A few days ago, I talked about how the lies behind President Trump’s anti-environmental screeds can be used against him. One big point that I didn’t make is that it’s a mistake to over-emphasize what seems to be Trump’s sheer craziness (“wind turbines cause cancer”) rather than focus on the more substantive message of his comments. Though there’s plenty that he says about environmental issues that might be added to the already-overwhelming case that the prez is off his rocker, Donald Trump is also communicating a powerful right-wing worldview that he shares with much of the GOP. When he tells us that the government has no right to tell people what sort of lightbulbs to use, even when such energy- and cost-saving policies are the result of the implementation of laws passed by Congress and signed by a previous president, he is basically making an argument that the government acts illegitimately when it acts democratically. This might sound absurd, since we all agree, at least at some level, that we live in a democracy, but it is of a piece with long-standing right-wing arguments that seek to label majority rule under a democracy as some sort of Soviet-style “collectivism.” This is the strain of conservative thought that identifies any government action it opposes, even when authorized by a democratically-elected government, as trampling on individual rights and free choice.

The flip side of this mentality is a belief that Americans really should not be trying to act collectively to solve common problems via our government. We are effectively instructed to be uncomfortable, if not outright rebellious, towards banding together for the common good. Instead, whatever we decide in our daily individual lives, via choices as consumers, is the main way our democracy should function. Dollars spent, not votes, reveal the will of the people. Collective action via politics for common ends is seen as dangerous and un-American.

But in the case of the environment, this proscription against collective action is supercharged by another powerful idea that is hardly Trump’s alone, but that’s elemental to his anti-environmentalism: the idea that there are no limits to what we can extract from and inflict on the planet. This really is at the root of the idea that we don’t need to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, don’t need renewable energy, don’t need to change anything at all in how our economy runs or how we live our lives. It is a denial of reality, sure, but it’s an intoxicating denial, and anyone who wants to beat Trump and the Grand Old Party of environmental apocalypse needs to counter this position. For instance, you can see how a strategy like the Green New Deal tries to turn this crisis into opportunity, showing how the economy and our wealth can actually grow by transitioning to a carbon-neutral world. But much more thought and perspectives are needed to push back and replace this powerful strain in American thought that we don’t need to ever consider our relationship to the natural world. Just because Trump sounds stupid when he talks about low-flow toilets being a pain in the ass shouldn’t blind us to the powerful tropes of dominance of nature that have been with us for centuries, and that he channels in his rants.

You can also see how this idea of no limits has perverse connections with the conservative notion that collective action is illegitimate and unwise. Since we are all just individuals with minimal individual impacts on the planet, how on earth could the planet be impacted by what each of us does? And since this is the case, collective action directed at a phantom problem is rendered even more suspect and unwise.