A banner from the Climate protest last weekend (Getty)
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Groups of children sleeping in the sunshine on their parents’ laps; thousands of painstakingly-painted colourful placards calling for all things counter-cultural; pounding tribal drum music. The London Climate Strike protest last week felt rather like Woodstock ’69 reconfigured on a patch of grass between the Palace of Westminster and the river Thames.
Like all political movements, the climate protests are as much about a mood as a policy. In part thanks to the presence of all those children, taken out of school in a licensed mass derogation from the rules, the mood was strikingly hippieish. I doubt if as many as one in 10 protestors could tell you much about the official manifesto beyond “act now” and “save the planet”. Under the banner of climate change was smuggled a much broader rejection of the “system” and a semi-religious invocation of sacred values like beauty over utilitarianism and materialism — a sort of prayer to mother Earth.
I don’t mean this as a criticism. The sheer scale of these protests across the world last week is proof that these instincts are powerful and deeply felt. Expressed slightly differently, they might even hold the key to a future political realignment that could bring together the Right and Left in surprising ways.
To investigate this we need to look at another, very different, political movement — also powerful and growing, but which on first inspection seems the sworn enemy of Greta Thunberg’s climate army.
A group of American conservatives has caused waves over the past 12 months by explicitly turning against big business. It includes figures such as Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, Fox News host Tucker Carlson (who recently delivered a speech entitled “Why Big Business Hates Your Family”, and endorsed Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s economic agenda) and a number of Catholic intellectuals such as Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen.
These Trump-friendly Right-wingers are certainly not cheerleaders for Extinction Rebellion or Greta Thunberg; at first glance they seem the polar opposite of hippies, who originally defined themselves against the “military-industrial complex” and its evil end product, the war in Vietnam.
But yes, if you can get past the tone of voice, there is something hippie about these new Conservatives, defining themselves against boundary-less financial markets, the over-mighty power of technology and global corporations, and the creep of commercial thinking into all aspects of our lives. In a sense, they are more truly ‘counter-cultural’ than the climate protestors, who are celebrated as virtuous by almost everybody in power.
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SubscribeI love the idea of this.I support trump but I have loads of friends in the folkscene too.Im sick of being targeted by them cos i support trump,I keep thinking this bigotry is so old hat,in with the new I say.This could work but it will probably take years