Become What You Despise? Why "Beating" Conservative White Male Climate Deniers May Mean Joining Them

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David Roberts of Gristย has written a wonderful and psychologically deep portrait of why conservative white males deny climate changeโ€”and much elseโ€”and how this is an unshakeable part of their political identities. He concludes that you canโ€™t sway them, so you have to just beat them, politically, with activism andย votes.

To do that, Roberts adds, you need not to move to the center, but to stoke intensity on the part of your base. So thatโ€™s what we need to focusย on:

โ€ฆ.perhaps the answer is not toย reduceย intensity in hopes of attracting CWM. Perhaps the answer is toย increaseย intensity in order to overcome CWM. Intensity is increased first and foremost through organizing, but also through clear, inspiring messages that draw sharp lines between those fighting for progress and those fighting againstย it.

The implicit premise of climate โ€œpragmatismโ€ and similar efforts is that CWM are stronger, that climate hawks canโ€™t win a direct clash. And for now, that seems to be true. Beating back the radical conservative resurgence is something that nobody on the left has figured out yet. But the alternative, attempting to win over CWM by soft-pedaling climate, doesnโ€™t exactly have a record of successย either.

Roberts is so close, and yet also so far.

Everything he says about the psychology of conservatives is right on, and there are actually multiple studies proving it.ย But he says nothing about the psychology of liberalsโ€“which is basically the flipside of what he says about his โ€œCWMs.โ€

This means that, while there may be exceptions, for the most part liberals-slash-envirionmentalists are not going to be as opinion intense or as unified as conservatives. They are going to disagree and squabble more amongst themselves.ย They are going to focus not on being the same as one another and being unified, but on being different and uniqueโ€“disunified, andย disorganized.

So how do you make liberals into the true and non-oxymoronic โ€œclimate hawksโ€ that Roberts wants to see? Itโ€™s incredibly hard. Just look at the spats that erupt constantly on the center and left over climate policy, and how everybody is balkanized and in a completely different camp from those who are only half a political degree away from them on a 360 degreeย spectrum.

Look at the repeated internecine fights weโ€™ve had over the โ€œEnd of Environmentalism,โ€ over framing, and over whether messaging should focus on talking about clean energy or about the science ofย climate.

Or, just count how many different environmental groups thereย are.

Or, just watch the Monty Python bit about the Peopleโ€™s Front of Judea versus the Judean Peopleโ€™sย Front.

You get the point, Iย think.

So whatโ€™s theย solution?

Iโ€™d say the beginning of the solution is to teach liberals and environmentalists about their own psychologyโ€“theyโ€™re often clueless about this, all the way up to the White House, apparently. And then call a summit to see if they will actually finally behave in a unifiedย way.

The problem is, youโ€™d better not make it a summit in which everybody gets to have an equal say, and there is no โ€œleaderโ€ calling the shots.ย So you have to design a highly structured agenda at a highly organized and businesslike meeting. And then you have to hope that all these liberal environmentalists will return home and stick to it and implement itโ€ฆsee the problemย here?

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