New Republic - Martin Gelin
Why do right-wing men hate Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so much? Researchers have some troubling answers to that question.
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Teenage activist Greta Thunberg
(Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty Images) |
Climate
skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book
told
those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he
seems to have difficulty sticking to the blasé tone when it comes to a
16-year-old climate activist from Sweden.
Lomborg has repeatedly
mocked and criticized Greta Thunberg, the prominent young activist who
has been sailing across the Atlantic to attend the UN’s Youth Climate
Summit and other meetings in the U.S. In June, he
tweeted
out a cartoon that implied Greta was only useful to climate activists
because being young made her unassailable—in four years, it joked, she’d
be replaced with someone younger still. Earlier in the year, he’d
asked why the World Economic Forum was listening to her at all, and approvingly
shared
a Quillette article which called Thunberg a fanatic and “absolutist”
and which argued adults had a duty to correct her childlike naiveté.
And Lomborg’s on the more civil end of Thunberg’s critics. In April, while
tweeting
that her policies were “unrealistic” and “costly,” he added that, “of
course, she should be treated respectfully, just like all participants
in the climate debate.” Several of his followers didn’t seem to care for
the caveat,
attacking Thunberg with comments about her age and mental health in replies.
As
Thunberg approached America, she was followed by a tsunami of male
rage. On her first day of sailing, a multi-millionaire Brexit activist
tweeted that he wished a freak accident would destroy her boat. A
conservative Australian columnist called her a “deeply disturbed messiah
of the global warming movement,” while the British far-right activist
David Vance attacked the “sheer petulance of this arrogant child.”
In
the U.S., former Trump staffer Steve Milloy recently called Thunberg a
“teenage puppet,” and claimed that “the world laughs at this Greta
charade,” while a widely shared far-right meme showed Trump tipping The
Statue of Liberty to crush her boat. We can expect a surge of similar
attacks in the U.S. as she arrives in New York this week.
While
these examples might feel like mere coincidence to some, the idea that
white men would lead the attacks on Greta Thunberg is consistent with a
growing body of research linking gender reactionaries to
climate-denialism—some of the research coming from Thunberg’s own
country. Researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology,
which recently
launched
the world’s first academic research center to study climate denialism,
have for years been examining a link between climate deniers and the
anti-feminist far-right.
In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers
published
a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics.
The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate
skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a
certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their
form of masculinity.”
The connection has to do with a sense of
group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive
to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by
developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock
some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s
challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by
right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism
increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.
Climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy.”
“There
is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity
that I call ‘industrial breadwinner masculinity.’ They see the world as
separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to
use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they
have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste.
It’s a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable and as
something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth
is more important than the environment” Hultman
told Deutsche Welle last year.
The
corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes
feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of
masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé
wrote in another paper.
These
findings align with similar ones in the United States, where there is a
massive gender gap in views on climate change, and many men perceive
climate activism as inherently feminine, according to research published
in 2017. “In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an
individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as
more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether
the shopper was a male or female,” marketing professors Aaron R. Brough
and James E.B. Wilkie
explained at
Scientific American.
“In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more
feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad
for the environment,” they write.
In the past year, young women
such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. and Thunberg in Europe have
become the global faces of climate activism, often with tremendous
political impact. In the United States, Ocasio-Cortez has helped
transform what was once considered a bit of fringe rhetoric—the Green
New Deal—into a topic of regular conversation. Across the Atlantic
Ocean, in a recent poll, one out of three Germans said that Thunberg has
changed their views on climate change.
The rise of Thunberg and Ocasio-Cortez has generated a predictable backlash among conservative men. In the U.S., Ocasio-Cortez has become an obsession on right-wing media. Fox News mentioned her an average of 76 times a day during her first month in Congress
.
Now, Greta Thunberg is becoming a similar target for European
nationalists. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland
party seems to have coordinated their attacks on Thunberg with the right-wing European Institute for Climate and Energy think tank.
Climate change used to be a bipartisan concern, the first Bush senior presidency famously promising
to tackle global warming. But as conservative male mockery of Thunberg
and others shows, climate politics has quickly become the next big
battle in the culture war—on a global scale.
As
conservative parties become increasingly tied to nationalism, and
misogynist rhetoric dominates the far-right, Hultman and his fellow
researchers at Chalmers University worry that the ties between climate
skeptics and misogyny will strengthen. What was once a practical
problem, with general agreement on the facts, has become a matter of
identity. And fear of change is powerful motivation.
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