The Right Profile
In which I confess, in the manner of an old man shaking his head at the follies of the world, to be baffled by the apparent beliefs of those on the extreme right.
Back in 2007 AUT Media were kind enough to publish Hot Topic - Global Warming and the Future of New Zealand - my attempt to summarise the climate science of the day and the policy options available to NZ. A Labour-led government was trying to find a way to thread the needle of getting emissions heading downwards without frightening the economic horses. We seem to have come full circle, except that the climate has already changed in ways that ought to frighten everyone, and the current government is being even more timid in its approach.
Hot Topic was the product of a year’s research and a lifetime’s interest, and born out of internet jousting with NZ’s tiny band of climate deniers. In the book, I rashly assumed that climate denial was being rendered irrelevant by undeniable facts. Our understanding of the science in the late 2000s meant that credible climate scepticism should have been limited to argument about how bad it could get.
How wrong I was.
It turns out that undeniable facts aren’t, as long as you have the internet, social media and a few like-minded people to give you support and encouragement. It helps to have money too, especially if that money is spent on building networks. It helps even more if the groundwork for those networks was being laid long before climate change became an issue.
In their 2010 book Merchants Of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway demonstrated how the tropes of climate denial were based on the strategies and techniques developed by the tobacco industry in its efforts to defuse and delay public health action to deal with the deadly effects of smoking. The science was damning: smoking clearly damages health and kills many. Nevertheless, the tobacco companies were able to find and fund scientists and spokesmen prepared to argue the toss. They realised it wasn’t necessary to disprove the science, just to cast doubt on its findings. If you could pretend there were vaguely credible uncertainties in the damage done, and you had sufficiently pliable politicians, then it was possible to prevent or at least delay action.
Merchants Of Doubt shows how those techniques were adopted and adapted by the big fossil fuel companies to delay action on emissions. Many of the same organisations - a network of right wing free market think tanks - were involved, even if the funding came from different sources. What I underestimated in Hot Topic was the extent to which those approaches had become embedded on the right of politics, and how self-supporting the world view of denial had become.
If you were inclined to be sceptical of the need for urgent action on emissions reductions, as was not unreasonable in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was possible to do a little light internet research and find that there was a lot of material out there apparently contradicting the mainstream scientific consensus. You might find that politicians whose views you found congenial shared some of that scepticism. There was a ready-made set of counterfactuals that you could adopt - a whole world view available. It didn’t matter that most of this stuff was either rubbish or tendentious, it provided apparent intellectual cover for doing nothing. Once again, doubt was the product, and it sold well.
Ultimately, of course, the tobacco industry lost its battle, and ended up paying the US government billions of dollars in damages. That hasn’t happened to fossil fuel companies, at least not yet. But the legacy of this calculated delegitimisation of science and expertise is all around us.
Last week I looked in on one of the few remaining NZ-based climate denier blogs - one I used to spar with regularly in the days when I was running the Hot Topic blog. It’s been more or less inactive for a while, but a new post by the blog owner promoting his latest political crusade - Free New Zealand - caught my eye. It appears that disappearing down one rabbit hole is not enough; now you have to traipse around a whole warren. I’m not going to link to or repeat the racist and misogynist views on display, but I do want to draw attention to the organisations cited as “fellow conservatives we love and admire”:
• NZ Centre for Political Research
• The Taxpayers’ Union
• Bassett, Brash & Hide
• Hobson’s Pledge
• Democracy Action
• Voices for Freedom
• The BFD
• Kiwis4democracy
• Groundswell
• NZ News Essentials
• The Platform
Anyone who follows NZ current affairs will recognise that this is the far right of our politics, former ACT MPs and mysteriously funded “unions”, faded right wing attack bloggers and climate denying farmers, with overt racism ladled over the top. And there in the middle is Voices For Freedom, the anti-vax group that’s popped up wherever there’s been anti-government demonstrations over the last few years. You don’t have to dig very far before you begin to find vaccine-scepticism, if not outright denial, on any of these web sites. The same is true of anti-transgender activism.
This clustering of issues is not particularly new - but the weaponisation of them most certainly is. Now you don’t need to go looking for ideas - Facebook and other social media will feed you with them. It only takes a click or two for the algorithm to work out that if you like stuff posted by climate deniers you’ll also be receptive to other right wing adjacent topics. If you’re inclined towards using alternative medicine or new age healing, you’ll find the messaging of the anti-vaxxers reaching your timeline, and pretty soon you’ll be mired in an alternate, overtly right wing reality where QAnon-like conspiracies lurk ready to capture the unwary.
The groups above maintain that alternate reality by muddying the waters and denying facts, and by delegitimising the so-called “mainstream media”. Youtube channels feed carefully curated stories as “news” and internet radio stations platform extreme views. If you don’t get out much, you might assume that this version of the world is where things are really happening.
In the real world, the views found on the far right are not common. The mainstream that they so deride is still a comfortable majority, according to opinion polls or vaccination statistics. But this cluster or bubble of attitudes does act to shift the window of discourse (aka the Overton Window) towards the right. Centre-right politicians look towards the noisy minority, and adjust their stance in that direction. Centre-left politicians find they have less room for manoeuvre.
It also changes the wider public perception of political debate. The protesters outside Parliament a year ago were both a tiny minority and a strange mixture of groups, but the blanket coverage of the occupation in the media, despite being negative about their behaviour and goals, worked in their favour by creating an impression of polarisation in the wider community.
Having been a journalist and publisher, I’m not blaming newspapers or broadcast media for creating division where none exists, but there is a problem of perspective. The noisy nutcase gets the headlines, the middle ground is ignored. Far right views are amplified by columnists, commentators, and talkback hosts. Free speech becomes defined as a right to say hateful things without consequence. Policies vaguely left of centre are demonised as communism in disguise.
All of this has been made possible by the delegitimisation of facts. If you can cut yourself free from mundane reality, then you can argue for anything.
That disconnect is probably going to get a lot worse, and quickly, thanks to recent rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Large Language Models such as ChatGPT make generating plausible text content more or less trivial, while generative AI models can take text prompts and produce almost any deep fake image, voice or video. This whole field is advancing so fast (not least because the models can be made to improve themselves), that about the only safe prediction you can make is that it will be used to create disinformation. The hard part will be knowing it when you see it.
Who benefits from this retreat from the real world? It’s partly the result of a long term political project in the US, covered in detail in Oreskes and Conway’s latest book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (excerpt here). The cultivation of market fundamentalism through a network of so-called think tanks, at first in the US and then internationally, underpinned US politics from Reagan onwards, gave Margaret Thatcher her raison d’être, and inspired the sea change in NZ politics in the 1980s. This was a project facilitated by groups such as the Atlas Network, which boasts of supporting 500+ free market think tanks around the globe. NZ has not been immune. It’s interesting to note that one of the most influential groups involved in this proselytising, the Mont Pelerin Society, in 2013 counted amongst its members Oliver Hartwich, Eric Crampton and Bryce Wilkinson - all currently involved in NZ think tank The NZ Initiative, which claims to be non-partisan but clearly isn’t likely to argue for a programme of renationalising state assets.
This long project, aiming to reduce regulation and cut taxes, getting the government out of peoples lives, has for the people funding it had the happy consequence of reducing tax burdens and concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The unhappy consequences can be seen most clearly in the country where it was born, the USA. America has the most expensive health care in the world, delivering the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation. Its obsession with the freedom to own military weapons leads to mass shootings on a seemingly daily basis. Its window of political discourse is so distorted that its most left-leaning political party would be on the right in most other democracies, while its right wing party is in thrall to Trumpism, the Christian right, and Putin. To this outsider the USA is a great country that has been profoundly broken by free market ideologues.
The other main strand in the international politics of the last decade or more has its roots in Russia. Sowing disinformation in order to create difficulties for your opponents is one way that Putin has been able to exert Russian influence. There is clear evidence of Russian funding and expertise being used to influence both the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US. In both cases, Russia was able to use cash and hacking expertise, along with willing helpers in each country, to achieve its geopolitical objectives.
None of this would have been possible if it hadn’t been for the delegitimisation of facts. I’m a fan of evidence-based policy making, but if you can’t agree about the nature of the evidence it becomes impossible to achieve a consensus on either the need for action, or what to actually do. Back in the days of Hot Topic, I expressed the view that much of what passed as policy imperatives on the right - tax cuts, removing regulations, small government - could only be supported in the face of the facts, not because of them. Tax cuts don’t trickle down, rising tides sink boats that are holed below the waterline, and deregulation gets you a country where most of the fresh water is polluted.
It would be easy for me to conclude with a dystopian take on our likely futures, where the rabid right drags us down the road to a Handmaid’s Tale society of Christian fundamentalist totalitarianism, but I suspect that’s not going to happen - at least, not outside the US. I think that the bubble of frothy fascism we’re seeing on the extreme right is going to burst on the rocks of reality. It won’t be quick, because the funding that’s flowing into supporting these groups is not suddenly going to disappear, but it will happen.
There’s nothing like a crisis to create consensus, as the arrival of Covid in NZ did for a few happy months in 2020 and 2021. There are plenty more of those coming our way. It’s hard to be a climate denier when your friends and family have had their homes and livelihoods destroyed by unprecedented floods, or the rising tide has washed away your beachfront bach. Free markets can’t clean up rivers, but social action can. People working together built our society, and people working together to face the great challenges of the 21st century can build tomorrow’s. That’s not communism or socialism, just a recognition that we can do more when we cooperate than when we put personal liberty before all else. And perhaps, just perhaps, we can persuade some of those emerging AIs to help out.