This piece is one of the myriad “why did Trump get re-elected” pieces out there, but I originally began writing it about a month before Election Day. Back then, it was obvious that the election would be close, and I set myself the task of wondering why. My conclusions represent, though, the grappling I have been doing since 2016 with Trump and his continued presence in US politics.
I propose a fairly broad explanation for Trump’s re-election: Trump was re-elected due to the anxieties produced by climate change and its consequences. I think that the other rivals I am seeing for explaining the election—racism, misogyny, economic anxieties—are all part of the picture, but the real driver here is climate change. It’s a broad theory, but I want to signal at the outset that it’s a tentative theory also. I don’t feel confident that I have every aspect at play here identified or given the proper weight. All of which is to say: take this as the tentative offering it is; if it helps, great; if I have gone astray, I am certainly open to hearing about it.
I
In his 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that part of the failure of humanity and its institutions to contend with climate change is a deep failure of our personalistic, “novelistic” narrative expectations, which were created in the modern era at the dawn of capitalism, to reflect the supra-personal processes that drive climate change. Ghosh’s book is written in the first instance as literary criticism. It asks the question, how would the narrative expectations of the novel have to change in order to give the popular imagination the tools it needs to make climate change a human and tractable problem?
Theories already abound for what led to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 Presidential election this past Tuesday. Most I have heard seem compelling, so far as they go, but something still eludes those of us who desperately need a narrative to explain what happened. I have come to think that what is eluding us is that very same narrative limitation Ghosh diagnoses in the contemporary novel: the difficulty of crafting a narrative that relates climate change to our other political concerns. I have come to believe that the chief reason Trump won was, incredibly enough, the fact that climate change is not only here, but is palpably worsening. Something is wrong in our country, in the world. Its effects are all around us, and yet we struggle to concoct a narrative that renders it available and urgent for people. Trump, though, managed to craft a narrative that captured the feeling of what is wrong. His narrative was—is—vague, riddled with lies and distortions, embroidered with seemingly every variety of bigotry, chauvinism, and plain meanness. It neither identifies the actual problem nor proposes any solutions for it. But—it’s a narrative that acknowledges the feeling of malaise and makes sense of it. Harris, and Democrats more generally, have struggled to craft a narrative that has the same urgency. A majority of voters simply went for the more compelling narrative.
II
In The Great Derangement, Ghosh briefly discusses the theory of Christian Parenti, author of the 2011 Tropics of Chaos, of the “politics of the armed lifeboat” in response to climate change. Poorer countries and countries in the global South are, whether by geography or political engineering, or both, especially vulnerable to the shocks of global climate change. Understandably one of the consequences is that, as climate change worsens, dwindling prospects for a livable future in poorer and hotter countries drive migration to wealthier and cooler regions. “Armed lifeboat” politics is a response to that situation: rather than working in collaboration with other nations to ease the impacts of climate change and work towards a livable future for all, wealthy nations in the global North “arm the lifeboat” by sealing their borders, shutting out immigrants, and preserving scarce resources for those already within their borders they deem most worthy.
I contend that what we are seeing from the contemporary right—its embrace of nationalism and state sovereignty in its most violent forms; its isolationism and populism; its tense relationship with traditional laissez-faire upward-wealth-transfer conservatives; its professed distrust of elites—is best explained as “armed lifeboat” politics. The special mix of urgency and terror MAGA politics embodies is, among other things, an effect of, and response to, the realities of our warming climate as they begin to register in American society.
But, you say, this can’t be correct! The contemporary American right has inherited from its right-wing ancestors the inability to admit that climate change is possible, much less than that it is already happening. How can an entire political movement be a response to something whose existence it officially denies? I think there are really complicated (possibly even psychoanalytical) answers one might give to this question. The simplest answer, though, is that the reality is there to be responded to, whether you acknowledge it for what it is or not. Trumpism of course doesn’t acknowledge climate change directly, because doing so seriously would entail that we adopt drastic, and likely strongly coercive, measures to reduce carbon emissions among the corporate class, who are the biggest polluters by a wide margin. What Trumpism does instead is to declare that certain of the symptoms of climate change—chief among them migration—are themselves the illness that needs fighting.
Think about the MAGA contingent’s response to the recent disasters spawned by Hurricanes Helene and Milton for a moment. It wasn’t the standard line of Republican climate change denialism at all. That standard line is, or at least has been, to point to hurricanes and other climate disasters in the past and say that what we have now is just within the standard variations in climate we have experienced for hundreds or thousands of years, not to worry! Helene in particular made it difficult to take that standard line because it was so destructive in a part of the world so far from the coast. (That, and it would be impolitic during an election year in a swing state to tell its disaster-stricken residents that a storm the likes of which had not been seen in that area in recorded history was somehow “normal.”) Instead of the standard climate change-denialism line, the American right in the wake of Helene and Milton instead floated conspiracies that Biden and Democrats have the power to create and direct hurricanes towards communities that historically vote Republican. Liberals always on the lookout for a cheap shot observed that attributing a comic book supervillain’s weather control machine to Biden seems to sit ill with saying that human activity doesn’t influence the weather. But that’s the point: the MAGA contingent is shifting towards the recognition of human-induced climate change in the only way it knows how—by attributing it to a deliberate conspiracy by its enemies.
The “weather machine” narrative is ludicrous, easily falsifiable in all its details. But—it’s a narrative. It puts a human face on what is otherwise a diffuse, complicated phenomenon.
If I am right, I think we have to give Trumpism credit for one thing: its fear derives ultimately from something worth fearing. We should all be afraid of the already-beginning climate crisis. This doesn’t mean that we should be mastered by our fear or that we should lash out indiscriminately. Trumpism is dysfunctional politics because it is a “vibes only” kneejerk reaction to fear that only exacerbates the problems to which it responds. I suspect, though, that Trumpism is not the first political program that fails to deal constructively with the social ills that are really its enabling condition.
III
So much for what animates Trumpism. Why, though, does this have anything to do with why Trump won on Tuesday? Why did more Americans vote for the dysfunction, the callousness, and the bigotry of Trump than the alternative?
I see two chief theories for explaining Trump’s victory, all of which I think have a certain merit. The first credits economic anxieties, and specifically the lingering effect of post-COVID inflation on household budgets. This is the “Milk and Eggs” theory. There are crude, reductive, memeified versions of this theory, of course, but before the election happened I shared an article by economist and historian Adam Tooze on Facebook that in a more nuanced way predicted that so-called “felt” inflation might have an impact on this election.
The second theory credits racism, sexism, or the intersection of both known as misogynoir for Trump’s win. Due to the gender and race of his opponent, so this theory goes, America reverted to its endemic and systemic racism and misogyny to reject a Black woman candidate. Again, I find these explanations undeniable. America still struggles with the legacy of its historic anti-Black racism and its sexism, and Trump himself has a way of channeling, and normalizing, some of the most vile and reactionary strains of racist and sexist behavior to be encountered in the US. Trump’s campaign resorted to racist, sexist claims at virtually every possible juncture it could have done so.
Why, then, would climate change be my candidate for why Trump won? Actually I don’t think it’s that simple. I think economic anxieties, racism (including racist attitudes towards immigrants), sexism, and other forms of bigotry all had an indispensable role to play in Trump’s winning the election. No explanation of what happened on Tuesday is complete without them. The deep fear and malaise caused by the pressure that climate change is putting on not just US society, but societies all across the world, though, is, I think, the anxious energy driving the US society to abandon the better angels of its nature and instead drag its historically bigoted attitudes back out of storage.
Allow me to make an analogy to a hurricane. (It seems apt on so many levels.) A hurricane forms out in the ocean as at first a normal storm. Under the right conditions, that storm begins to rotate and draws energy off of warm ocean water, thus increasing in power until it becomes massive and powerful. Storms happen all the time, but it’s the other enabling conditions in the environment, chiefly the late summer heat trapped in the ocean, that make them into hurricanes.
This is, I think, how the deep malaise Trumpists feel—the specter of “American carnage” from Trump’s first inaugural speech—becomes a phenomenon that breaks through the barricades formerly erected around the John Birch Society fringes of extreme right-wing politics. All of Trumpism’s bigoted politics is, as we are often reminded, of very old vintage as far as its substance goes. (The Harris campaign’s slogan “Not Going Back” was an apt acknowledgement of that reality.) Trumpism becomes a widespread populist movement that utterly takes over one of the two major political parties in the US when it encounters that widespread, deep malaise and, like the storm drawing warm water off of the ocean, reinforces and redirects it. Racism and sexism are part of that energy too, as well as the blatant transphobia that Republicans generally exploited; their tools, their way of seeing the world, are ready to hand everywhere around us in the US. The whole thing then coalesces into a hurricane of more than 72 million people voting for someone who promises to wreck US civil society at large by promising to make a certain very white sector of society safer.
IV
The pressures of climate change on US society are, so far, still indirect and quite diffuse. This is what makes it hard for everyone to see them for what they are. Trumpists mistake the symptoms of the pressures for the pressures themselves, but at least they are feeling the pressures! Why Harris lost is, I think, that she and her most ardent followers failed to show that they feel any of those pressures very much at all. Something is deeply, fundamentally wrong in the US: a global crisis threatens to devour the world as it currently exists. While Trumpists might claim that the things that they think are wrong are caused by liberals (scapegoating is part of its fundamental error), liberals, whether consciously or not, communicate the message that the chief thing wrong in the US is…simply the Trumpists themselves and their fevered, bigoted imaginations. That’s the difference.
Put differently, I think Harris’s chief message is that she was the defender of a competent, intelligently technocratic, benevolent status quo that, under Biden, successfully navigated us out of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic aftershocks. True enough! But Harris’s vision was, truth be told, deeply conservative in its own way, and the Harris campaign’s active solicitation and promotion of its endorsements from the likes of Dick Cheney reinforced that impression. It’s also an appeal that reinforced liberals’ annoying tendency towards smugness, self-congratulation, and patronizing dismissal of its opponents. Nothing is wrong, the Harris campaign seemed to be saying, that we can’t fix with plucky grit and good cheer! If only those deplorable Trumpists would come to their senses and see how good and smart we are over here, there’s nothing we couldn’t do! It’s definitely a sunny, pragmatic, optimistic view of the world and its problems. (The contrast of this sunny optimism with Biden’s and Harris’s near-unconditional material support of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza was jarring, but they hoped people wouldn’t dwell on that too much.) It’s a view of the world that isn’t afraid of anything, isn’t troubled by anything—except, of course, by people who are afraid and troubled and what they might do under the influence of a demagogic con man.
Perhaps I sound unfair to liberals here. Maybe I am, at least a little bit. (We can often be hardest on those who are closest to us.) Aren’t liberals the ones who actually think climate change is real and are at least nominally willing to do something about it? Well, yes, but to hear most liberals I know talk about climate change, it’s just another one of those pesky problems that technocratic know-how and incrementalist solutions could lick in no time flat, if only their opponents would let them do it. Their talk about the problem is mostly couched in the anodyne language of NGOs: treaty targets for CO2 emissions, graphs of historical temperature changes, reports made by international bodies at fancy conferences. It’s rarely made concrete: half of Pakistan’s farmland flooded, villages in Germany and China wiped off the map, Asheville, North Carolina devastated. The Greta Thunbergs of the world who confront the measured pronouncements of international institutions with a concrete cry for urgency are subjected to endless mockery, and not just from conservatives.
I think that at the end of the day voters in the US chose the candidate who is channeling a sense of something being deeply wrong, however utterly misdirected his unease might be, over the candidate who seemed to take offense that anyone could feel that way.
V
Let me be absolutely clear: I do not think that a majority of my fellow voters in the US were right to vote for Trump. I hope it is abundantly clear that I think Trumpism blatantly misidentifies the problems we face as a society and that his proposed “solutions” will only exacerbate the very real problems we have. The “armed lifeboat” will not save us. Harris would have been better; she is less erratic and malevolent and more sympathetic with the radically democratic deliberation that is, in my view, the best way out of the dangers of a warming world. She would have proven an obstacle to more progressive policies, as every Democratic president since 1980 has been. But she would have been less blatantly, obscenely bigoted, less authoritarian, less eager to sacrifice queer and trans folk as propitiatory sacrifices to quell the destructive forces they refuse to understand.
Nor am I advocating for a facile, context-free “can’t we all just agree to disagree?” posture. If anything, I want the center-left in the US to be more confrontational, to start having the courage of its convictions! At the same time, the US center-left needs to cope with its addiction to cheap moral superiority. Sure, the memes and the John Oliver and Jon Stewart routines are funny enough, but they stand in the way of the deep listening and grappling we need to do. Deep listening involves paying attention to what the Trumpists say—and what they don’t say. The silences, the unintentional admissions, the rhetorical shifts. This task can, but need not, involve having conversations with Trump-supporting family and acquaintances. If your health and well-being don’t allow for those kinds of interventions, then by all means don’t. Block and unfriend and set boundaries however you must. (Lord knows I have!)
Most of all, this is a moment for embracing a kind of deep humility. The difficulty of translating the climate crisis into a compelling human narrative knows no ideology. The isolationist right and the neoliberal left are struggling about equally with this problem from where I sit. I don’t have any sure-fire solutions to propose myself! The first step, though, is admitting we have a problem, as the saying goes. Once we admit our problem, those of us who care about having a future not structured around chaos and cruelty might even come up with a way forward.
Thought Required; Pants Optional. 