The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression

"In some ways, this book gets back to your first question about how we came to be in the situation we’re in. It overlaps with the work that Erik Conway and I did in Merchants of Doubt to identify the ideological underpinnings of climate change denial. You’re right that this book is quite different from the others in tone and topics, but again it’s about meaning. One of the things that Erik and I argued in Merchants of Doubt was that many of the people who deny climate change believe — and I think in some cases authentically so — that they are defending freedom. What we showed in our work was that the climate change deniers that we studied were resistant to accepting the scientific evidence of climate change because they feared that it was going to be used as an excuse to expand government and limit personal freedom. That motivated them to downplay, discount, and ultimately deny the scientific evidence of climate change. But they really did think that they were protecting freedom. And, this, on some level, is the story of 20th century neoliberalism—or at least its founders. It’s the story of a group of thinkers who wanted to place individual liberty and freedom at the centrepiece of their ideological thinking and also at the centrepiece of economic theory. Otherwise, they argued, we’re on the slippery slope to socialism. or as Friedrich von Hayek called it ‘ the road to serfdom .’ “You work because you believe that if you get the factual information clear, explain it well, and make it available, then people will respond in a rational way. For scientists to discover that’s not true has been shocking” Angus Burgin’s book is relevant because I want to argue that these people who apply those arguments to climate change have got it upside down. They think they’re defending freedom but, in fact, they’re putting freedom at risk. At the end of the movie version of Merchants of Doubt , we argument the following: think about American society or European society, think about any liberal democracy, what are the conditions under which we consider it acceptable for the government to force people to leave their homes, order martial law, and order the national guard to come in? The answer is in one of two situations: warfare and natural disasters. We take it as routine now that in the case of a natural disaster the government has the right – even the obligation – to order evacuations to protect people for their own good. This is an extreme loss of freedom. So, there’s a deep irony here. The people we studied worked with the tobacco industry because they didn’t think that the government should regulate tobacco because they didn’t think that the government should protect people from themselves; they thought that people should make up their own minds about whether to smoke cigarettes or not, or ride a motorcycle without a helmet, or anything else. They thought that any time that the government begins to intercede, even if it’s for your own good and even if it’s to protect you from the harms of tobacco, you’re on the slippery slope to socialism. But now look where we are with Hurricane Harvey in Texas. Of course, the government is intervening to protect people because actually that’s what most people think should happen — including most conservatives and Republicans. But now imagine a future where Hurricane Harvey isn’t an unprecedented terrible catastrophe but a frequent, normal thing. One can picture a situation where troops are mobilised to go in wherever they’re needed, and where people are not just relocated temporarily but permanently. A situation in which governments begin to say ‘you can’t live in the Texas gulf coast anymore or you can’t live in the Louisiana gulf coast anymore because it costs too much money to protect you. So, we’re going to make you move. We’re going to move you to Austin or we’re going to move you to Salt Lake City.’ In our science fiction dystopia The Collapse of Western Civilisation , this is what China does: it moves three hundred million people away from coastal areas. We wrote that as a sort of fantasy — a sort of ‘what if?’ scenario — but as climate change unfolds we begin to see it’s no longer a fantasy. Governments may forbid people from living in certain places that are simply too costly to protect. What’s happened to your cherished personal freedom then? It’s gone. You don’t even have the basic right to decide to live where you want to live."