The right wing is apparently
still on the rise, with its xenophobia, its nationalism, its ignorance and fear.
This, like el Niño weather patterns, happens periodically. What makes complacency
impossible this time is the planetary threat that looms in the setting with an
urgency never understood before. That the alt-right can surprise no one. That
its periodic recurrence of high-pitched rage has been given a boost by
propagandist media and social networks means that its strength at this moment is
particularly ominous. But in the normal course of things, it would subside. It
would lead, again, to some catastrophic equivalent of the holocaust or
Hiroshima and more compassionate alternatives would afterwards emerge. History does not
repeat itself in the same way ever, but there are patterns of closing in and
opening up just as there are patterns of boom and bust in a capitalist economy.
But just as those economic patterns cannot persist forever, and that at some
point that economy will fall of its own accumulated weight, and just as the
universe cannot expand forever, these destructive patterns of right-wing fear
and liberal recovery cannot endlessly repeat. At a certain point the squeezebox
breaks. The threat this time, however, is not structural, it’s not the wearing
out of the parts. It comes from the outside. Everything the right wing supports
leads it to ignore the heating of the earth. It wants to hurry to accomplish as
much as it can while it has the stage. Chaos is its friend. That liberal cause
of species survival, which would seem to be a nuisance, even that can—by attacking
it with the empty derision of made-up terms like "P.C."—even that can become an
asset in the right-wing assault on compassion, decency, basic humanity. Global
warming is now the mis-en-scene where our ultimately meaningless political
battles take place. A sword fight in a burning building. And nothing will be
done to put out the fire, and not because both sides are so intent on defeating the
other that neither will call the fire department, but because one side won’t let
the other call, blocks every move toward the phone, laughs “you can’t call
until you defeat me, and by then it will be too late.”
