Haywire Liberalism and the Dialectic of Climate Denialism

• In Event: Crises of Liberalism: From Climate Change to Democratic Retrenchment

Abstract

How will mainstream liberalism and far-right movements differently respond to increasing levels of climate chaos in the coming decades? This paper reflects on likely scenarios by theorizing a dialectic between moderate climate delay and radical climate denialism. It begins with a discussion of neoliberal think tanks and corporations that built the intellectual edifice for climate denialism. It then shows that these free-market networks are increasingly allied with far-right parties and libertarian movements across North America, South America, and Europe. At the heart of this development is what I call economic liberalism’s haywire trajectory, or “haywire liberalism,” splitting into strands of melioristic liberal centrism and far-right ethnonationalism. Much like the interwar period, however, there is an important intersection that can be found between them: a constitutional opposition to socialism, now dressed in the green garbs of “ecosocialism.” Understanding and combatting this rejection of economic planning, the paper contends, is not only crucial to the monumental task of containing climate change. It is also critical to grasping how current moral panics over race, migration, gender, and sexuality intersect with questions of economic and climate policy. Through examples of both soft and hard climate denialism – from Michael Schellenberger to Javier Milei – the paper concludes with a discussion of how pandemic-related conspiracy theories (the Great Reset) have already framed and advanced opposition to climate policy. As neoliberal and far-right movements seek to undermine progressive and socialist attempts at stemming climate change while also capitalizing on the uncertainty it generates, confronting their ideological roots and growing popularity is a political-theoretical task of the first order.

Author

• William Callison, Harvard University