Scapegoats and Solidarity

Then there are the macro explanations. There’s blame directed toward the longstanding misogyny and racism that informed the strategy of the Trump campaign and formed the cultural environment that received it. On the economic side, there are the effects of the global cost-of-living crisis as incumbent parties across the globe hemorrhaged votes to their opposition. (It’s interesting to note that the Democratic Party actually lost a smaller share of votes than its counterparts in the ​“developed world” in 2024.) 

This second set of explanations is certainly getting warmer. But so, too, is the Earth. Whomever we decide to scapegoat, our climate predicament continues unabated. 

If current trends continue, we are set to hurtle past 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in 2024, the target scientists set to limit the damage of global warming. Under a president who threatens to pull out of the global Paris Agreement for a second time, we can expect the U.S. contribution to dramatically worsen. In the meantime, the cascade effects of warming have already begun. In the United States — the world’s biggest petrostate — the climate crisis is feeding into a housing bubble headed for crisis. Beyond the direct, physical effects of escalating wildfires and floods are the systemic risks that increasingly uninsurable houses will create in the housing market. 

We should be particularly concerned about a worsening climate in an era where grievance politics and scapegoating proliferate. Climate denial had its day, and now something far more nefarious is brewing on the far Right. Researchers studying a database of content from the white supremacist website Stormfront found that 70% of sampled posts ​“accepted or exploited” the scientific reality of climate change, compared with a mere 16% expressing denialist views. Instead, as ProPublica journalist Abrahm Lustgarten has chronicled, the floods and wildfires engendered by the emissions of fossil fuels and big agribusiness are fueling right-wing border militias and several ​“lone wolf” eco-fascist mass shootings, from New Zealand to El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y.

On these corners of the far Right, immigration and climate change conspire to steal open land from the white Americans who are entitled to it, as part of a ​“White Genocide” that aims to replace white people and their culture (and which, presumably, must be resisted by way of actual genocide).

This is by no means confined to the fringes. Stephen Miller, the political advisor Trump named as deputy chief of policy, has helped fuel a deluge of climate disaster coverage on Breitbart, framed by ​“research” from the far-right Center for Immigration Studies that stokes fears of resource scarcity and food shortages while platforming ​“great replacement theory.” Trump, for his part, has offered to address rising housing prices through mass deportation — which baselessly scapegoats immigrants while ignoring the fact that the construction sector employs more undocumented immigrant labor than any other, except agriculture. 

Meanwhile, the ability of the powers that be to contain this persistent, anti-organizing, anti-political counter-offensive is eroding. Even as candidates, Trump and JD Vance pushed back against the idea of fact-checking, with Vance doing so notably in his debate performance after being confronted with his lies about Haitian immigrants. A billionaire crony of the president-elect owns a sizable chunk of an influential information base that he has essentially converted into a misinformation machine for the Right at best (“Nazi bar” at worst). And local sources of news, which could counter the political narratives being shamelessly promoted by the billionaire class, are facing censorship, layoffs and closures.

These facts are intimately related to the facts that began this essay. Those invectives preemptively blaming Latinos for the carnage promised by the ascendant Republican Party were made by well-compensated pundits at major news organizations — not just those aligned with the far Right, but MSNBC and Newsweek. Log on to Twitter (if you can stomach it) and you will see plenty more where that came from: Under Elon Musk’s tenure, the company has been converted into a de facto anti-organizing platform that eats solidarity and shits out bitcoin. 

Moving forward, we need to be sharp-eyed about resisting the tempting allure of scapegoat politics. While electoral blame-casting by the center and Left is by no means equivalent to the genocidal mass deportation politics of the Right, both work against building the power that will be required to change our political trajectory. This is not to say that we should avoid the hard and necessarily contentious work of figuring out which strategies, actors and cultural realities have cost us our opportunities to head off the worst of the present crises. But we should keep our eyes fixed on exactly why that work is worthwhile — that we might come up with better things to do and build the power and connections required to do them. Much of the scapegoating discourse that has emerged in the wake of the election is practically lab-engineered to undermine exactly that. 

In Solidarity, Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix consider solidarity to be ​“the recognition of our inherent interconnectedness” and ​“an attempt to build bonds of commonality across our differences” — the very preconditions for acting together, politically. One sense of solidarity is in the direction we want, that of solidifying popular power against oppression and working to expand the zone of people whose material lives, rights and dignity are respected. But this ​“transformative” version has an evil twin: ​“reactionary solidarity,” the type forged between those who aim to jealously protect the in-group from the out-group. This is what passes for solidarity between the Musks and Trumps of the world, who realize their combined class interest in controlling information, capital and political institutions that in turn control whether they can protect their money and power from our pesky needs for healthcare, bodily autonomy and a livable planet. 

Solidarity can sound like a naive and idealistic ideal, divorced from the hard truths of power struggle in a contentious and unequal political world. It is anything but. Confronting the state will require a mass base of people, and the strategic value of preventing solidarity between the people who could make up that base is no more mysterious than the question of whether the average army would prefer to face a larger or smaller enemy army. Empires famously ​“divide and rule,” and we know for a fact that various actors, from rival states to opportunistic politicians, see the seeds of tomorrow’s success in today’s sowing of widespread public mistrust. 

We have reason for optimism about what we could get out of rejecting scapegoat politics and going all in on solidarity. While the support for the right-wing party in this country is sobering, it’s important not to over-read the top line electoral results in to a self-fulfilling prophecy about what our neighbors do or do not support (or, more to the point, would support, under different political circumstances). 

The results of referenda and other forms of direct democracy in the November election bolster this point. Abortion protections won in 7 of 10 states (and earned majority support in Florida, though they failed to clear the needed 60% benchmark). Paid sick leave passed by large margins in three states. Kentucky soundly defeated a measure to defund public schools in favor of private ones. California, Hawaii and Louisiana all opted to put public funds toward climate adaptation and resilience. These results were no accident. The way that we are invited to participate in democratic life affects the kind of politics that result: People in the United States asked to weigh in on political issues directly often give answers to the left of the candidates they vote for. And the ballot box or direct referendum is not the only way to pose such questions: Unions are engines of democratic life that invite and allow for sustained participation. Union participation puts workers in common cause with one another, which offers a reason to rethink the social relationships between workers and owners. Unsurprisingly, union membership has consistently been shown to help erode prejudices and resentment between groups, as unions, after all, offer both a reason for solidarity and an opportunity to put that solidarity to work. It is perhaps also unsurprising, then, that union voters did not drift to the right in this past election, even as the rest of the working class did. 

It is disappointing when people with whom we hope to make common cause do not politically align with us or make the choices we hope they will make. But solidarity is not a market exchange — it is not something we extend in payment for good behavior. It is that which forms our capacity to change political realities. As the climate crisis intensifies and capitalists consolidate their control over information and material, the pressure to bargain away solidarity for clicks will continue. 

If we give in, we will be selling our ability to transform the world with it. And we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.