Denying the pandemic was surely one of the reasons Trump lost the election. By January 2021, his Administration’s painful response had already caused the deaths of half a million Americans. Although the key learning was not so much in the obvious danger of denialism (which too), but in seeing the effects of the neoliberal ideology that brought him to the White House. Like all nationalism, that of America First it also deliberately obscured the class, race, and gender divisions of American society. The divide between rich and poor, which included blue-collar workers and black or Hispanic minorities, was seen in their shockingly higher infection and mortality rates. Trump’s was not a project to make the United States bigger, but to dismantle it socially, a prelude to future looting. Today, when the same thing happens with climate change, we should think about whether we would be fooled again with a clear Trumpist speech; whether that seemingly rebellious rhetoric can once again be a winning horse.
Perhaps our greatest philosophical challenge in thinking of a habitable world is the difficulty of unraveling our rigid and egotistical forms of individuality. The pandemic and the climate crisis are global phenomena that show that we are tied to a shared world. It’s called interdependence. But, paradoxically, the pandemic, like climate change, has visualized inequalities while increasing the sense of global responsibility towards other beings and towards the Earth. It is the same interdependence/fragmentation dialectic that we see on a global scale: we fortify the logic of militarized blocs against a China that we need as an ally to combat climate change. Will we again opt for a apartheid climate, as happened with vaccines, or will we develop a sense of global solidarity?
Here, the risk is to turn the climate into a cultural war and obstruct any shared projection of a new development model and the new forms of solidarity that will have to be activated, even imagined. There is a double front: here, the Trumpist whims of the opposition; there, a government that fails to articulate a discourse that mobilizes the collective effort in an inclusive and purposeful way. And this is more relevant than the dangerous but tiresome Ayusism. If we complain because the Commission does not consult us for the limits on gas consumption and we appeal to a “rational solidarity” that considers the differences between States; If we relentlessly appeal to co-governance with the autonomies during the pandemic, why turn this into a mere throwing weapon in the face of the new electoral cycle? Deciding well on capital issues, understanding that there are challenges that we must not leave at the mercy of the fury of partisan struggles, is precisely what defines good leaders.
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