“All the dirty waters of history”: The spectacularly racist right and liberal management of U.S. climate politics

Abstract

This essay considers the role of the political right in managing the politics of the climate crises of U.S. capitalism. We confront in the U.S. a political situation in which no major party has even attempted to lay out a credible roadmap to address the scale of the climate crisis. Rather, they are pouring fuel on the fire, despite the fact that majorities want climate action and despite the cries of frontline communities, movements, and scientists around the world documenting the extreme, racialized, gendered, and class-based violence of both planetary warming and the fossil fueled economy that engenders it. To make sense of this moment, I take direction from Aimé Césaire’s trenchant analysis of the post-WWII transitionary period in which our present crises acquired their modernized form, and Laura Pulido et al.’s (2019) concept of “spectacular racism.”