The last time the environmentalist left went ‘underground‘ in America, it produced a campaign of costly economic sabotage and property destruction.
Matthew Huber’s May op-ed in the New York Times went off like a bomb inside the increasingly jilted community of climate activists. The Democratic Party’s candidates — many of whom were once committed to a wholesale renovation of the entire American economy, its modes of transportation and housing, and even its very social contract to combat climate change — don’t even talk about the issue anymore. Nor should they, Huber wrote. Democratic office-seekers’ “first task must be to regain credibility with working people by tackling their more immediate, material concerns.”
Huber was describing an organic phenomenon that he merely observed. But it wasn’t long before the activist left swiftly determined that the diminution of climate change as a source of political currency for the Democratic left was something that had been done to them — the flowering of some malign conspiracy cooked up by the reviled establishmentarians.
As PBS News put it last month, the “national shift in the conversation” around climate change (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) “is sharp enough for some researchers to coin the term ‘climate hushing’ to describe it.” The number of disparate and disconnected left-of-center interest groups that seemed to move away from climate change simultaneously belies rather than betrays the existence of some overarching plot. There are too many moving parts, and a complex coordination narrative has less explanatory power than the fact that climate change is not a priority for most voters. “It has felt less like people care less about climate and more like people are increasingly freaked out about other issues,” the executive director of the climate activism outfit the Sunrise Movement told PBS.
And yet, the talk of “climate hushing” persisted, and the left’s hostility to it grew.
“Whatever their motives,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse argued, “the climate hushers are wrong about pretty much everything.” The Democratic National Committee’s Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis chair, Michelle Deatrick, disputed the notion (endorsed by the DNC’s own autopsy of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign) that climate activism is electoral poison. “Walking away from climate demobilizes our base,” she insisted. Throw that unfalsifiable claim atop many more that Inside Climate News compiled. Among academics, the consensus seems to be that “there’s not a political cost” associated with climate activism, the 2024 election “was not a referendum on climate change,” and most Americans remain “worried about climate change.”
Incensed by the notion that they had become an embarrassment to the Democratic Party’s institutionalists, the environmental activist class resolved to put on an even more humiliating spectacle. This summer, this scorned constituency staged protests, circulated petitions, and hounded Democratic lawmakers in their attempt to push their agenda back to the front burner. So far, the impassive Democratic political class remains unmoved.
The party’s attempt to relegate climate activism to the fringes, even temporarily, is a compromise with political reality more than a sincere change of heart. Not that the duplicity will assuage climate activists, bitter and forsaken as they are. What is the activist left to do but prepare for what The Guardian’s Damien Gayle forecast would be the “new phase” of climate activism: violent direct action from the underground.
The left’s climate Cassandras are talking themselves into carrying out “clandestine acts of sabotage against the corporations they see as responsible for the destruction of the climate,” Gayle reported. But it’s not all talk. Gayle cited several recent “ecotage” attacks in Europe — wrecking construction equipment, puncturing tires at Land Rover dealerships, disabling underground communications infrastructure, and even filling the golf courses’ 18 holes with cement — as evidence of what the future of climate activism may soon look like. As How to Blow Up a Pipeline author Andreas Malm contends, Gayle concluded, “militant action” is the “only sustainable route for climate activists increasingly facing a severe pushback against non-violent disruptive protest.”
As a declaration of intent to engage in violent acts, it doesn’t get clearer than that.
Yet, the most militant of those who remain intent on “militant action” have already been forced into the “underground,” the BBC reported. Groups like Just Stop Oil, which popularized antisocial protest tactics like defacing priceless works of art and blocking traffic, have been “policed” into incognito mode. That invites the risk that underground activism could “spawn a new, even more disruptive or chaotic climate action.”
“In this context, some climate activists have concluded that it is time to drop the movement’s long-standing commitment to accountability,” the report added. “They will undertake disruptive actions but won’t stick around to be arrested anymore.”
Just Stop Oil and its offshoots long ago lost the support of the mainstream British left. For America’s environmental activists, their shunning is a relatively new experience. Their activism may follow a trajectory similar to the one the U.K.’s activist left followed, and we should be wary if it does. The last time the environmentalist left went “underground” in America, it produced a campaign of costly economic sabotage and property destruction.
Some of the outcast activists will bide their time, meet the voting public where they live, and incorporate the lessons that should accompany their marginalization into their work. But some won’t. And those who won’t will not abandon their convictions. Instead, they are likely to lash out at a system that seems wholly arrayed against what they regard as a moral imperative, using the tools and tactics associated with the “underground.”
We have been warned.