Rightwing Authoritarianism vs the Environment
In the U.S. and elsewhere, rightwing authoritarians oppose climate action. That’s not a coincidence.
Project 2025 favors authoritarian presidential rule. It also wants to destroy environmental regulation, especially climate law. That’s not a coincidence. The combination of authoritarianism, extreme conservative ideology, and anti-environmentalism is common globally, not just in U.S. politics.
There’s no logical connection between a belief in authoritarian government, upholding traditional hierarchies, and views about protecting the environment or the reality of climate change. Thus, the reasons must relate to psychology or political science, not philosophy.
In terms of psychology, there is a clear correlation between rightwing beliefs and anti-environmental attitudes. The psychology behind this connection is not entirely clear, but studies provide some clues. Researchers have found links between two psychological dispositions and hostility to environmental protection. One attitude is called social dominance orientation (SDO) and involves a desire to maintain a hierarchical society. People with this attitude tend to agree with statements like ““To get ahead in life, it is sometimes okay to step on other groups.“ They may favor dominance over nature or the use of nature to favor one’s own group over others. A related attitude is called right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Authoritarians tend to agree with statements like “Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fibre and traditional beliefs.” They may view environmentalists as posing a threat to society. Those who reject environmental protection see the harms as falling on others of lower status and become more likely to reject social equality generally. This research is suggestive, but my impression is that there is a lot we still don’t know about political psychology.
Whatever the psychology involved, the connection between rightwing populism and anti-environmentalism is not just an American phenomenon. You only need to look at leaders such as Bolsonaro in Brazil and Orban in Hungary to see this. Rightwing populists across Europe oppose climate action. As one example, the successful populist leader in the Netherlands “said that climate action was an ‘unaffordable madness’ and that – once in office – the party would put the national climate law and the Paris Agreement ‘straight through the shredder.’”
Psychology may explain some of the connection between authoritarianism and anti-environmentalism, but political science may also have something to say about it. In many countries, including the U.S, oil is one part of the answer. Petrostates tend to suffer from corruption and are prone to authoritarianism – something economists call the “resource curse” because of the way that being rich in natural resources can actually hinder a country’s progress. The windfall component of oil industry profits – the part that comes from the scarcity of a natural resource or price-fixing by OPEC – means the industry has a lot of money to throw around to reward its political allies.
Our previous President is not the only one to celebrate oil and gas as the golden road to national wealth. This economic strategy is fundamentally based on the luck of geography rather than innovation, manufacturing, or having a capable, well-motivated workforce. That makes high-quality government a low priority – reflected in the Project 2025 and the America First Agenda’s desire to replace government professionals with ideological presidential lackeys.
Other factors may also be relevant. Rightwing authoritarians enjoy support from various quarters. But they tend to have the strongest support in rural areas, where jobs in extractive industries are important, and among the less educated, who are less likely to be aware of climate science. In addition, they offer their followers social stability, which is connected to favoring established industries and technologies. Rightwing authoritarians are hostile to higher education, as they are to any source of independent thinking outside their control. Science of all kinds is suspect because of its academic roots and its reliance on free inquiry rather than authority as the source of knowledge. Finally, even more than the rest of us, authoritarians tend to think that anything the other side believes is necessarily wrong, and liberals tend to favor environmental protection.
There’s a lot of room for research on the anti-environmentalism, anti-democracy link. Given the existence of this link, there is a sense in which environmental work and democracy work are themselves inseparable.
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About Dan
Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he has al…
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Dan, now that we have a new Chancellor, Berkeley Powers That Be must end the era of Environmental Fiefdoms and IMPLEMENT YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS FOR REORGANIZATION OF BERKELEY’S ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES so efforts can be united to protect the human race as the highest priority with the greatest sense of urgency now that environmental disasters are out of control throughout America and around the world.
All true.
The common denominator across history and location is land. Those who’ve controlled it have had power and wealth. That seems like the basic psychology: I want to keep my power and wealth.
Land was historically about farming, and farms were worked by families (e.g., serfs). Since the Industrial Age, it’s more about resource extraction. Still, basically a real estate thing.
It links to the motherland/fatherland meme, which is a derivative of the family. There’s something “natural” about it. The parents dominate the family; the nobility dominates the country. These memes (in the Richard Dawkins sense, not the internet sense) are so ancient and deep as to be pre-conscious–for all of us. Think of the deep appeal of Stars Wars. It’s basically a story of royalty, dynasty, and empire, one that resonates with all of us, as does any fairy tale.
Given that, I think conservatives experience severe cognitive dissonance with other forms of social organization that embody egalitarianism and human rights. Those forms look like incipient chaos to them. They fear them. Who’s in charge? How do you decide?
Liberal tradition comes from recognizing the evils of dynasty. But that doesn’t mean that liberals have always had successful responses. The French and Russian revolutions had terrible consequences, a lot of which related to who gets power and controls the resources. The American Revolution benefitted from happening on a “new” continent, so rearranging land ownership, at least among Europeans, was amenable to that new form of government, democracy. (More than terrible for the indigenous population, but that’s another discussion.)
Revolutions are scary, and they don’t always solve the power problem. They feed the conservative fear of non-hierarchical society.
The Power of Money seems to be a never ending threat to and within all of our institutions in America and throughout the world.
I Hope and Pray that at least one institution can overcome the grave threats to our Democracy and environment in time to save and protect quality of life for our newest generations like the Greatest Generation did with their sacrifices for us.
Jim,
It is not “they,” it is us. We are all together on the Earth. We should be figuring out how to get along and protect the life-sustaining systems of the Earth before we cross the line and cannot get back. I suggest perusing Climate Change 2021 – The Physical Science Basis: Working Group I Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
https://www.ipcc.ch/
We have taken the unusual step this morning of removing a comment. We encourage the robust exchange of views, including views that we think are flatly wrong. However, we do not allow ad hominem attacks, particularly on the authors of Legal Planet posts or other commentators. Repeated violations can lead to exclusion from the comment section.
Dear Dan,
Please forgive me, it was never my intent to engage in ad hominem attacks against the authors and commentators on Legal Planet. Instead, I was trying to address the futility of climate mitigation and its high costs for ordinary citizens.
All of us should try to be as honest as possible about climate mitigation. Going forward I pledge to be mindful of the delicate sensitivities surrounding this controversial subject and choose my words more carefully. Have a good day, thanks for this forum.