From the Storm to the Stormtroopers - by Timothy Snyder
By: Timothy Snyder
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Fascist Logic of Climate Lying
Today, our American fascists blame the hurricanes on the meteorologists and disrupt the government response. Tomorrow they will blame climate change on the climate scientists and deport their enemies of choice. And the day after tomorrow there will be no democracy and no country, just a politics of impotence and a fascist catastrophe.
Trump and Vance are teaching us that the government cannot do anything except turn us against one another. They do so by spreading disinformation about critical matters like hurricanes, so that people despise and disrupt the government, the only institution that can help. This is impotence politics, and it leads to fascism.
In impotence politics, nothing is true except our emotions, and so we cannot see the sources of problems, and do not really expect to solve them. Once we accept that government is useless, we respond to crisis by turning against one another. Politics then begins not from improving life together but by choosing an enemy within.
This is very comfortable for the impotence politicians, who rule not by addressing problems but by defining enemies.
When there is a real problem, they will define enemies. When there is not a real problem, as with the domestic animals of Springfield, Ohio, they will also define enemies. From the pinnacle of politics they use their talents to turn us against one another. We then forget what democratic government did for us and become accustomed to this new pattern of suffering, grievance, and conflict.
In a Trump-Vance impotence regime, America shifts then to fascism, in which it is no longer the law that matters, but the people, but only the people who are "the real people," the Volk, the ones who believe that they are favored by their Leader. Politics is no longer government acting for them, but rather them acting for their rulers, following a script of us-and-them. The political energy that was once resolved as policy as now spread as enmity.
The politics of impotence favors fascism in another way. When we no longer believe in law and democracy, we still want to get things done, at least for ourselves. And so we will have to find some way to appeal to the Leader personally: by paying a bribe to someone, by doing a special favor. Against the background of conflict and chaos, we will of course be grateful when anything at all is done for us. "I alone can fix it," Trump has been telling us for eight years. When everything is broken, this becomes true, and we become ingratiating peons.
As the earth heats and the storms and droughts become worse and worse, Trump and Vance will suppress the science and blame the scientists. The plan to fire all the meteorologists is already there. Project 2025 will eliminate the National Weather Service and make climate change a taboo subject inside the federal government. This direct courting of death is itself quite fascist.
Americans will be told that government "elites" were the real problem. In a regime of political impotence, there will be no solution -- which is both idiotic and heartbreaking, because the technology to fix global warming is right around the corner. We could solve this problem and live in a much better world.
Instead, as climate change worsens, the fascism will worsen too. This is the politics of catastrophe, which is where we are heading next. When we face a truly existential problem, and when our politics is not about policy but about enmity, we will blame the victims.
This has already started. Climate change affects people to the south of the United States first. Our choice to warm the climate guarantees more attempted migration. And when it comes, the politicians of impotence will just blame the migrants. Their answer to everything will be deportation.
And the attempt to deport millions of people will of course turn Americans against one another. The government in a Trump-Vance regime will be highly dysfunctional. Even were this not the case, there are no organs in the federal government capable of a deportation on the scale of millions or tens of millions. The only way to organize such a mass deportation will be to to call on citizens to denounce their neighbors, and to deputize tens of thousands of local authorities for the manhunt. And so we move from the storm to the stormtroopers.
None of this is speculative. It is the plain reading of the Trump-Vance campaign. And none of this is new. Hitler too denied the science that would have solved the basic problems of survival; Hitler too promoted ecological crisis as a reason for race war; Hitler too started from mass deportations of migrants (largely carried out by a non-governmental actor deputized for the purpose, the SS).
The logic of fascism is known to us from history. And if we don't avert our eyes, we see how that logic can play out in the future. History can help us to see, but history will not do the work for us. We need to make history ourselves, in the name of a better future. That is within our grasp, if we all do what we can.
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Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor History at Yale University and the author of several books on fascism and totalitarianism, including On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom and On Freedom, and he is the recipient of a number of signficant literary awards. He is one of the leading scholars and thinkers about fascism and totalitarian movements.
Do you think that's accurate?..
Assuming you are asking me to comment on only the highlighted section of your comment, what other institution(s) can provide the massive aid necessary for the devastating and widespread destruction caused by hurricanes like Helene and Milton? Entities like the Red Cross may be able to provide some help, but not at the level needed in these instances.