On Paris and Tribal Politics

I don't have much to say about President Trump's announcement today that the U.S. will pull out of the Paris climate agreement. It's certainly not surprising. It was a campaign pledge, and one that he could easily keep. Plus, it's another easy way for him to feel superior to Obama. Thus, the urging of many leading businesses to stick with it was not enough to change his mind. Trump is going to be Trump, and this decision is frankly not at the top of my list of political worries these days.

On the broader issue of climate change, I think Jonathan Chait is basically right.

The dominant spirit of conservative thought — or, more precisely, verbal gestures that seek to resemble thought — is not even skepticism but a trolling impulse. The aim is not so much to reason toward a policy conservatives would favor as to pierce the liberal claim to the moral high ground....

[The predominant conservative argument on climate change] contains a defiant refusal to take the policy questions seriously, combined with a gleeful reproach of the urgency with which liberals view the issue. A crude tribalistic impulse overrides any reckoning with the problem. The proximate issue in conservative minds is not climate change itself but the fact that liberals are concerned about all these things. Disintegrating ice shelves, extinctions, or droughts are abstractions.

Let me provide one modest supporting example: Back in 2009 on this very blog, I highlighted the following quote from Rush Limbaugh about climate change.

The whole thing's made up. And the reason I know it is because liberals are behind it. When they're pushing something, folks, it's always bogus.

If that's not the driving sentiment behind current conservative politics, I don't know what is. This mindset, it seems to me, has spread far beyond climate change, and is manifested by the increasing dismissal of experts, outside of conservative-approved sources, on a variety of topics (not to mention the propensity of conservatives to turn against their own policies when adopted by Democrats).

As a young Limbaugh-listening lad in the 1990s, I believed that Republicans were the party of smart policies. Whatever the truth of that proposition back then, for my money the party has increasingly become regressive, selfish, angry, and afraid of the future. (There are exceptions, of course.) I'm not sure what the driving reason for this is, though I am certainly not the first to suspect that the consumption for hours a day of conservative media that constantly tells people that they are being victimized is a big factor.

Donald Trump will not be the president forever, and many commentators see the trend of greening the economy (and the death of coal) as inevitable. The larger questions in my mind are how long conservative politics will be driven by tribalism combined with a sense of grievance, and how long will it be a winning combination?

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