Right-wing authoritarianism against the environment
In the United States and elsewhere, right-wing authoritarians oppose climate action. This is no coincidence.
The 2025 Project favors authoritarian presidential rule. It also wants to destroy environmental regulation, especially climate law. This is no coincidence. The combination of authoritarianism, extreme conservative ideology, and anti-environmentalism is common globally, not just in U.S. politics.
There is no logical connection between belief in authoritarian government, the maintenance of traditional hierarchies, and views on environmental protection or the reality of climate change. So the reasons must be related to psychology or political science, not philosophy.
In terms of psychology, there is a clear correlation between right-wing 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 it involves a desire to maintain a hierarchical society. People with this attitude tend to agree with statements such as, “To get ahead in life, it is sometimes okay to trample on other groups.” They may favor dominating nature or using nature to favor their own group over others. A related attitude is called right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Authoritarians tend to agree with statements such as, “Our country will be destroyed someday if we don’t destroy the perversions that are eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs.” They may view environmentalists as a threat to society. Those who reject environmental protection see the harm as falling on others of lower status and are more likely to reject social equality in general. This research is intriguing, but my impression is that there is still a lot we don’t know about political psychology.
Whatever the psychology involved, the link between right-wing populism and anti-environmentalism is not just an American phenomenon. Look no further than leaders like Bolsonaro in Brazil and Orbán in Hungary to see this. Right-wing populists across Europe oppose climate action. For example, the successful populist leader in the Netherlands “said that climate action was ‘unsustainable madness’ and that, once in office, the party would put the national climate law and the Paris Agreement ‘straight into the meat grinder.’”
Psychology can explain part of the connection between authoritarianism and anti-environmentalism, but political science may have something to say about it, too. In many countries, including the United States, oil is 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 being rich in natural resources can actually hinder a country’s progress. The windfall of the oil industry’s profits, the part that comes from the scarcity of a natural resource or from OPEC price fixing, means the industry has plenty of money to throw away to reward its political allies.
Our previous President is not alone in celebrating oil and gas as the golden road to national wealth. This economic strategy is fundamentally based on the luck of geography rather than innovation, production, or a capable and well-motivated workforce. This makes high-quality government a low priority, reflected in Project 2025 and the America First Agenda’s desire to replace government professionals with ideological presidential lackeys.
Other factors may be relevant. Right-wing authoritarians enjoy support from various quarters. But they tend to have the strongest support in rural areas, where extractive industry jobs are important, and among the less educated, who are less likely to be aware of climate science. They also offer their followers social stability, which is linked to favoring established industries and technologies. Right-wing authoritarians are hostile to higher education, as they are to any source of independent thought outside their control. Science of all kinds is suspect because of its academic roots and its reliance on free inquiry rather than authority as a source of knowledge. Finally, even more than the rest of us, authoritarians tend to think that whatever the other side believes is necessarily wrong, and liberals tend to favor environmental protection.
There is much room for research on the anti-environmentalism-anti-democracy nexus. Given the existence of this nexus, there is a sense in which environmental work and democratic work are themselves inseparable.
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