The future of environmentalism is post-liberal

Progressive environmentalism is a dead end. Something new is needed.

As Donald Trump enters the White House for the second time, it feels very different from the first time. In 2016, European elites were in full resistance mode against the populist uprising in America and Britain's Brexit. They thought they could weather the storm.

Eight years later, Europe's liberal and progressive elites are in a panic because they know that with Trump 2, the mood is changing in Europe too and that Trumpism will spill over to Europe in one way or another.

Across Europe, the political class and their allies in the media are now openly admitting that, in order to stop the political headwinds, they need to regain control of public discourse and are working towards total internet censorship. If they initially thought that targeting Elon Musk and X would be enough, now that Mark Zuckerberg has come out in favour of free speech, the list of platforms to be censored has become much longer.

Whatever the European elites try to do in the coming months to silence Musk and co, they already know they are losing the war. But progressives and liberals are not losing because of Musk, as they and the media would have us believe, but because their politics are completely out of touch with the reality of ordinary people. They have no convincing ideas to offer on today's most pressing problems, and worse, the politics of the left over the last 30 years have created or exacerbated the problems that have led to the populist revolution we are seeing.

Although protecting nature and the environment is not a progressive idea per se, but rather a conservative one, environmentalism became increasingly associated with the left as the 20th century progressed. In particular, in the 1960s and 70s, environmentalism became part of a broader countercultural movement associated with anti-establishment and left-wing ideologies.

The revolutionaries of the 1960s then embarked on the famous march through the institutions until they themselves became the establishment, dominating Western institutions, especially in the last 30 years. 

In the Western world today, the vast majority of environmentalists identify with left-leaning progressive ideas, and so do their organisations. A few niche areas of conservative environmentalism are the exception.

But what does the current shift to the right mean for environmentalism in the West? Should environmental organisations remain firmly rooted in the progressive left resistance movement against Trump, Musk and right-wing populism? Importantly, what kind of right-wing political regime are we likely to see in the coming years, and what will that mean for the environment? And finally, what kind of environmentalism might reconnect with ordinary people, respond to the reality we live in, and actually have a chance of improving the way we treat the natural world?

Let's start with why sticking with business as usual is (obviously) a very bad idea.

Progressive environmentalism is a cul-de-sac

The progressive obsession with oppression narratives, according to which any unequal outcome is necessarily the result of oppression by men or, alternatively, by white people, has created a society that is more divided than ever. It shouldn't come as a surprise that if you tell white men that they are by definition racist and sexist, they will create their own identity group and start fighting back in one way or another.

Similarly, the left's obsession with open borders and multiculturalism has severely damaged the social fabric of our societies. The high levels of immigration in all Western countries over the past few decades are the main reason for the current right-wing populist backlash.

While the official mantra continues to be that 'diversity is our strength', it has been abundantly clear for many years that the opposite is the case. In a 2007 study, for example, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam found that

the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

The European liberal-progressive establishment continues to believe that illegal immigration can help tackle the worrying collapse in fertility rates and save the welfare state. But since its net contribution to the welfare state is actually negative, it will only exacerbate the problem. At a time when European left-wing parties still want to expand the welfare state, the reality is that the time bomb for its total collapse is ticking.

On top of all this, the same European elite remain committed to a unilateral energy transition to renewables that will devastate European economies through rising energy costs and increasing risks of blackouts, while doing nothing to mitigate climate change.

It is difficult to find any innovative idea or even a sign of pragmatism somewhere across the European progressive-liberal-left spectrum and it doesn’t help that the left is very eager to censor anyone who disagrees.

I have often argued (for example here) that making the environmental movement explicitly part of the radical left was a mistake, that it would eventually fail because it would clash with the common sense that most ordinary people have.

I led a successful international initiative on transformative strategies for the environmental movement, which I founded in 2011 (Smart CSOs Lab). However, when around 2017 I started to express doubts about the radicalisation of our network and the adoption of certain dogmas, which are now commonly known under the umbrella term 'wokeism', I became persona non grata in my network and the wider European movement.

I have no regrets about standing up to the imposition of these ideas, even though it came at a considerable professional, financial and personal cost.

It was clear to me then that the radicalisation of the left and the obsessive focus on race and gender would be rejected by ordinary people and would only accelerate the rise of the populist right, which is exactly what has happened, the opposite of what the woke activists intended.

For example, whereas ten years ago young people were disproportionately attracted to the Green and Progressive parties, today populist right-wing parties are cool among young people.

This is not to say that the populist right (in general) has coherent ideas about how to improve the health of the natural world, or that it's entirely the fault of progressive environmentalists that more and more ordinary people believe that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax.

But if the aim is to find better and more effective ways of tackling our environmental problems, and to broaden your audience among ordinary people, business as usual environmentalism is a very bad choice. Environmentalists need to stand for ideas that improve the lives of ordinary people and help create a healthy society, a society that actually works. Progressivism and progressive environmentalism have failed to do that.

Is this the time for the right-wing progressives?

So what kind of right-wing politics are we likely to see in the West in the coming years?

Over Christmas 2024, a fierce debate over immigration erupted between the Silicon Valley tech elite, led by Elon Musk, who backed Trump and arguably contributed to his victory, and some of the more conservative representatives of the MAGA movement. While everyone in the Trump coalition agrees on the need to crack down on illegal immigration, the tech elite would rather increase the number of high-skilled immigrants, while the MAGA people are aware that the working class, to whom Trump owes most of his victory, want to see overall immigration reduced, not just illegal immigration.

This episode showed a clash between two different worldviews, one that is culturally conservative and one that is not conservative at all, but rather the opposite. 

NS Lyons, one of the intellectuals of the culturally conservative American New Right, which has been very influential on Vice President JD Vance, calls Elon Musk and company right-wing progressives (RWPs). RWPs have in common with cultural conservatives that they value hierarchy and order, but they differ radically in that the RWPs are techno-optimists, believing that everything in the future will be better than the past and that there is nothing from the past that deserves to be preserved. In this view, change is always positive.

Mary Harrington believes that "the future belongs to right-wing progressives", and it certainly looks more and more like it. Clearly, many of the emerging leaders of the right in Europe (Meloni, Farage and the AfD's Weidel) and in Latin America (El Salvador's Bukele and Argentina's Milei) are attracted to Musk's vision and ideas, and have developed close relationships with him.

Apart from being pro-capitalist and enthusiastically pro-technology, the common patterns emerging in this political shift to the right are a drastic reduction in the size of the bureaucratic state, a crackdown on illegal immigration, a focus on law and order, and a return to meritocracy and hierarchy.

Most ordinary people want to see a move away from an ever more intrusive managerial state, patronising its citizens with ever more regulation, dysfunctional DEI dogmatism and growing censorship. They will be happy to see the police concentrating on making public spaces safe again and illegal immigration reduced to a minimum.

And if right-wing progressives bring back nuclear power and scale back Europe's (unilateral) ambitions to achieve net zero (carbon emissions), most people will be relieved.

I can see the appeal of a vision that brings pragmatism and hope back into politics. If this is the direction we go in over the next few years, it may soothe people's minds and actually restore some basic functionality to our societies, at least for a while.

But the techno-optimist approach doesn't address the deeper problems we face. NS Lyons expresses the New Right's scepticism about the techno-optimists'

unrestrained lust for change in the name of progress that got us into our current civilizational mess in the first place. It’s not going to be what gets us out. And as for the vision techno-optimists sell, of humanity sailing the stars, expanding ever outward to conquer the galaxy, that does sound pretty cool. Someday it may even happen, and I wouldn’t complain. But this vision is not a solution to the nihilism that has gripped our societies today; endless expansion and acquisition for the sake of expansion and acquisition is just another expression of nihilism. Sometimes I even get the feeling that the sheer devotion some display in their zeal for this science-fiction future is itself a sign of the depths of their despair in the actual here and now. Escaping this pit is going to take more than the materialist-rationalists and their machines can ever provide.

Since we humans, with our hunter-gatherer minds and bodies, are already struggling on so many fronts with the hyper-novelty of an increasingly technological world, why should accelerating the technological path ultimately make our lives better? Will self-driving cars improve our lives? Can life on Mars, if it ever becomes possible, be as enjoyable as the life we (can) have on Earth?

Is more technology the solution to the worsening epidemic of loneliness and the increasingly dysfunctional lives we lead because we are addicted to our screens? Probably quite the opposite.

One of the most worrying perspectives is how the RWPs could take us all the way to the biotechnological surveillance state that we saw a glimpse of during the pandemic with the vaccine passport and virus testing regime.

But is the RWP's techno-optimist vision at all viable, and what can it realistically offer to effectively tackle environmental problems, including climate change?

One of the big questions, and I think a very valid one, is whether the global fertility collapse that we are experiencing could stifle the rate of technological innovation in ways that few are currently considering. As fertility rates fall below replacement levels around the world, including in India, the global competition to attract young, highly skilled immigrants to sustain economic growth and the welfare state will be fierce. It will allow some countries to continue with business as usual for some time, while all others will soon have to face decline. 

Based on his observations that fertility decline was a frequent driver of civilisational decline in the pre-modern world, the economist Robin Hanson argues that if fertility rates continue on their current downward trajectory, we will have only a few more years of high rates of technological innovation, after which innovation will decline and eventually stall. If we follow this hypothesis, the RWPs have no vision that is viable in the long run.

The other big question is whether there are any breakthrough technological innovations on the horizon that could solve humanity's energy problem, and whether, beyond the vision of going to Mars, there is a realistic technological pathway to sustaining the ecological foundations on which we depend, or whether this is just another utopian vision that will fail to deliver on its promises.

For a start, it would be an important step if we could finally abandon the notion that our European economies can run entirely on wind and solar energy while maintaining our standard of living. The unreliability of wind and solar power, and the need for a parallel gas-fired back-up system to keep our economies running when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, explains our ever-increasing energy costs and, consequently, deindustrialisation.

If this were the way to save the climate, we might consider it, but 500 million Europeans won't save the climate unless 4.8 billion Asians are likely to follow the same path. And they're not.

Until we find a feasible and cheap way to store large amounts of electricity, the only realistic way to keep our economies running and reduce carbon emissions is to build new nuclear power stations and stop shutting down perfectly good ones.

Of course, while nuclear power has proven to be very safe in the past, with Chernobyl being the only accident with a significant number of casualties, we may be underestimating the risk of a solar storm leading to a cascade of nuclear disasters.

However, the alternatives are either continuing to burn fossil fuels business as usual or large scale impoverishment of our societies which is not a political program that can win in a democracy.

As I understand it, for the technological pathway to work, most of the effort has to be put into solving the energy storage problem, and I'm open to the possibility that it can be solved and that we will eventually be able to run our economies on renewable energy. And I'm also open to the possibility that the dream of nuclear fusion will eventually become a reality, rather than the promise of an immediate breakthrough that it has been for decades.

But scepticism is more than warranted. Every new technology brings with it new unwanted consequences. Reducing carbon emissions is only one of many environmental goals. We face serious ecological problems on many fronts, including our oceans, soils, freshwater and biodiversity. Solar and wind farms, electric cars and batteries pose multiple resource and pollution challenges to the natural world, as do our consumerist lifestyles in general. If we continue down the technological path, we may ultimately be unable to avoid ecological collapse.

Towards a post-liberal environmentalism 

What does all this mean for environmentalists as we enter this new era? Certainly, pandering to the new elites is not a good alternative to remaining entrenched in the left-wing resistance movement. Instead, environmentalists need to challenge and propose new ideas that might be better for people and the planet.

If environmentalists and their organisations want to become relevant actors again, they need to let go of some deeply ingrained dogmas that were never based on sound thinking, but rather on wishful thinking.

For years, the climate movement sold us the idea that a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy was the only right choice. The only problem they saw was a lack of political will and the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry. But this was never true.

The way forward should be to recognise that there are currently only two ways to rapidly reduce carbon emissions on a global scale. One is to maintain or increase a significant proportion of nuclear power in all countries, and the other is a world dictatorship that forces a managed decline in industrial output and the adaptation of our societies to the availability of unstable renewable energy. We could then discuss how realistic and desirable such a world dictatorship would be.

The second major dogma that environmentalists should let go of is that large-scale immigration into Western countries is a good thing, and in particular that it is a moral duty to offer asylum to anyone who wants it. The moral intuition to somehow compensate for centuries of European colonialism by keeping our borders open to people from former colonies was understandable up to a point. But it should have been clear long ago that the consequences of mass immigration cannot be justified even from a left-wing perspective. The immediate negative effects of mass immigration on the host countries are rising crime, the degradation of public space and skyrocketing housing costs, which benefit the property-owning classes to the detriment of the working classes. But the far more tragic long-term effect is that we are wiping out our local and national cultures and replacing them with a flat global culture of mobile, liquid and interchangeable consumers. Take a walk around central London and you will see what I mean.

I urge everyone to read this essay by NS Lyons, in which he describes 'the ideology of replacism and the global flattening machine it animates'. Ironically, the progressive left is obsessed with the idea of diversity as our ultimate goal, but what we end up doing is erasing the diversity of rich cultures in favour of more dysfunctional, conflicted but also very similar societies everywhere. This also seems bad for environmentalism, which grew out of Western Christianity. If European cultures disappear, so will our morals and institutions.

If they let go of their dogmas, environmentalists have a chance of reconnecting with ordinary people who are uniting because they don’t want to see our past erased, our cultures trashed, our nations dissolved.

It is time for a new post-liberal environmentalism. 

We are already living in a time when liberalism, the ideology that gained global dominance after the Second World War, is in decline. Many ordinary people in the West now believe that liberalism has too many downsides: the decline of traditions leaving a fragmented society with weakened shared norms and values. Western working classes are rebelling against free trade and mass immigration because they have been on the losing end of this era of free movement of people and goods.

In addition, our global supply chains were built on the assumption that serious disruptions would never occur. As a result, we have made ourselves increasingly vulnerable to supply disruptions caused by international conflicts, wars, pandemics and so on.

The accelerating pace of globalisation in recent decades has always been criticised by serious environmentalists. Apart from the huge environmental impact of transporting goods around the world, the idea of managing and improving environmental and social standards globally through complex bureaucratic systems, rather than making the world more sustainable and humane, has made multinational corporations more powerful at the expense of small producers who cannot keep up with the bureaucratic requirements.

For example, stopping the EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement would benefit European farmers, help prevent further destruction of the Amazon rainforest and make Europeans more resilient to potential disruptions in international food supplies.

Moreover, a post-liberal environmentalism should not be hostile to new technologies, but should examine new technologies through a post-liberal lens. Political scientist Jon Askonas explains how conservatism has failed because it hasn't understood how technology has ultimately destroyed our traditions. He argues:

As new technologies enter a society, they disrupt the connections between institutions, practices, virtues, and rewards. They can render traditions purposeless, destroy the distinction between virtuous and vicious behavior, make customary ways of life obsolete, or render their rewards meaningless or paltry. If the institutions that shepherd traditions aren’t regenerated, and if no one adopts their practices, traditions will fade into nothingness.

Now that we have been left without traditions, Askonas suggests a way forward:

If we believe in a human future, we must build it, not with kind words or tax credits, but with a serious program of technological development. Marx showed how a material transformation of the economic order could have enormous social and cultural effects. Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well. In some places, the renewal, revival, and reoccupation of the human order of things requires a return to what was done within living memory. In other places, however, it will need to be far more radical in the literal sense: It must return to human nature rooted in man’s bodily dwelling upon the earth.

Finally, a post-liberal environmentalism could take advantage of the fact that our current social and economic model will not survive much longer, mainly because of the collapse in fertility rates.

The welfare state will become much less generous in the near future and will not survive in the long term. Obviously, this will mean severe hardship for many in our Western societies, as our traditional systems of solidarity, such as local communities, the local church and the family, have disappeared or have been severely weakened and no longer fulfil this purpose.

But the post-liberal and post-fossil fuel era may ultimately mean that there is no other way forward than to return, at least to some extent, to some more traditional, smaller structures of society. In other words, those who are able to join local communities or solidarity groups will thrive, while others will struggle to survive, as the state will no longer be able to take care of them.

The sooner people start preparing for this scenario, the better. It will require strengthening the family as the most important institution, regaining a sense of place, restoring a sense of virtuous living that has been lost under liberalism, and relearning how to live well together in smaller units without the state there to regulate every little aspect of life. This is what Simone Weil called enracinement - actively putting down roots where there are none.

A post-liberal environmentalism could focus on helping people adapt to this new situation. One important aspect could be relearning and developing regenerative agricultural practices, another would be adapting to climate change in a pragmatic sense, without a sense of catastrophe.

While today's inauguration of Donald Trump also means that JD Vance will be the first post-liberal politician to enter the White House, we may only see a few glimpses of his politics over the next four years. Even though the near future may be dominated by right-wing progressives, environmentalists would do well to regain a sense of reality and anticipate a future that seems inevitable.