Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“While Democrats have become increasingly uncomfortable with the anti-democratic consequences of the hard power of the war on terror, they seem more comfortable with a ‘soft power’ politics of fear: environmentalism. Environmentalism is one of the few movements on the left that presents itself in the same totalizing political terms that the war on terror does on the right, and its influence only seems to grow as the war on terror’s influence declines. The New York Times’ bellwether of elite opinion, Thomas Friedman, recently swung around to the new framework…
Trolls please note that Gourevitch is not making the discredited argument that global warming is nonexistent or harmless. He’s talking about the way in which real problems — terrorism and environmental deterioration alike — tend to be discussed these days, as if the facts dictate one response and one only.
