Today’s reactionaries use culture war rhetoric to camouflage their class war intentions. The Thiels, Musks, Mileis, Kickls and Weidels of this world are not populists but elitists who, self-consciously, increasingly defend their backward-oriented supremacist ideologies in public. To counter their strategy, neither mainstream ecomodernist “green growth” strategies, nor “degrowth” movements offer convincing alternatives. The former are naïve with respect to the political-economic preconditions of deep socio-ecological transformations. The latter underestimate the need for unconventional alliances to resist a civilizational backlash that aims at building hierarchical societies to guarantee a good life only for a select few. Such broad alliances are necessary, however, as the far right indiscriminately attack both sides, denouncing them as urban educated, often academic “elites”. 

The ecomodernist mainstream has long tried to convince enlightened business to adhere to a green agenda based on science and facts by “bribing” them with de-risking policies: green investment should be good for the environment and for profits. Still today, many believe that both economic and political liberalism are necessary for tackling the climate crisis in pluralist societies. Markets and private corporations together with democracy, human rights, and science offer, so the belief, the necessary preconditions to implement profound ecological changes, including—in line with Fridays for Future—the ability to “listen to science”. What this overlooks, however, is that economic liberal parties—such as Austria’s NEOS or Germany’s FDP—share with the far-right—such as FPÖ and AfD—a defense of market solutions and private property, and an aversion to redistribution. This point barely enters into contemporary debates, and yet, it has severe implications for current economic policies which prioritize competition and growth over achieving climate targets. This is justified—in line with economic liberalism—by austerity and geopolitical competition. And it is grounded in a common supremacist belief that, as per Friedrich Hayek, some must lead and others must follow.

Degrowth research, unlike ecomodernism, is critical of economic liberalism. Nevertheless, it reinforces a narrative that is inimical for alliance-building. If one wants to focus on human flourishing and planetary health, calling alternatives “de-” or “post-growth” risks trapping them in the same imaginary. Neuro-linguist George Lakoff illustrated in his book “Don’t Think of an Elephant“ what Michel Foucault demonstrated with respect to sexuality—showing how “free sexuality” and “demonize sexuality” remain prisoner of the same discourse (or put another way, the more one tries to shift the narrative “beyond growth”, the more the focus stays on growth). To avoid marginalization and build support for new objectives of wellbeing, and better approaches for coordination and planning, the climate movement needs a new language, new discourses and new framings that can move us from words to deeds.