Climate Collapse Meets The Ancien Regime: 'Murca, Freedumb & Magical Thinking. Then What?
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And yet there is no sign that the American political system is taking this threat at all seriously. It raises the question of whether climate change will be the thing that finally topples the already creaking American constitutional system. In Washington, nearly the whole summer has been eaten up with negotiations around a bipartisan infrastructure that includes little climate policy. Democrats are hoping to pass a separate reconciliation bill with about $3.5 trillion in additional spending over 10 years (or roughly 1 percent of GDP, a modest bill), but even if that was entirely climate stuff (only a small part is), it is maybe a fifth the size of what a serious attack on climate change would be.
Progress is being made, but it just is not anywhere near the scale of the problem. Then, because Democrats will likely lose control of the House of Representatives at least next year, and Republicans don't believe in doing anything about the climate problem, that will probably be it for climate policy for the rest of the decade, if not longer. If conservatives succeed in their plot to destroy fair elections at all levels of government and set up one-party rule, that will be it for the indefinite future.
Traditionally, when a government fails to address a giant, looming threat, it raises the chance of revolution. Now, such an event is quite scary, and both conservative and moderate forces have spent generations whipping up fear of Jacobins and guillotines. This leads to a common misconception, though — that revolutions are the result of people deciding to overthrow the government. As listeners of historian Mike Duncan's excellent Revolutions podcast can tell you, this gets the causality (mostly) backwards. Actions from revolutionaries of course do matter, but the primary causal factor in virtually every revolution in history has been the rottenness and incompetence of the status quo political regime. If a government can ensure a modicum of economic prosperity and keep a solid grip on the armed forces, revolutions almost never have a chance.
For instance, by the end of his reign, Tsar Nicholas II's record of constant failure was so appalling that nearly the entire Russian political spectrum, from communists to ultra-conservative monarchists, was united against him. His horrifying misrule convinced even die-hard autocrats that the country could not survive with an incompetent dolt at the apex of power. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith made a similar observation about the failure of the elite in Ancien Régime France to head off revolution:
In 1774 [Turgot] became comptroller-general of France, and his immediate task was to curb the expenditures of the French court. He failed. A firm rule operated against him: People of privilege almost always prefer to risk … total destruction rather than surrender any part of their privileges. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is a reason. There's also the invariable feeling that privilege, however egregious, is a basic right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a small thing as compared with that of the rich. And so it was in the Ancien Régime … when reform from above became impossible, then revolution from below became inevitable. [The Age of Uncertainty]
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https://news.yahoo.com/american-government-heading-climate-induced-095210891.html
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