HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World
David R. Weiss – January 8, 2024

I am unsure where or how to begin. I’ve made multiple false starts over the past four days. Partly it’s how much I have to say—so many disparate (but ultimately related!) threads—and I know I can’t fit it all into a single short essay. So, I fret and overthink. But it’s more than that. It’s also—likely more so—the heaviness I hold inside. Altogether, for four days now, I’ve found myself restless and distracted almost to the point of frenzy. It’s a strange place to be. I love writing, and I have plenty of time to write these days. But sometimes I dread what I feel driven to write about.

My sense is that climate is rewriting the state of American politics (and possibly this election) in ways most people can’t even imagine. Of course, most people realize that climate is going to be a primary topic in this election cycle. After all, 2023 was the hottest year on record for global surface temperature, and 2024 promises to give it a run for its money. How could anyone run for office and not address the climate crisis—even if only by denial? But my concern in this piece is not with what the candidates may or may not say directly about the climate. It’s that climate (and collapse) will produce an entire politics that is HEATED in ways that will make this election—and each future election—a referendum on the very character of human community.

This scares me. Not least because even among those folks with whom I usually find common cause (the progressive flank of the Democratic Party) I fear there is as yet little real appreciation for how thoroughly climate/collapse are going to foster campaign rhetoric and public mania that will make for an unrecognizable political landscape. The Left will easily be caught between dismissiveness and disbelief right up until democracy closes its doors altogether.

This essay is about that dread.

Three years ago, late on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, I was struggling to make sense of what I’d just watched play out on national television: an insurrection against the government of the United States. I scribbled words in real time into one of the spiral notebooks where I gather thoughts—some of which later find their way into essays. Here are three sentences I wrote down that day:

• “This is inverted ecological demographic anxiety: the militant even irrationally fanatical denial of what your subconscious knows to be true.”
• “Make no mistake: the [January 6] assault on our very imperfect democracy had no interest in perfecting it, but in annihilating it, and therewith it hoped to annihilate any claim that finitude and diversity are twin poles of our reality.”
• “This [January 6] mayhem is the eruption of ecological extractive demographic anxiety.”

Now, fast forward to just last month, when Trump bragged that he was only interested in being a dictator for his first day in office: “On Day 1 we are closing the border and we are drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I am not a dictator, OK?” But these two goals—closing the border and endless drilling—express precisely what I identified three years ago as the roots of the January 6 insurrection: ecological extractive demographic anxiety and the attempt to annihilate any claim that finitude and diversity are twin poles of our reality.

This is HEATED campaign rhetoric intended to stoke public mania. And, thus far, among Republican voters, it is carrying the day. Behind the fury of the MAGA/Far Right crowd—and the candidates who play to them—lies a deep and growing anxiety over the inescapable (and increasingly undeniable) finitude of our world and the inexorable press of diversity that results both from shifting internal demographics and external migration patterns.

But it’s more than just building a border wall and drilling for oil. And it’s the “more than” that we really need to wrestle with. And the “more than” gets complicated fast. And the “more than” drives my dread. This is not to say that there’s nothing we can do with respect to this HEATED political climate. But there’s nothing easy or simple to do. And if we don’t grapple with the complexity even some of the harder things we attempt may miss their mark. So, in keeping with the tagline of my current work, “writing into the whirlwind,” here’s sort of a whirlwind tour of (just some of) the complexity behind my dread.

Migration isn’t going anywhere. Migration patterns are themselves driven by socio-political stresses (such as famine and war) exacerbated in recent years by the worsening climate crisis—but those current stresses are also the long-term result of U.S./Western foreign policy decisions (including covert actions) made decades ago in service of insatiable U.S. material appetites that (often intentionally!) eroded the socio-political conditions in countries of the Global South.

Specifically, those decades old injustices assailed the political aspirations and frayed the civic fabric of the same societies whose worsening conditions now lead desperate persons to flea northward—while those same injustices were, decades ago, busily enabling our patterns of consumption that sowed the very seeds of climate collapse that furthers migration today. Migration and climate are inexorably intertwined—they have been throughout human history and no less so in recent decades.

This means no “immigration reform” will be just or workable unless it reckons with our past complicity in creating the roots of the crises in other countries—and recognizes that as climate breakdown progresses, the migrants crossing our borders are fleeing unlivable conditions in their homelands that our patterns of consumption right here have created for them.

Collapse is here. Already now. This is a hard bleak truth we can’t entirely grasp yet—because the same history of injustices that has now made collapse inevitable, has also insulated most of us in the U.S from its first immediate effects. Thus, many on the Right continue to deny the ecological crisis altogether, while many on the Left accept the reality of the crisis but continue to believe we can still sidestep catastrophe. The unnerving but essential truth is that ecological collapse is now an unstoppable force shaping our future. We may yet be able to mitigate the degree of catastrophe (although even that window is closing—fast!) but collapse itself now has an inertia that is beyond our capacity to stop. And the longer we wistfully imagine otherwise, the less time and energy we have available to meet the reality of collapse with civic creativity and community compassion.

This collapse will be physical, the result of human-driven ruptures in our climate and other planetary systems. But it will also be social, the result of cascading stresses on civilization systems that cannot (or will not) adapt to the new, fractured world that is now our home. I believe this unfolding collapse is sensed (subconsciously, but viscerally) even by those who deny it—and it shapes their anxieties and actions. As a result, during this election year, collapse will be a “silent partner” with an uncredited but oversized voice in political rhetoric. (This is already in evidence.)

Although no politician will likely campaign on a platform of preparing for collapse, the stakes of this election cycle, especially at the federal level, will be decisive in determining whether as a nation we are merely ill-prepared or acting with stupendous malevolence over the next four years—and beyond.  

We have “entered the bardo.” This is a notion from Tibetan Buddhism recently invoked by Joanna Macy. The bardo is the liminal (threshold) space in between worlds. To say we have “entered the bardo” is to recognize that the world we have known is now effectively closed off from the world that awaits us. There is a chasm between present and future—between this year and the next, more decisively between 2024 and 2034—that will not be crossed by merely flipping calendar pages. There exists “in the bardo”—between worlds—a moment when nearly everything is up for grabs. Freefall or paradigm shift, calamity or transformation. Likely a mix of both.

What’s critical in the bardo is that we not cling to the past, to the supposition that somehow what came before can reliably predict what comes next. This has often been true. But no more. Indeed, as we cross planetary systems tipping points, Earth itself is entering its own bardo (like it or not, we’re going along for that ride). But, for us, to acknowledge we have entered the bardo in our present socio-political context, is to confess (to hold with conviction) that tomorrow (next year, next decade) will be radically disconnected from today—because of unfolding ecological collapse and the impact that will have on every facet of our lives. Knowing we are in the bardo confers a certain freedom, even as it guarantees nothing. Many possibilities imagined in our past will be foreclosed, while a handful of unforeseen possibilities may present themselves. The bardo does NOT make collapse avoidable; it does mean that we might position ourselves (at least in some ways) to encounter collapse rather than simply finding ourselves swamped by it.

Our democracy is at the edge of eclipse. We could vote it away in the next election. It’s easy to blame this on Trump, and he has amplified this danger like no other American political figure in recent history, but the roots of this fraught moment go back further and deeper in our past. Still, Trump, his political allies, and his popular base pose the largest threat to U.S. democracy in my lifetime. If they have electoral success in 2024, they will set out to dismantle civil rights, social justice, and environmental progress for years to come. And they will seek to effectively guarantee rule by a corporate-backed, white-interested minority for the foreseeable future. This is far from certain, but it is dreadfully possible.

The Right’s agenda is driven by inverted ecological demographic anxiety. Unwilling to face a world with finite limits and diverse others, the Right—whether in Trump’s transparently vengeful and authoritarian rhetoric or in the more “nuanced” extremism of his competitors—has no viable political strategy other than to stoke these anxieties and then simultaneously promise false (self- and other-destructive) solutions to them. To be honest, while Democrats by and large have more “humane” messaging, their overall economic agenda remains unequivocally ecocidal, and their immigration policies fail the tests of justice and workability given earlier.

Here’s the difference, though, and it does matter. Establishment Democrats, while clearly beholden to monied interests, have not targeted democracy itself. And so long as (small d) democratic practices are in place, there is at least room to maneuver; at least opportunity to exercise politics as harm reduction and perhaps, if we are wise and savvy enough, to use it to imaginatively experiment for the common good. The GOP, however, which is increasingly entangled with if not undifferentiated from the Far Right, seems poised to dispense with democracy altogether. And that difference matters: it has consequences for us, for our global neighbors, and for flora and fauna across the planet.

It isn’t just us in the bardo. Our political adversaries are in there with us.

The age of information anomie is upon us. Anomie means lawlessness. Few of us have yet realized how fragile—fractured—information has become in recent decades. Information is the infrastructure of the world itself: the patterns revealed in physics, the structures and relationships observed in chemistry; the DNA maps discerned in biology. The material world IS matter given form by information. Similarly, the infrastructure of organized human community rests on reliable social information—commonly held data regarded as trustworthy. The stability of our society is built on this. And our capacity to press the case for improving—further humanizing—society (deepening understanding, expanding rights, etc.) hinges on being able to use the relative solidity of current information. But today information itself is under assault. To be blunt, this assault amounts to humanity unmaking itself. When information fails, language itself teeters on noise.

Just in the past few days Donald Trump and then Elise Stefanik (New York representative and Chair of the House Republican Caucus) began referring to those arrested for their violent roles in the January 6 insurrection as “hostages.” This is nothing other than an attack on information. Not a war of words, but a war on words. Trump has done this “in plain sight” from his first campaign, throughout his presidency, and right up into the present. His “charisma” is fashioned out of disinformation—and its lure on some significant portion of the public.

Propaganda has a long, storied history. It has thrived—for centuries—in government messaging and hate-group narratives. That’s not new. What is new is the extent to which the digital age has made disinformation at once a cottage industry accessible to anyone with the internet and a state/corporate program capable of being scaled up to an overwhelming force. We know that as early as the 1970’s U.S. oil corporations began promulgating disinformation regarding the climate with the sole goal of sowing doubt about science. For sake of profit, they chose to weaken the infrastructure of human community. In the 1980’s the Soviet Union (and now Russia) expanded its disinformation efforts globally. Driven less by profit than the lust for power, the express purpose of these streams of disinformation was ultimately less about making false stories believable than about so flooding the world with fiction-as-fact as to render Americans (and others) incapable of sense-making. To transform information into confusion.

More recently social media companies—driven by a thirst for both profit and power—have found that algorithms can process information about us in ways that undo us. It isn’t just that these media create “echo chambers”—perfect storms that exponentially amplify bias into prejudice into hate into action. It’s also that these echo chambers “work” by employing algorithms (as well as both cottage-produced and corporate/state produced disinformation) to throttle our amygdala (“lower” brain) into a frenzy of fear and anxiety. Which is to say, they “succeed” when they dampen (or even shut down) the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex, our “higher” brain where critical thinking, creativity, and compassion are born. AI-generated content, including deep fake technology, will make this even worse. This is what I mean when I say social media employs algorithms to process information about us in ways that undo us. Social media weakens our access to our higher brain; it lessens our humanity.

There is an eerily relevant reference in the 2016 movie Arrival, which features a plot about first contact with intelligent alien life that has come to Earth. As a small circle of linguists around the world work feverishly to decipher this alien language, they encounter an ambiguous phrase that might be understood as referring to a “weapon”—or a “tool.” Of course, for the humans and their response to the aliens, everything hinges on whether the aliens are speaking about a weapon or a tool. In an even deeper irony, what the aliens are speaking about is language itself.

The stark reality we face, as we grapple with other steep challenges and as we enter an election cycle with enormous stakes, is that today language, images, and information are all rapidly being turned from a once trustworthy tool into a high-tech weapon—to be deployed against the human community itself. As if there weren’t already enough dread on my (and your) plate!

But we dare not stop at dread. The task now is to ask, how does it help us to recognize the core anxieties beneath the tremors that rock the HEATED political landscape in front of us right now? What insights does this offer as we navigate our choices—and personal relationships—in 2024? How do we respond strategically, creatively, compassionately, and humanly to those whose anxieties over finitude and diversity are being used to unmake democracy and lessen humanity? I don’t know. But that’s what I’m leaning into in the weeks ahead.

I’m leaning into my dread, so I can discover what’s on the far side of it. I hope you’ll lean with me.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.