Dangerous Customer: The Right’s need to mobilise people’s fear lies at the heart of its determination to defend free speech. If the environmental agencies of the state were to be captured by political forces determined to take action against climate change, for example, then climate change denialist propagandists would very soon find themselves being countered by the full force of the scientific community. There is thus a need for the most reactionary forces within capitalist society to take (or retain) full control of the state apparatus. That cannot be done without free speech. Nor can it be prevented without free speech.
THAT THE INSPIRATION for this posting came from a man who
spent his life studying grizzly bears is entirely fitting. The free speech
debate of the past fortnight has seen more than a few angry grizzlies come
galloping out of the woods. The question in most need of an urgent answer is –
why? What is it that leads the Right to defend the principle of free speech so
vigorously? And why has the contemporary Left departed so dramatically from
Noam Chomsky’s free-speech absolutism?
Having watched the grizzly bear population of Yellowstone
National Park dwindle under the impact of climate change and observed the blank
unwillingness of state and federal wildlife protection agencies to intervene,
or even acknowledge the need for intervention, David Mattson went in search of
some answers.
His explanation for the Right’s ingrained antagonism towards
climate change, published in Counterpunch
under the headline “The Sinister Underbelly of Climate Change Denial” is
unequivocal:
“Educated
but mostly-white conservative businessmen and political servants/allies
recognize a threat to their current near strangle-hold on power and wealth
arising from calls to address rampant climate warming. They see those who promote alternative climate-cooling lifestyles and technologies
as enemies to their existing entitlements, certainly profits and power.
They are, moreover, inclined to be bigots. Being clever, they mobilize their
equally bigoted but less educated, less cognitively capable, and exceedingly
fearful base comprised largely of increasingly disadvantaged white males by
appealing to their interest in maintaining the status quo and inflaming their
fear of an alien intrusive world, manifest as ‘immigration’ and ‘immigrants’.”
From the oil-giant Exxon, to the coal companies currently
driving US environmental policy, the historical footprints linking the fossil
fuel industry to climate change denialism have long since been forensically
tracked and identified. Mattson is right: denialism is a manifestation of
reactionary capitalist fear.
The Right’s need to mobilise people’s fear lies at the heart
of its determination to defend free speech. If the environmental agencies of
the state were to be captured by political forces determined to, in Mattson’s
words, “promote alternative
climate-cooling lifestyles and technologies”, then denialist propagandists
would very soon find themselves being countered by the full force of the
scientific community. Hence the need of the most reactionary forces within
capitalist society to retain full control of the state apparatus – a goal that
can only be achieved by mobilizing their “equally bigoted but less educated”
fellow citizens against an “alien and intrusive world” peddling fake news about
everything from immigration to anthropogenic global warming.
The proposed visit to New Zealand of Lauren Southern and
Stefan Molyneux should be viewed in the light of the Right’s on-going
mobilisation of Mattson’s “increasingly disadvantaged white males”. An
important element of this mobilisation process involves persuading its target
audience that “the powers that be” are determined to suppress information which
they have a right to know, but which the “liberal elites” don’t want them to
hear. In this respect, the Mayor of Auckland’s decision to deny Southern and
Molyneux access to Council-owned meeting-halls, played directly into their
hands.
Obviously, the most effective strategy for defeating the
Right’s strategy of mobilising fear is by countering its lies with the truth.
This may not be as difficult as many opponents of the Right would have us
believe. As Mattson notes in his article:
“[E]verything
else aside, self-identified political conservatives cum Republicans are the
most committed disbelievers [in climate change] and, among those, the best
educated (paradoxically) the most strident of all. In other words, conservative
elites of a Republican persuasion are the standard bearers of skepticism.
Surprisingly, they are expressly less amenable to persuasion by evidence than
their more poorly educated political base.”
It is in relation to this group of voters that the Left
comes to grief over free speech. Climate change denialism and free speech
denialism both being born of fear.
The Right is terrified of ordinary people learning the truth
about capitalism and its causal relationship with environmental devastation –
hence its determination to destroy their faith in science and social progress.
The Left, or at least a distressingly large part of it, is
equally terrified that ordinary people are either incapable of absorbing, or
unwilling to accept, the implications of the scientific research into climate
change. Worse still, many leftists believe that ordinary people (white
working-class males in particular) are equally unwilling to absorb and accept
the Left’s arguments in favour of equality and diversity. That, in Hillary
Clinton’s catastrophic characterisation, they are “a basket of deplorables”.
Ignorant rubes who must, at all costs, be kept away from the influence of the
Right’s agitators – even if that involves reducing freedom of expression to the
status of “collateral damage” in the culture wars.
Nothing could be more helpful to the cause of the Right than
a Left which has lost its faith in the people. What, after all, is more likely
to cause the people to lose faith in the Left than a nagging suspicion that
their self-appointed liberators regard them as being either too vicious or too
stupid to grasp the arguments in favour of individual freedom and social
justice without instruction from above?
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 17 July 2018.
