Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [107]
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. . . . America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.48
This mentality underwrites the current xenophobia. In 2010, Pew pollsters found that 67 percent of Americans said they “approved of allowing police to detain anyone who cannot verify their legal status,” while 62 percent approved of “allowing police to question people they think may be in the country illegally.” And 59 percent said they approved of Arizona’s profile and arrest law.49
Nor is it a coincidence that some of the biggest financial supporters of the xenophobic and “paranoid style” are oil magnates, most famously, the Koch brothers. These two mild-mannered and quiet billionaires started Americans for Prosperity, a free market advocacy shop that passed on at least $5 million in start-up money to the Tea Party. The Koch family has long followed Hayek’s ultra-antistatist theories and more recently has promoted climate-change denial. The two positions are naturally aligned: to venerate the market and despise the state is to oppose legal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Koch brothers spent more than $100 million to assist a network of thirty-four Far Right political and policy organizations. Among these were the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Independent Women’s Forum, and the American Enterprise Institute.50 The noise from this network is a mash-up of free market fanaticism, climate-change denial, and xenophobia. Talk radio and cable TV are the amplifiers.
Fortress Europe
In Europe, the xenophobic Right is also alive and well. The older cryptofascist leaders, like Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s Front National, and Jörg Haider, long-time leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, are now fading. 51 But a new generation of leaders is taking the old message mainstream; among them are Dutch politician Geert Wilders and Danish People’s Party leader Pia Kjærsgaard.52 Perhaps more worrying is the adoption of overtly racist policies by center-right governments: witness, for example, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s expulsion of eight thousand Roma from France, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement that Germany’s multiculturalism had “utterly failed,” and the walling off of Roma communities in the Czech Republic.53
Romancing the End Times
Even among good liberals, one finds the temptation to embrace the armed lifeboat. Consider environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben, who has done stellar work bringing the reality of climate science to a mass audience and started the international climate activist group 350.org. In his latest book, when he addressed the question of climate security, his politics faltered:
If you think about the cramped future long