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It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

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Mikaela Loach

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“Why, per Freedom House, is democracy now "under assault and in retreat"? Why are many people in positions of power seeking to undermine public confidence in elections, the courts, the media, and--on the fundamental question of earth's future--science? Why have such dangerous splits been allowed to develop between rich and poor, urban and rural, those with a higher education and those without? Why has the United States--at least temporarily --abdicated its leadership in world affairs? And why, this far into the twenty-first century, are we once again talking about Fascism? One reason, frankly, is Donald Trump. If we think of Fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.”

“The defining feature of world politics post the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been the rise of right-wing populists, who have disrupted politics. It wasn't meant to be this way. Conventional wisdom at the time was that the GFC would lead to the 'social democratic moment'. The theory went that in the aftermath of the GFC - an event which exposed the dangers of relentless deregulation and fuelled an already existing rise of inequality - progressive parties, with a preference for appropriately calibrated regulation and redistribution, would benefit. Like much conventional wisdom, reality proved otherwise. Instead, it's been the right-wing populists' moment. The charlatans' moment. First, they disrupted their own parties, then they disrupted politics more broadly. (p.14-15)”

“Like the authors of the Manifesto, I don’t believe that the generalised mass misery of the world, all the unbearable checklists of deprivation and depravity, is irrelevant, nor unrelated to the economic system that runs the current order of things. Nor that the poverty of the poor is unrelated to the riches of the rich, nor the powerlessness of the disempowered to the power of the powerful. We’re all familiar with inventories of inequality like the one quoted above, eliciting anguish from some and eyerolling from those for whom such anguish is politically gauche. I don’t believe, for reasons outlined below, that such invidious realities are sad facts of human nature, nor that they are inevitable – though certainly changing them would not, will not, be easy. The question is whether it’s worth the attempt. Whether those countless discarded and disempowered lives are worth fighting for and alongside.”