound familiar?]

The “völkisch conception of the state,” in the Era of Trump, is German for “Make America Great Again!” or “America by Americans for Americans.” 

Returning to my contention:  Why do I think the Republican Party, the party of immigration restriction, deregulation, and climate denial, will co-opt climate change for its own political ends?  The simple, existential answer is that it needs young voters to remain viable, and young conservative voters are concerned about climate change and mass extinction.  They’re ripe for the taking.  An opinion piece in The New York Times at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/opinion/republicans-democracy-play-dirty.html?searchResultPosition=1 by the authors of How Democracies Die  illustrates why the party itself is on the verge of extinction and what it must do to survive:

Republicans appear to be in the grip of a similar panic today. Their medium-term electoral prospects are dim. For one, they remain an overwhelmingly white Christian party in an increasingly diverse society. As a share of the American electorate, white Christians declined from 73 percent in 1992 to 57 percent in 2012 and may be below 50 percent by 2024. Republicans also face a generational challenge: Younger voters are deserting them. In 2018, 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrats by more than 2 to 1, and 30-somethings voted nearly 60 percent for Democrats.

The only way out of this situation is for the Republican Party to become more diverse. A stunning 90 percent of House Republicans are white men, even though white men are a third of the electorate. Only when Republicans can compete seriously for younger, urban and nonwhite voters will their fear of losing — and of a multiracial America — subside.

That’s a heavy lift, but the climate crisis provides a lever.  Statistics say that by 2040, the U.S. will be a majority minority country.  Gerrymandering, voter suppression, Electoral College skewing—even encouraging help from foreign governments—won’t be enough to guarantee a GOP electoral victory.  The party needs more members.  As Del Valle writes:

…[N]ativist conservationism could find a more powerful vehicle [than environmentalism] in the geopolitics of climate change. This approach may prove more seductive to younger generations as the consensus grows over the dangers of global warming, and as fears over climate migration start to shape national immigration policies.

The countries most responsible for global climate change—the United States and the member states of the European Union—will likely feel fewer and less-catastrophic immediate effects than do impoverished countries in the Global South. And many of the people most vulnerable to the damaging effects of climate change hail from the very countries that right-wing nativists have deemed racially and culturally inferior.

 

To paraphrase President Trump, they hail from “shithole countries.  Why can’t we have more people from Norway?”  So, if you’re a member of a nativist political party on the verge of extinction, why not solicit young conservative voters by giving lip service to climate concerns, claiming that overpopulation is a threat to climate security, while at the same time using that threat as a way to push your racist/anti-immigrant agenda?   It’s a Two-fer Win-Win!  When you read that “Non-Europeans are overpopulating the planet,” or about “the number of people traipsing through our wilderness areas,” you are witnessing the fear of overpopulation by non-native Americans being used to claim the climate crisis as a conservative political recruiting tool.  

 

But is non-European overpopulation really the threat to climate security white nationalists claim it is?  Actually, no, according to The World Economic Forum at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/david-attenborough-warns-planet-cant-cope-with-overpopulation/ :

China and India are the most populous nations on the planet, with 1.4 billion and 1.3 billion people respectively, according to the UN’s World Population Prospects.

By around 2024 though, India will have overtaken China, while Nigeria, currently the world’s seventh largest country, is growing the fastest - and is predicted to overtake the United States to become the third largest country before 2050. Japan, by contrast, is seeing its population decline, which is impacting on its economy.

While it’s true that global fertility levels are in decline, leading to a slowing in overall population growth, fertility in the world’s 47 least developed countries is still relatively high - at 4.3 births per woman between 2010 and 2015 - meaning rapid growth of these countries at 2.4% per year.

According to the UN, the populations of 26 African countries are due to at least double in size between 2017 and 2050.

 BUT:

As developing countries catch up with the rest of the world, you might think their carbon footprint grows at the same rate, but, according to research, between 1980 and 2005, many of the nations with the fastest population growth rates had the slowest increases in carbon emissions.

Turns out over consumption is the issue.  So, the eco-fascists are distorting science and statistics, “naturally selecting” the facts that support keeping America for the real Americans.   In my view, they don't actually fear that too many people will put an undue burden on the climate and sustainability.  No, they fear that overpopulation of America by the wrong kind of people will result in race suicide, which is straight out of The Passing of the Great Race.  This is the link that ties white nationalism, racism/eugenics, immigration and climate change together.  Because, if you’re a white nationalist, when the climate shit really hits the fan, you’ll become a green nationalist.  You’ll become an eco-fascist who sees the black, brown, and non-Christian poor people from the shithole countries where climate change will wreak the most havoc as the new barbarians at the American gate.  These non-Nordics must be kept out.  They must not pollute the race.  To quote Congressman Steve King, “We cannot rebuild our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”  (Hmmmm.  Could King’s attitude have anything to do with the war on women and abortion?  Kinder, Küche, Kirche = children, kitchen, church.)

Finally, Del Valle:

What all this reveals is the true motive of the environmentalist-nativist nexus. Whether its members are sincere or merely opportunistic, the “endangered” species they care most about preserving is bipedal and fair-skinned—Nordic, even.

Keep it real!

Marilyn