Trump's Paris climate decision shows the threat rising tribalism poses to the planet

After months of dithering and teasing his decision like it’s a reality show finale, Donald Trump has finally pulled the trigger: He will withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement (technically, he will begin the multi-year process of withdrawing).

It is an unwise and immoral decision — bad for US interests, bad for humanity, and bad for future generations. It’s even against Trump’s own interests. It’s just dumb all around, really, from any vantage point you can pick.

Rather than dive into the specifics, I want to pull the lens back a bit, because I also happen to think the Paris decision is a direct window into a profound contest of worldviews. And the outcome of that contest matters more, in the big picture, than the specifics of US carbon emissions over the next four years. Indeed, at risk of being melodramatic, the outcome of that contest will determine the fate of our species in the 21st century.

To put it as bluntly as possible: The cosmopolitan progress of the late 20th century is threatened by a tribalist backlash, and if cosmopolitanism doesn’t win — if it doesn’t regroup, adjust, and reconstitute — we are all screwed.

Tribalism versus cosmopolitanism

To frame things, let me introduce a rough but useful distinction.

Every human is at the center of multiple, concentric circles of concern — self, family, kin, residents of the same city, state, or nation, members of the same religion or ethnicity, fans of the same sports team, and so on. We are all members of multiple tribes. (I’m a Roberts, a Voxxer, a Seattleite, etc.)

Those tribal attachments are most intense when they are closest in — self and family. As they move outward, they become less intense, more abstract. I consider myself a member of the tribe “humanity,” for instance, but in practice, the intensity of my attachment to, say, a random dude in Estonia is rather attenuated.

I think of tribalism as the basic human impulse to pull concern inward, to shrink the circle, to raise walls and draw sharper contrasts between Us and Them. Its opposite, which I call cosmopolitanism (for lack of a better term), is the impulse to push circles of concern outward, to extend cooperation and communion, to bring more people under the banner of Us.

History is defined by the waxing and waning of these two impulses — tentative cosmopolitan extensions outward, followed inevitably by tribalist backlashes. Slowly, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, humanity groped its way to something approaching global cooperation.

Three important aspects of this distinction, for present purposes:

1. It also maps onto a rough taxonomy of personality types. At the extreme tribalist end is the authoritarian personality; at the other extreme are the dissolute, louche, and unrooted. Most people land somewhere in the middle, though psychologists have found that people tend one way or the other.
2. No one is at a fixed point on the spectrum; circumstances matter. Fear and anxiety move everyone in the direction of tribalism. A sense of safety and trust inclines people more toward cosmopolitanism.
3. In recent decades, Americans have been sorting themselves not only by income and education, but by personality. Tribalism is concentrating in exurban and rural areas; cosmopolitanism is concentrating in urban areas.

I told this story in (much) more detail in my post on tribal epistemology (which you should read, despite the headline), but the point here is simply that Trump represents an extreme tribalist backlash.

Trump is a tribalist

The hallmark of tribalism (a term I prefer to “nationalism,” as it gets at the deeper roots) is that it views the world in zero-sum terms — if one tribe benefits, it is at another tribe’s expense. As has been much remarked (see my post on Trump’s mindset), this describes Trump to a tee. He views all interactions, both personal and international, in terms of dominance and submission.

Tribalism has also entirely subsumed the US conservative movement. The intellectual core has all but rotted; what remains are older, rural and suburban white men and their wives, angry that their tribe is being demoted from its hegemonic position. At a barely beneath-the-surface level, Trumpism is about restoring old hierarchies: the powerful over the powerless, whites over minorities, men over women.

This same zero-sum attitude animates Trump’s foreign policy. This extraordinary quote from his advisers H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, regarding Trump’s recent trip overseas, puts the issue in stark terms:

That is tribal thinking in its essence: Everyone’s out for themselves. It’s Us versus Them, forever jockeying for advantage, and we are stronger.

In foreign policy this perspective goes under the rubric of “realism,” but what’s evident in this quote is that as the tribalism grows stronger and more naked, the realism becomes more crude and ideological. It becomes less about a clear perspective on interests and more like a primal cry: We’re the winners, the richest and most powerful, and we don’t owe you anything.

Tribalism is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. When Trump approaches other countries with an attitude that America is dominant and everyone else owes it thanks, or money for border walls, or money for mutual defense, he is received with suspicion and hostility.

A zero-sum perspective is inherently hostile to collective agreements and treaties. It can only see such agreements as attempts by the weak to bind and restrain the strong (a theme that popped up again and again in Trump’s announcement on Paris). Trump was inclined to see things that way already, no matter what he was told.

That is the backdrop to Trump’s decision. It’s not that Paris particularly constrained him — it didn’t constrain him at all, actually — but the very notion of committing to collective action bothered him (and Steve Bannon). From his perspective, the US has tons of fossil fuels, and that gives the US power. Voluntarily reducing dependence on fossil fuels threatens US dominance.

Trump doesn’t just want that dominance — he wants to signal it, to shove it in other countries’ faces. Staying in the agreement, even if it was substantively meaningless, didn’t send the right signal.

The same approach has marked Trump’s attitude toward other international agreements, including NATO. As his disastrous overseas trip demonstrated, he feels utterly unbound by those agreements, and his international peers have heard loud and clear.

Trump’s rise is, of course, part of a global resurgence of tribalism in democratic countries. Several have slid into autocratic illiberalism; others, like Britain, have chosen to withdraw from international commitments. The champions of cosmopolitanism — free global flow of people, goods, and ideas, mutually beneficial international cooperation — are on the defensive.

Trump leaving Paris is only one battle in this war, but it is a grievous blow struck in favor of tribalism.

Cosmopolitanism must win or we are screwed

These days, cosmopolitan “elites” are under heavy fire for neglecting the plight of working people and allowing inequality to spiral out of control.

And to be clear, most of that fire is deserved. Globalism has not led to “free” trade so much as a playing field skewed to the advantage of capital. Middle-class workers have not been adequately sheltered from the buffeting winds of the global economy. Millions of words could be and have been written about how to better offset the dislocations involved in global cooperation and communion.

But in this time of tribalist ascendance, I think it’s also important for defenders of cosmopolitanism to have a little of what Republicans used to call “moral clarity.” (Remember that? Don’t hear it much anymore.)

It’s not just that recent globalization has been a net gain for humanity — though it has been, in life span, food security, health, education, and income — it’s that every advance in the human condition since our days on the savannah has come through the cosmopolitan impulse. Tribalism can and does protect particular tribes, particular lives, but it is only when we reach out across tribal lines that we learn, prosper, and progress.

It is through the cosmopolitan impulse that we construct stable, transpartisan institutions and norms that enable us to set aside immediate tribal interests in favor of mutual long-term benefit. Science, for example, is impossible without cosmopolitanism.

What’s more — and this is the key point — greater cosmopolitanism is required for humanity to prosper, or possibly even survive, in the 21st century.

Humanity has entered what some scientists are calling the “Anthropocene” — the geological age of human beings. We bestride the planet a hegemon, now so numerous, wealthy, and technologically powerful that we are reshaping Earth’s basic systems. Collectively, our actions now determine which species profuse and which go extinct, the distribution of biomass, the composition of the atmosphere, the course of ocean tides and weather patterns, and the distribution and relative health of our own species.

We are the prime mover, but we are not in charge, not exactly. Taking control of and responsibility for our collective global effects would require some form of global governance. To date, such governance is mostly aspirational (like the Paris agreement).

Living in the Anthropocene means that our most important challenges are collective and can only be effectively met with collective action. Climate change is the paradigmatic example — and it seems revealing to me now that climate change so early and aggressively elicited the tribalist backlash that has now swallowed all of US politics. The willful irrationalism of climate denialism is now the default epistemological setting on the right.

Responsibility for climate change is broadly shared, and the only way to slow or arrest it is through trust and non-zero-sum cooperation. Only cosmopolitanism can solve climate change.

That’s also true of pandemics, terrorism, cyberterrorism, trade, and travel. They all require cooperation — submitting before a set of neutral, shared rules, agreeing to be constrained in the long-term collective interest. If every country treats international relations with the crude tribalist perspective McMaster and Cohn advocate, as all against all, there is no chance that any of those challenges can be adequately met.

And time is short. Climate change is a “threat multiplier,” as the military says. It will make almost every global problem worse, increasing disasters, water and food shortages, refugee flows, and the violence that inevitably attends such dislocations.

Increasing chaos and dislocation will increase the need for cosmopolitanism — for cooperation, information sharing, cross-border aid flows and law enforcement — while simultaneously making it more difficult. Remember, fear pushes everyone toward tribalism, and the more chaotic things get, the easier it will be to scare people, to demagogue, to slide into illiberalism.

The flip side is, just as 21st-century challenges will disregard national borders, so too will 21st-century opportunities. Unlocking the enormous potential of advanced-energy technologies will also require international cooperation. This was an underappreciated aspect of Paris — it was not only or even primarily about punishing fossil fuels. Especially in the bi- and multilateral deals that surrounded the main agreement (the US signed dozens), it was mainly about researching, testing, commercializing, and deploying low-carbon technologies.

To the extent that the US takes itself out of the game, the enormous global capital flows going into those technologies will steer elsewhere. Other countries will capture the first-mover benefits and the spill-on effects of innovation.

Paris is the battle, not the war

Other countries are already stepping into the void the US will leave. China and the European Union are taking measures to reaffirm and strengthen their cooperation on climate change. China, which invests more in renewable energy than any other country on Earth, is rubbing its hands at the opportunity to dominate advanced energy markets, shape the accord’s transparency and reporting requirements, and press its own interests in bilateral deals around Paris framework — all while the US stands out in the cold, where it put itself.

The US represents just 15 percent of global emissions.

But it represents 20 percent of the pledged emission reductions in Paris (which were already inadequate). There’s no whistling past the graveyard here. Not just in leaving the Paris accord but in ceasing its efforts to reduce emissions, the US is dealing a grievous blow to global efforts to constrain climate change. The global poor will suffer first and most, but Americans will suffer too.

But the damage is not just to the climate effort. The US is isolating itself, siding with Nicaragua and Syria against the united will of 190 of the world’s countries, including all the biggest democracies and economic powers.

The damage to the trust extended to the US — already substantial in the wake of Bush’s disastrous Iraq War — will be difficult to repair. Pay attention to this extraordinary thread from New York Times international reporter Max Fisher:

Nations are realigning for a world in which the US is no longer the singular economic and moral leader. That can’t simply be undone by the next president, even if she is not a proto-authoritarian lunatic.

Bailing on Paris, thumbing our nose at the world’s nations, is a triumph of tribalism in an era when renewed international cooperation is needed more than ever. If there’s to be any hope of addressing climate change and the many global problems it will exacerbate, the forces of cosmopolitanism must rally.

They have the public on their side. Trump’s approval rating is 38 percent. Public support for the Paris accord stands at 71 percent, a majority in every state. The problem, as ever, is that tribalists have fear, and thus intensity, on their side. Calming those fears, easing the dislocations of global integration, restitching the ties of trust within and among nations, is a matter of survival in the Anthropocene.

Trump has just won a battle for tribalism. But cosmopolitanism must win the war — the alternatives are too horrible to contemplate.

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