Environmentalism—Long Live the Politics of Fear
For all intents and purposes, the politics of fear appears to be a fading memory — a nightmare, the last traces of which we vaguely recall. True, it was replaced by an equally undesirable economic crisis, an intemperate battle over health care, and unsavory midterm electoral combat. But the war on terror is over. Barack Obama may not have managed to clean out the prisons at Guantánamo (yet). The Afghan war remains a major problem. Yet even here, the problem seems to be more about how to finish getting out. At the very least, it is safe to say that the politics of fear, that doomed project of national rejuvenation through fear and emergency, is in the past. But past in what sense?
The answer depends on the response to another question: what are the alternatives offered by the Left that could provide an equally overarching and commanding framework to replace the war on terror? “The problem is that all liberal politics have become special interests.”1 So say Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of the now debate-defining book The Death of Environmentalism. They believe that environmentalism can provide a totalizing vision able to integrate everything from international law to health care, and it is indeed the one set of ideas on the left that seems to unite the mundane world of policy with the higher questions of the good life. Mainstream nonenvironmentalists have latched on to this idea and have linked it directly to transcending the politics of fear. Thomas L. Friedman, for example, believes that a “new green ideology” can substitute hope for fear and overcome the “trauma and divisiveness of the Bush years.”2 The more grounded liberal economist Paul Krugman has offered proposals for creating a “green economy” to address economic and environmental crises in one go.3
However, the politics of fear is a broader, more deeply rooted political phenomenon, of which environmentalism is as much a part as the war on terror. If anything, the politics of fear can renew itself by shedding its association with the discredited war on terror and by attaching itself to the seemingly wholesome and pacific environmentalism standing in the wings. If the politics of fear is distinct from the war on terror, then it is worth first considering what the politics of fear is. Only then can we can see how environmentalism reproduces its essential features and why this leads not down the path to political renewal but to more security- based antipolitics.
The Politics of Fear
The fast and easy use of the slogan “politics of fear” has contributed little to our understanding of it. If anything, the commonsense character of the concept obscures its meaning. Initially, the catchphrase “politics of fear” calls to mind pure hysteria — orange alerts, duct-tape runs, and the irrational destruction of various Third World countries, or, in the more distant past, Red Scares, McCarthyism, and nuclear drills. However, this view is rather oversimplified because it equates a politics of fear with the conscious, and outrageous, manipulation of public fears for ulterior, elite political motives. On the flip side, it views the public as something approaching an inert, gullible mass easily swayed by blunt propaganda devices. There must be more to the politics of fear than that.
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Notes
- Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World ( N.p.: Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, 2004), 28, www.thebreakthrough.org/PDF/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf.
- Thomas L. Friedman, “The Power of Green,” New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/opinion/15iht-web- 0415edgreen- full.5281830.html.
- Paul Krugman, “Building a Green Economy,” New York Times Magazine, April 5, 2010, www .nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?pagewanted=all.