Does anyone else feel like the dawn of a new decade caught them unawares? Until a couple weeks ago, I thought of 2020 as just the plodding follow-on to 2019, which had shared the same incremental relationship to 2018, and so on. Personally, I blame the millennium — after a once-every-thousand-years roll-over, how can a simple new decade ever compete? Throw in the fact that we’ve spent the last 20 years not even well settled on what to call where we are. The “oughts” never felt natural (sort of British and controlling all at once); meanwhile, the “teens” never fully won their fight with the “2010s,” the two diluting each other’s potential dominance in a way reminiscent of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren splitting the progressive vote in the Democratic presidential primary.
So here we are in the 20’s, at least back in the land of certain naming conventions, but not sure yet if they will roar or whimper. What we can be sure of, though, is that we’ve got a great if artificial turning point for looking back at the last ten years and thinking about the themes that emerge. The two enormous ones I’ve been thinking about aren’t just in the past, though, but will continue to dominate our not-really-new age for years to come.
The first is climate change, which at last is hammering its way into mass consciousness as the existential threat that it’s been all along; according to this Washington Post article, “76 percent of American adults view the issue as a ‘major problem’ or a ‘crisis.’” This Post story can stand in for the many other recent ones that identify the last ten years as a “lost decade” in the fight against climate change. While the average global temperature and concentration of carbon in the atmosphere both continue to rise, the 2010s were an era when countries around the world went through the motions of making climate change agreements and then failing to abide by them. In 2010, the United Nations estimated the world would need to decrease emissions by around 3% annually; having failed to do so, the present estimate is that we need to cut emissions by 7.6% each year to stabilize temperatures. The disastrous consequences of these failures are mounting, from great swathes of Australia ablaze and dangerous to human health, to acidifying oceans and unprecedentedly monstrous storms.
And this is after temperatures have risen just a single degree Celsius due to the burning of fossil fuels. On our current trajectory, we’ll hit a 3.2-degree rise by the end of the century. Scientists have identified 1.5 degrees as a crucial point, and describe a 2-degree rise as something that would be disastrous for many parts of the world. What many people are just starting to grasp is that many parts of the world are already experiencing this extreme change; a Washington Post analysis “found roughly 10 percent of the globe has surpassed 2 degrees of warming since the preindustrial era.”
At the same time, we’re also getting into the realm of tipping points and feedback loops. For example, the melting of Arctic ice means that there’s less of it to reflect sunlight, so that the water simply absorbs the heat instead, feeding the melt-off, while elsewhere in the far north the melting of permafrost releases methane into the atmosphere that likewise feeds the cycle. Similarly, we’ve recently heard about how enough of the Amazon rainforest has been compromised that self-perpetuating desertification may take hold in vast areas of it. Even as scientists offer some faint reassurance that even the worst scenarios don’t necessarily mean the end of all human life on the planet, it is becoming as clear as anything that there are all sorts of catastrophes short of a full-on apocalypse that many millions of people are increasingly being forced to endure.
The second overriding issue I’ve been thinking about is the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism around the world and in the United States. From Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Narendra Modi in India, from Viktor Orban in Hungary to Vladimir Putin in Russia, it’s undeniable that a rollback of democracy is well underway. The reasons for this are complex and manifold, and to a great extent relate to the history and politics of individual countries. Yet this is also a global phenomenon with some common roots, perhaps none more important than increasing economic inequality worldwide and the avenues this opens up to the manipulation of mass resentments and the incitement of blame and hatred against those labeled as being outside the nation.
Looking back over the last 10 years and more, we can see how in the U.S. the Republican Party has embodied the American strain of this global virus, ending with a full-blown case of authoritarian fever in the form of Donald Trump. As I’ve tried to describe over many, many posts, GOP initiatives like its redistricting schemes after the 2010 census and its embrace of voter suppression as a key electoral strategy are anti-democratic maneuvers that secured the way for the full-blown authoritarian tendencies of our current president and the zombie GOP that worships him like a god. I highly recommend this piece by David Daley, who literally wrote the book on the Republicans’ REDMAP (for Redistricting Majority Project) plan to secure majorities in state houses and Congress even in the face of popular vote losses. Daley describes how manipulation of redistricting in favor of Republicans acts as a sort of gateway drug to increasingly authoritarian tactics:
Here’s the thing: When you’re trying to ensure that the side with less support continues to hold power, when you’re trying to maintain control without talking to a changing nation, your tactics aren’t likely to end with redistricting. Indeed, efforts to make it harder for citizens to vote were among the very first actions by gerrymandered state legislatures, especially in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where a federal court found that those barriers were “surgically” crafted to target blacks. Gerrymandered legislatures can take such anti-democratic actions because the people’s representatives need not fear the judgement of the people. And after the U.S. Supreme Court undid essential protections within the Voting Rights Act, in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, states and other entities didn’t have to fear the courts, either, when they wanted to change the rules around voting. Across much of the nation, but especially in the South, as well as in states with one-party control and newly gerrymandered legislatures, came a flood of voter ID bills, cutbacks in absentee and early voting, voter roll purges, precinct closures and more.
And then, of course, along came Donald Trump, who not only embodied a whole host of authoritarian attitudes that were latent in the GOP all along — the longing for a strong man, the overly-zealous deference to authority — but the racist and white nationalist elements to which the authoritarian impulse in America is inextricably tied. After all, a central point of all these anti-democratic attitudes is to make sure that white Americans continue to hold power in the country, and that non-whites are denied their fair say in its destiny (at The Nation, Joan Walsh has a fantastic run-down of the way the GOP has transformed into a white nationalist party in plain view of us all, benefitting from denialism in both the media and in a Democratic Party that it still coming to grips with its rival party’s squalid transformation).
This is also as good a time as any to remind everyone of the startling fact that the Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once since 1992 — a piece of information so startling that I did a literal double-take when I came across it again the other day, and a crucial data point for understanding the GOP’s desire for undemocratic mechanisms to maintain its grip on power.
Both of these crises — that of the environment, and of democracy — have extensive parallels. Denial and disinformation are key to how bad things have gotten, whether it’s oil companies engaging in campaigns to sow doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change, or the use of propaganda by authoritarian leaders to maintain power. And both are rooted in the needs of the few overpowering those of the many; our planet is being wrecked to make a smaller and smaller number of people extremely rich, while authoritarian government ultimately serves only those at the apex of power.
But I think one of the big themes of the coming decade will be our collective realization of how these two issues are in fact interlinked to the point that neither can be resolved separately from the other. Authoritarian rule stands in the way of the profound economic and political shifts countries must make in order to head off still more obscene and unacceptable damage to our planet. It is no coincidence that here in the U.S., the GOP both increasingly opposes democracy and denies the reality of climate change. As political scholars have noted, the authoritarian-nationalist mentality is one of exploitation and degradation, with no real belief in a better future, looking instead nostalgically toward a mythologized, glorious past. The idea of needing to live in harmony with nature is a challenge both to the limits of the leader’s power and to the centrality of a nationalist message.
Conversely, some climate experts are warning of pernicious social and political feedback loops that might develop in response to the increasing devastation of global warming. Vox writer David Roberts describes this line of thinking:
As climate damages mount and countries begin dealing with more heatwaves, floods, and storms, continued investment in sustainable alternatives will become more difficult. Adaptation spending will rise relative to mitigation spending.
Climate change will primarily manifest as a series of traumas, and as a general matter, stress and trauma cause people to draw their circles of concern inward. Yet addressing climate change requires a circle of concern that encompasses all of humanity. It requires international cooperation. And the escalating damages of climate change are likely to make the very cooperation necessary to fight it more difficult. Local concerns and fears will come to dominate.
In other words, climate chaos could very well accelerate the forces of nationalism and urges for strongman leadership that are the diametric opposite of what’s needed to actually stop climate change. Chillingly, David Wallace-Wells sees the global response to the catastrophic Australian fires over the last few months as an early sign of how climate change might inspire “system of disinterest defined [. . .] by ever smaller circles of empathy.”
These possibilities of global political and climate doom are frightening and depressing almost beyond comprehension — but understanding the profound linkages on these two fronts is ultimately clarifying, even electrifying. For anyone who believes in democracy and a healthy planet, there is no way forward but by defending and advancing both. There is no environmentalism without democracy, and there is no democracy without environmentalism.