Trump, Carl Schmitt, and climate change denial

Over at the Niskanen Center blog, Mark Weiner recently posted the very interesting "Climate Change Denial as the Historical Consciousness of Trumpism: Lessons from Carl Schmitt". Some excerpts:

We need to understand Trumpism as a philosophical movement even better than its own adherents do, and with full interpretive sympathy, and we need to be prepared to confront it along all its philosophical axes.

The most central of these axes is Trumpism’s approach to history, because the identity of a political movement, like that of a nation, becomes fully apparent only once it possesses a self-conscious understanding of the past.

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As a framework for interpreting the past, climate change denial grows logically from the core metaphysical commitments of contemporary populist nationalism in its confrontation with trans-Atlantic, cosmopolitan, individualist liberalism.

In this respect one might thus regard it as the distinctive form of anti-liberal historical thinking of our era. 

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Two principles of Schmitt’s writing are especially relevant to understanding the place of climate change denial in Trumpism’s historical consciousness, and they’re worth discussing at some length. Each principle links Trumpian domestic and international politics as two sides of the same philosophical coin.

The political is inviolable

First, for Schmitt a community’s ability to draw the friend-enemy distinction can—by definition—brook no conceptual or institutional restraint.

Most notably, the distinction can’t be predicated on other domains of human value, such as morals, aesthetics, or economics. Ideals from these fields may be used to enhance public feelings of opposition. Enemies are regularly portrayed as ugly, for instance—a practice at which Trump personally excels.

But the object of a community’s political dissociation is made on the basis of criteria independent from judgments about good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or profit and loss.

Liberals today regularly violate this principle. They seek to circumscribe national sovereignty within generally-applicable legal norms such as individual human dignity—consider Article I of the German Basic Law—and to restrict it through institutions like the United Nations.

Schmitt views such liberal projects not simply as naïve, but also as a recipe for social chaos at home and unrestrained, imperialistic violence abroad. 

Putting the Trump environmental transition in perspective

William Ruckelshaus, the first time around

Following today's post by Craig Oren on precedents from the Reagan era for Trump's plans to roll back environmental regulation (on which see also William Ruckelshaus's piece from yesterday's NY Times), I'm also re-posting an interesting call originally posted on H-Environment:

On behalf of a new group of scholars, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, I'd like to invite the participation of environmental historians in a a project we're undertaking.   As part of a report we are preparing on the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, we're hoping to offer some historical and comparative perspective on what will have transpired.  I'd welcome your help, first of all, with a review of the relevant historical literature.  Either as "reply" to this post or through email, could you please send citations of insightful articles, book chapters or book--with a summary of contents and argument--on the following topics?

1. Accounts and analysis of the environmental dimensions of the U.S. presidential transition to Ronald Reagan

2. Accounts and analysis of the environmental dimensions of the Canadian transition to Stephen Harper

3. Nominations, with a citation, of any other environmental transitions of a federal government that you think pertinent

All replies and a summary are going to be posted in the new H-Commons list H-Envirohealth.   If you prefer emailing, please send to chrissellersedgi@gmail.com and/or trinberg@gmail.com.   

If you'd also like to get further involved with our group, please let us know.  Plenty of good work to do, and we welcome new energy and ideas.

Chris Sellers for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative https://envirodatagov.org/

The Trump environmental transition

After a pleasant interlude in medieval English forests, we return to recent history with a recent post by Craig Oren on RegBlog. After laying out some of the possible deregulatory moves we will see from the Trump administration, Oren takes us back in time:

We must remember 1981, when the Reagan Administration came into power. Its choice for EPA administrator was Anne Gorsuch [Neil Gorsuch's mother-DS], who had little experience in environmental matters. Lobbyists seeking deregulation initially had much influence on the agency. During her short-lived tenure, a draft emerged of proposed amendments that would have eviscerated the Clean Air Act, much to the horror of environmental groups. Gorsuch also repeatedly weakened EPA’s enforcement office. Gorsuch warred with the agency’s career staff: a number of high-level executives were transferred—and some lost their jobs altogether—as punishment for not being sufficiently compliant with the Administration’s priorities.

Gorsuch at her farewell news conference

Capitol Hill looked unpromising, too, during the Reagan years. Then-Representative John Dingell (D-Mich.)—a firm environmentalist, but also someone who was concerned with the interests of auto companies, which employed many of the constituents in his Detroit congressional district—joined with industry and Republicans to put together a package of weakening amendments to the Clean Air Act, including a rollback of auto-emission standards l. And a so-called regulatory reform bill, designed to hamstring agencies from protecting public health and the environment, seemed in 1982 to have a considerable chance for some time of being enacted.

Nature and anti-immigrant politics

With great timing, the latest Environmental History has a review by Sterling Evans of John Hultgren's Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America (U. Minnesota Press, 2015), reminding us that current events have historical (and environmental) roots. (I note that it's frightening how far the "racial logics" that are "socially acceptable withing mainstream political discourse" (see below) have shifted between the book's publication two years ago and the Trump Era.) Some excerpts:

This highly recommended book focuses on the nature of building US-Mexican border walls, the racism that has accompanied such policies, and the anti-immigration fervor that has followed within some environmental organizations. The term that John Hultgren relies on to discuss this issue is “environmental restrictionism,” and he discusses its efficacy very well in Border Walls Gone Green.

Hultgren, a political scientist, suggests the “central thesis” of the book is that “nature is increasingly being deployed as a form of walling—providing a subtle means of reinforcing ‘territorial’ borders without having to revert to racial and cultural logics that are no longer socially acceptable within mainstream political discourse” (pp. 1–2). That is a meritorious thesis to pursue in this study and one that Hultgren works to prove by the end of the book. “Nature, in this sense,” he posits, “provides a way for immigration restrictionists to expand their alliances beyond the far right while still maintaining the support of nativists,” a scenario that he argues is hardly new with “American greens” (p. 2). For theoretical background he provides some historical context from the anti-immigration stances of members of Earth First!, the Sierra Club, and a variety of environmentalist writers and activists. Thus he unpacks the connections between the “nature” of restrictionists and “narratives of political community” in this “emerging form of territorialization.” In other words, his goal is to shed “light on the discursive and institutional pathways through which nature is subtly woven into exclusionary political projects” (p. 3). In a larger sense, Hultgren’s point is to draw attention to “the complexities of natural-cultural interconnection,” especially how the environmental movement has been guilty of using “nature’s perceived location within progressive politics … to be used for exclusionary purposes by a variety of actors who seek to naturalize their (usually privileged) location within the political community while marginalizing others” (p. 5). 

For more on this issue, see here and here.