Climatism as an oligarchic strategy to cement power and preempt rivals

An amateur oil painting of Schönfels Castle (Thüringen).

All human societies are led by a confined group of especially influential people. These are the elites, and like them or not, they are unavoidable because humans are hierarchical chimps and they build the same social structures over and over again wherever they flourish.

The elites are not necessarily always and everywhere the wealthiest people, or the most persuasive people or the strongest people – although being wealthy, persuasive and strong certainly helps. They simply enjoy some combination of attributes that grants them social prominence. Lesser people take direction from them, imitate their habits and value their attention.

Knitting circles, learned societies, hunter-gatherer tribes and religious communities all have their own elites. Nations do too, and in politics the uppermost tiers of the national elite invariably form oligarchies. In the premodern era, oligarchs bestowed upon themselves special costumes and elaborate titles and they took substantial steps to ensure that their children could inherit their share in power. In the liberal West the very word “oligarchy” makes us uncomfortable, but that does not mean we have done away with the oligarchs. They are still with us. They no longer bear fancy titles and they have ditched their fur-trimmed robes. They determine their successors via institutional processes rather than descent. All of this makes our oligarchs a little harder to see, but that does not mean they are not oligarchs.

Oligarchs command the loyalty of the violence professionals who enforce things on the ground. Some may command this loyalty directly, but others do so indirectly, through intermediaries. They are (some portion of) elected politicians and (some portion of) the judiciary, but they do not all have formal political roles or titles. Only a minority of them have ever stood for election. De facto oligarchs are also to be found in media organs, non-governmental organisations, various areas of academia and of course large swathes of the state bureaucracy. These oligarchs are embedded within a broader elite class, not all of whose members necessarily have a say in government, but all of whom share a similar outlook and regard themselves as being on the same side.

Because the oligarchy aims above all to stay in power, a great part of politics involves the struggle of the reigning oligarchy to maintain their position and fend off incursions from the outside. These struggles are often camouflaged as disagreements over specific policies or as moral outrage over ostensibly impermissible political views. The entire German elite establishment, for example, claims to hate Alternative für Deutschland because of their alleged fascism. In fact, their real quarrel with the AfD is that their very existence and the reforms they demand threaten the oligarchy’s hold on power. Once upon a time, in the earliest years of the Federal Republic, there really was substantial overlap between those whose views might have fairly been called fascist (in some sense of the term) and potential rivals to power. Now the rivals have totally different political views but they must be forced into the fascist mould anyway, because “fascism” for our oligarchy has come to mean “unwelcome upstart.”¹

Mere wealth, by itself, does not an oligarch make. Especially in heavily bureaucratised Western nations, money does not magically give you sway over the all-important rough men with guns. It can, however, be used to fund opposition parties, to buy favourable (or unfavourable) media coverage and to win the friendship of influential people. Money is also extremely useful for that most threatening of all activities, namely political organisation. You might notice that many of the wealthiest personalities in the West mire themselves in goofy charitable activities and give flabby media interviews in which they mouth whatever banal political orthodoxies happen to be the flavour of the month. They do this by way of advertising to the oligarchs that they are not a threat. “I am on your side, please do not arrest me or have me shot.”

So, money is not everything, but it is something. And money is very often a product of economic productivity, which is another probably even more important something. A great part of Western politics, since economic growth returned in the eleventh century, can be explained by the tensions that arise between a settled, closed and defensive oligarchy on the one hand; and the New Men whom economic success brings to the fore on the other hand. These New Men, because they have achieved their status and resources independent of the oligarchy, threaten the settled way of things. They make the oligarchs nervous.

The rabble harbour all manner of impulses, feelings, delusions and desires. Elites are wont to cultivate some of these for political purposes. Perhaps no single popular impulse has proven more explosive, powerful and useful to political elites than resentment of the wealthy. Since the Industrial Revolution, two groups in particular have seen in this resentment a powerful weapon to be wielded against enemies. Communist counter-elites used this resentment to fuel revolutions; the wealthy to be resented were the old oligarchs, and when they were ousted the communists simply established themselves as a new elite. Settled oligarchies, too, can find it useful to direct this resentment against threatening New Men. Counter-elite would-be revolutionaries on the one hand and threatened oligarchs on the other hand are most of the reason why we have had to hear so much about how bad the wealthy are, even as industrialisation and mass society have made us all vastly more prosperous and collapsed the vastness that once divided the nobility from the serfs.

Sending the peasants to storm the villas of the industrialists is only one very narrow tactic for dealing with the perennial threat of the New Men. A look at modern history will illustrate some of the grand strategies at work in this area. The National Socialists muscled the economic elite with threats, while granting those industrialists willing to play ball special favours, licenses and contracts. In this way they built a patronage economy rife with benefits for the ideologically aligned who agreed to toe the line. The Communists eliminated the threat of the New Men entirely by nationalising everything, effectively replacing the “capitalist” elite with a permanent managerial class. This resulted in poor economic conditions, which is exactly what the managers wanted: If your economy is in the toilet there will be precious few New Men to worry about. The lesson is that settled oligarchies often fear economic growth as a destabilising factor.

Liberal democracy has experimented with two strategies. Through the Cold War and for about ten years afterwards, states like Germany cultivated a very open elite and accordingly tried to align policy with the interests of economic heavyweights, believing that prosperity could be a stabilising force in itself. The oligarchs let the New Men into the fold and in many cases tried to govern on their behalf, while the left complained (not always without justification) about lobbyists and malign corporate influence. This was a period in which West competed with alternate political and economic systems and tried to construct itself as the superior option. There was, in other words, external pressure on the oligarchs to behave, even if they did not always get the balance right.

That pressure has long since vanished. Since Merkel, our oligarchs have revived various doctrines from the political left to keep the New Men away from power. Increasingly, their goal is to squeeze the dreaded “capitalists” by undermining economic growth and thereby cutting off the supply of New Men at the source. Frequently they have overreached, targeting also farmers and small businessmen, as they come to fear everybody who is not an institutionally approved and promoted political actor. It is a light version of the Communist strategy from the Cold War. Our present oligarchs believe there are no viable political alternatives and they need no longer worry so much about comporting themselves well.

This is what I think climatism is for, fundamentally. It is one of the primary instruments used to sap the economy and forestall the rise of New Men. All of the apparent drawbacks of Net Zero policies are in fact features rather than bugs when seen from this perspective. Chasing industry overseas means that other people have to deal with the New Men; our oligarchs are free of them. In a fully developed climatist regime like that which prevails in the Federal Republic, many businesses cannot operate without special subventions, tax breaks or other subsidies, which allows the oligarchs and their institutional apparatus to control who rises and who falls. And naturally, reconstructing the entire energy sector via heavily subsidised Green initiatives allows the reigning oligarchs to choose ideologically aligned winners.

Socialism-lite turns out to be a very delicate balancing act. The oligarchs need to constrict the economy sufficiently to mute the rise and influence of rivals, but not so much that they cause economic collapse or specific catastrophes that would result in them being discredited and thrown out. They were managing this balance fairly well until the Ukraine war messed it up for them, and now their backs are against the wall. At the same time, they have turned their gaze towards the Atlantic with trepidation. They see in Trump’s election a vision of the dark future that awaits them if they let New Men like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and whoever else get out of hand. They’ve also noticed that key actors in the American tech sector played some role in Trump’s victory, and this is yet another reason for them to hate the whole world of technological innovation, from the internet in general to social media and large language models and everything in between. It is a very worrying source of New Men.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think our oligarchs sat down at a table somewhere and hashed out climatism to mess up the economy. The oligarchy is very large and diffuse, but like everybody else they are inclined to believe things that redound to their practical benefit. Climatism emerged via a confluence of interests, but the oligarchs’ enthusiasm was decisive. As an ideological system, however, it is beginning to break down. New Men, after all, are not the only problem an oligarchy may face, and the rising populist right has become a much more immediate threat not only in Germany, but across Europe. For this the oligarchs need new narratives, about the evil Putler abroad and his fifth-columnist sympathisers at home. They might even need a halfway functional economy, but I doubt any of them have yet thought that far ahead.

1. A similar phenomenon once attended ancient and medieval theological disputes, where it often became expedient to brand one’s intellectual opponents “Arians” or “Nestorians” or whatever, even though their actual theological views had zero to with anything actual historical Arians or Nestorians ever espoused.