The past decade of global warming and right-wing advance poses an existential threat to various visions of human progress
The fire last time. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Twitter is a place for attention-addicted depressives to mine dopamine from pixels. So, it’s never been the happiest app on Earth.
In what he billed as a “case against crisis-mongering,” Yglesias wrote that the “notion that we are living through some acute ‘global social, political, and economic crises’” is “fundamentally false.” In reality, he contended, we are living through problems that are “serious and difficult” but “not necessarily any more serious or more difficult than the problems of the past, and certainly not serious in a way that should cause one to doubt the basic tenets of liberalism.
This said, I don’t think liberalism is exceptional in its plight. And I have trouble seeing how an alarmist reading of contemporary conditions would necessarily lead one to embrace socialism, as I take Heer to be implying. If Matt Yglesias’s formula for human flourishing has seen better days, Karl Marx’s has too — and for many of the same reasons.
Humanity’s collective technical capacity is vast. It remains quite possible that our species will be much better off in the future than it is today. Advances in biotech are poised to eradicate a wide array of medical scourges. Renewable energy and battery technology could allow us to enjoy the benefits of industrial society without inhaling little bits of poison all the time. But all utopian visions for the 22nd century are contingent on decarbonization in the coming decades of the 21st.
These are trying times for liberalism in a few different respects. For one thing, tensions between the creed’s disparate commitments are high and rising. In the wake of the 2008 crash, Barack Obama disavowed bank nationalization on the grounds that “private capital” should be responsible for “fulfilling the core investment needs of this country.” In so doing, he articulated the main principle that divides American liberalism from democratic socialism.
Nevertheless, Yglesias insists that this reality does not reflect any “conceptual or technical” deficiency of liberalism. Rather, he suggests it is a product of contingent policy mistakes combined with the voting public’s hostility towards policies that raise the cost of carbon energy.
Of course, Chinese communism has not proven itself to be any more eco-friendly than American liberalism. But if liberal democracies fail to facilitate expeditious decarbonization, an epoch of ever-deepening ecological instability is liable to be a favorable one for top-down systems of government. In times of acute crisis, such as World War 2, liberal states have themselves tended to suspend democratic norms and expand executive power.
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