defiance petro-masculinity

=<div>explains coal rolling :(</div><div>=</div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">an 8 22</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Stan Cox, Angry White Guys in Big-Ass PickupsAs gun sales in this country soar — <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/gun-deaths-per-year-usa/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">another 43 million</a> weapons bought in 2020 and 2021 alone — while the possession of military-style weaponry is <a href="https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/20-million-assault-weapons-in-american-homes-digging-deeper-into-us-gun-ownership-fiery-debate-uvalde-buffalo-tulsa-mass-shootings-background-checks-national-shooting-sports-foundation-firearms-industry" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">normalized</a>, whether in <a href="https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">mass killings</a> or everyday life, American politics, too, is becoming weaponized. If you doubt that, then you weren’t in that Comfort Inn room where, on the night of January 5, 2021, a group of Oath Keeper militiamen <a href="https://www.arlnow.com/2022/01/18/feds-release-new-details-about-jan-6-weapons-cache-at-arlington-hotel/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">stored</a> their weapons so that a “quick reaction force” could <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/oath-keepers-guns-jan-6-capitol-riots" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">potentially transport</a> them to the Capitol the next day.In the end, as far as we know, none of those weapons made it that January 6th, but others certainly did, as the House January 6th committee made <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/08/jan6-defendants-guns/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">all too clear</a> in its recent hearings. Worse yet, the president of the United States <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/06/28/1108387054/trump-said-he-knew-jan-6-crowd-members-had-weapons-ex-white-house-aide-testified" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">knew</a> perfectly well that some of those he was encouraging to march on the Capitol to protest (or even reverse) his election loss were armed. In political terms, red states have been <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/24/democrats-press-national-gun-control-republican-states-expand-firearm-access/6966823002/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">easing gun laws</a> even as some blue states are cracking down. In California, which has among the nation’s strictest laws (especially when it comes to assault rifles), deaths from guns are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/us/newsom-gun-bill-california.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">approximately 40%</a> below the national average — not that such figures, it seems, matter to most Republicans.The result: an unequally armed nation at a moment where the weaponizing of our political system seems on the rise. As right-wing extremism <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/4/how-the-us-far-right-threat-has-evolved-since-january-6" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">grows</a> and guns become ever more commonplace in American life, while the death toll from them soars, the idea that arms, not votes, might someday define the endpoint of an American election is also being normalized.Oh, and my mistake, I forgot to include in the above description one of the ways in which this country is weaponizing big time. Fortunately, <a href="https://tomdispatch.com/how-not-to-cope-with-vladimir-putin-by-drilling-and-pumping/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">TomDispatch regular</a> Stan Cox didn’t. So, sit back, watch out for the smoke and fumes, and let him explain. TomThree Tons of Fascism with a Bull Bar Fuming at the Rest of Us, Democracy, and the EarthIn the United States during 16 months in 2020 and 2021, vehicles rammed into groups of protesters at least <a href="https://apps.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2021/10/vehicle-rammings-against-protesters/tulsa/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">139 times</a>, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims died and at least 100 were injured. Consider that a new level of all-American barbarity, thanks to the growing toxicity of right-wing politics, empowered by its embrace of ever-larger, more menacing vehicles being cranked out by the auto industry.And keep this in mind: attacks on street protests are just the most recent development in fossil-fuelized aggression. Especially in the red states of America, MAGA motorists have been driving our quality of life into the ground for years. My spouse Priti Gulati Cox and I live half a block south of Crawford Street, the central east-west artery in Salina, Kansas. Starting in the early Trump years, and ever more regularly during the pandemic, we’ve been plagued by the brain-rattling roar of diesel-powered pickup trucks as they peel out of side streets onto Crawford, spewing black exhaust and aiming to go from zero to sixty before reaching the traffic light at Broadway. By 2020, many of these drivers were regularly festooning their pickups, ISIS-style, with giant flags bearing slogans like “Trump 2020” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” as well as Confederate battle flags. Some still display them, often with “F* Biden” flags as well.If you live in flyover country as we do, you come to expect such performances. And don’t think that I’m just expressing my own personal annoyance about an aesthetic affront either. Fueled by diesel or gasoline, and supercharged by what political scientist Cara Daggett has labeled “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0305829818775817" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">petro-masculinity</a>,” those men in big, loud vehicles serve as the shock troops for a white-right authoritarian movement that threatens to seize control of our political system. Recall the “Trump caravan” that <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/31/politics/biden-bus-2020-campaign-texas-trump-supporters/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">tried to run</a> a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas just before Election Day 2020. Or the “<a href="https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2020/10/29/21523624/flags-pick-up-trucks-trump-2020-campaign-rally-dont-tread-on-me-conservatism-display-extremism" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Trump Trains</a>” of pickups carrying men with paintball guns, one of which <a href="https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/08/30/the-flag-covered-assault-truck-is-trump-2020-ad/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">attacked</a> Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon.Long forgotten now by most of us, those hapless North American truck convoys, some of which converged on Washington, D.C., last spring, might as well have been scripted by the writers of Seinfeld. To all appearances, they were protests about nothing — other than a vague sense of grievance personified (or truckified). Still, the drivers did manage to cause serious mayhem, assaulting the residents of two capitals, Ottawa and Washington, with diesel fumes, daylong horn blasting, and bellicose conduct. They paralyzed downtown Ottawa for almost a month (and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/discover-cool-canada/2022/mar/18/ottawa-truck-convey-cost-c36m-police" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">cost the government</a> there more than $36 million). Some drivers in the cross-country U.S. convoys physically assaulted counter-protesters, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/peoples-convoy-pins-down-biker-in-altercation" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">cyclists</a>, and motorists. There was one bright spot, though: one day, a man on a cargo bike got in front of a line of semi-cabs and pickups and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/26/dc-trucker-convoy-protest-bike/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">slow-pedaled</a> through Washington’s narrow side streets, leaving the invaders no alternative but to creep along behind him for what seemed like forever and a day.The convoy truckers, however, paid little price for the havoc they caused. Indeed, vehicular aggression and violence increasingly goes unpunished. On June 24th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man aimed his pickup truck at a group of women protesting that morning’s Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. When his vehicle first came into contact with them, the women stood fast, and grabbed its bull bar — the steel armoring designed to <a href="https://www.sa4x4.co.za/product/chevrolet-trailblazer-2012-on-commercial-deluxe-bull-bar/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">protect</a> the grille against livestock, but used more often these days to intimidate humans. With a yell, he <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/political-violence-the-new-american-normal_n_62c07c37e4b0ffe00a1260a6" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">plowed ahead</a>, driving over one woman’s ankle and giving another a concussion. When the police arrived, they interviewed the driver, but they have yet to charge him or even identify him publicly. He was probably shielded by a law the Iowa legislature passed in 2020 immunizing drivers who run into or over protesters, if they simply claim to have been fleeing in fear. Ominously enough, Florida and Oklahoma have passed similar laws essentially encouraging such acts.Are You What You Drive?Here in the heartland, white nationalism feeds on gas, gunpowder, oil, and testosterone. Ranchers, wheat-growers, oilfield roughnecks, firefighters, loggers, hunters — in short, the very kinds of guys who populate today’s ads for pickup trucks — are widely viewed as the real Americans. Most pickups today, however, are found not out on the range but on city streets and Interstate highways, sporting empty beds and clean tires, with their drivers settled into cushy captain’s seats. For many of them, big pickups are no more than a non-utilitarian cultural statement and, in today’s culture, that means a political statement, too. (With so many luxury options on offer, a new truck can also be an extravagant statement, since their average price now exceeds <a href="https://www.autolist.com/guides/average-car-price" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">$60,000</a>.)When I was reading <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1586482033/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">High and Mighty</a>, Keith Bradsher’s classic book on SUVs, in the early 2000s, there was as yet no correlation between the supersizing of personal vehicles and political preferences. It was mostly about armoring up against crashes and crime. A few years later, when even more bloated trucks and SUVs with abundant creature comforts started being advertised as “<a href="https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15117435/2011-honda-odyssey-touring-elite-long-term-road-test-wrap-up-review/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">living rooms</a> on wheels,” they still had no strong political associations. Over the past few years, however, manufacturers have begun capitalizing on MAGA-world belligerence by pumping up the road-ruling mystique of those vehicles. On this topic, I won’t even try to match the bracing prose of Angie Schmitt, the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1642830836/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America</a>, who <a href="https://governorswindenergycoalition.org/what-happened-to-pickup-trucks/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">wrote</a> for Bloomberg News last year:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.542px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">Pickup truck front ends have warped into scowling brick walls, billboards for outwardly directed hostility… [T]he height of the truck’s front end may reach a grown man’s shoulders or neck… That aesthetic can be detected not only in the raised ‘militarized’ grille height of pickup trucks, but also the popularity of aftermarket modifications like blacked-out windows and ‘bull bars’ affixed to the front end.
</blockquote>Some pickups and full-size SUVs now approach the dimensions of World War II-era <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxzg/american-cars-are-now-almost-as-big-as-the-tanks-that-won-wwii" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">tanks</a> and are advertised accordingly. Ford used the <a href="https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2014/01/13/ford-uses-high-strength-steel-plus-high-strength--aluminum-alloy.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">term</a> “military-grade, aluminum-alloy” five times in a single press release for its F-150 pickup. This supersizing, as well as armoring, has had predictable results. For example, in another <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/suvs-trucks-killing-pedestrians-cyclists/621102/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">article</a>, Schmitt observed that:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.542px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">Passenger and driver deaths have remained mostly stable over the past decade while <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/11/pedestrian-deaths-are-too-common-america/620721/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">pedestrian fatalities</a> have risen by about 50 percent. From 2019 to 2020, pedestrian deaths per vehicle miles traveled increased a record 21 percent, for a total of <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotlight-Addendum21" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">6,721 fatalities</a>. This astonishing death toll has multiple causes, but the scale of the front end of many pickup trucks and SUVs is part of the problem, and that’s been obvious for quite a while.
</blockquote>The politicization of big-box personal vehicles is now almost complete. By the 2020 election campaign season, few drivers, left or right, needed bumper stickers to tell the world which candidates they supported. A month before the election, Forbes <a href="https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/what-your-car-might-say-about-how-you-vote/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">summarized</a> survey data illustrating the relationship between party affiliation and vehicle ownership. Of the models most disproportionately preferred by Democrats, liberals, and progressives, 14 were sedans or crossovers, three were trucks or full-size SUVs, and two were hybrid or electric vehicles. The Honda Civic sedan topped the list.I’m sure at this point you won’t be surprised to learn that the vehicle preferences for Republicans and other conservatives were almost exactly the reverse of that. Of their top model preferences, 14 were trucks or full-size SUVs while only three were sedans or crossovers. None were hybrids or electric vehicles. Those with the strongest Republican/conservative associations were the Ford F-250 and Ram 2500 pickups, both weighing in at more than 6,000 pounds.“Pollution Porn”A couple of weeks before the 2020 election, Priti and I were cruising south along Santa Fe Avenue, the main street in downtown Salina. As we approached Crawford, we saw that a long, noisy Trump train was passing through the intersection, headed west. Decked out with flags, balloons, and other regalia, the parade of trucks stretched out of sight in both directions. When a temporary gap opened in the queue, we took a right turn toward home. In this way, our 2006 Civic hybrid (I know — too trite) involuntarily joined the procession. With a huge, flag-bedecked tailgate towering over our windshield, a five-foot-high bull bar looming in the rearview mirror, and a cacophony of horns drowning out our laughter, we crept home, where we bailed out of the parade. Though we faced no hostility ourselves, that was probably because the drivers on either side of us could barely see us.Compared with many of the 2020 Trump trains, Salina’s version proved remarkably mild-mannered. But all such white-right parades, including the farcical “Boaters for Trump” regattas, also manage to do a remarkable job of making a relatively small number of Americans seem like a big crowd. There were far more people in Salina’s 2020 Black Lives Matter march than in that truck parade. But when you surround a modest number of people with tons of steel and aluminum propelled by loud internal-combustion engines, you’ve got an impressive spectacle in an ominous sort of way. The forests of flags only add to the <a href="https://universityofleeds.github.io/philtaylorpapers/pmt/exhibits/1436/kelman.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">fascist aura</a> that surrounds the political use of such hulking vehicles.Until James Alex Fields, Jr., <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/james-alex-fields-jr-suspect-charlottesville-car-crash/story?id=49204700" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">drove</a> his Dodge Challenger into a non-violent group of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, killing Heather Heyer, the tactic of crashing into crowds was best known as a terror tool used by <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/isis-told-supporters-run-people-cars-years-nice-article-1.2712241" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Islamic State</a> sympathizers, primarily in Europe. At the time, the means of aggression preferred by American pick-up drivers was something called “rollin’ coal.” It involved modifying a truck’s fuel system so that the driver could blast large clouds of thick, black diesel smoke from its tailpipes or smokestacks.Often, coal-rollin’ was pure performance, a display of rebellion against anything in the culture that smacked of concern for climate change. It was, as Vocativ labeled it in 2014, “<a href="https://www.vocativ.com/culture/society/dicks-pick-trucks-meme-rollin-coal/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">pollution porn</a>.” But even then, under the surface was the potential for so much worse. In recent years, more aggressive drivers have taken that stunt to its logical conclusion by engulfing pedestrians, cyclists, electric vehicle or hybrid drivers, and other perceived enemies in toxic black clouds.As Cara Daggett <a href="https://governorswindenergycoalition.org/what-happened-to-pickup-trucks/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">put it</a>:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.542px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">A lot of things are attached to fossil fuel culture because they are symbolically a part of a certain way of life or an identity. It’s no longer possible to operate in the world and not understand that fossil fuels are violent. [Rollin’ coal is] a kind of spectacular performance of power.
</blockquote>Psychology professor Joshua Nelson suggests that such an extravagant, showy combustion of fuel represents an attempt by white male drivers in particular to compensate for two new realities – that men like them can no longer feel they’re part of an all-powerful American clan and that what awaits us all, however hard it may be to express, however much they may want to repress the very idea, is impending doom from fossil fuels destroying this planet. As Nelson <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joshua-Nelson-7/publication/339047921_Petro-masculinity_and_climate_change_denial_among_white_politically_conservative_American_males/links/5ebea96e299bf1c09abd16b6/Petro-masculinity-and-climate-change-denial-among-white-politically-conservative-American-males.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">puts it</a>:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.542px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">There is nothing more possibly traumatizing (and requiring psychologically defensive operations) than potential global destruction and annihilation, especially when one is forced to consider [his] own role in this impending apocalyptic disaster.</blockquote>Whether such “psychologically defensive operations” grow out of a sense of guilt, inadequacy, or something else entirely, they play out the same way — as aggression against the rest of us.Standing Up to the Men in TrucksOne characteristic news photo from the violent conflicts of recent times — whether in Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, or elsewhere — has been of <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/114138171781610070/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">pickup trucks</a> loaded with armed men. The U.S. hasn’t made it there — not yet anyway. But it’s hard to doubt that (thank you, Donald Trump!) ever since January 6, 2021, when so many right-wing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/06/militias-capitol-january-6/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">militia members</a> broke into the Capitol, some of them <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/28/trump-jan-6-rally-guns-capitol-attack" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">armed</a>, we’ve been living through an attempted takeover of our country by members of one of the two major parties. And in 2022, it will hardly surprise you to know that its supporters own more guns and trucks than the rest of us.This fits with trends pointed out by Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She’s studied the use of violence by a growing number of political parties in a wide range of countries and is now tracking America’s upsurge in militia activity, too. She recently <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/81898/the-gops-militia-problem-proud-boys-oath-keepers-and-lessons-from-abroad/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">wrote</a>, “Even if Trump passes from the scene, the embrace of violence and intimidation as a political tactic by a faction of the GOP will cause violence of all types to rise — against all Americans.”Ultra-MAGA elements in legislatures and the courts are already <a href="https://citylights.com/in-real-time-part-ii-onslaught-of-the-oily-authoritarians/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">gutting</a> our right to preserve a livable climate, ensure reproductive rights, and vote, even as they create new rights to own weapons of war and put them to deadly use. Usually, those weapons are AR-15s or other firearms, but they can also be tank-scale personal vehicles wrapped in military-grade alloy, with an armored front end.Big trucks, aggressively driven, straddle the borderline between a democracy in crisis and a country (and world) facing a climate emergency of the first order. They guzzle fuel, spew pollution, and degrade our quality of life. With the paramilitary wing of the anti-democracy, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/us/politics/climate-change-republicans-delay.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">anti-Earth GOP</a> at the wheel, such vehicles portend even worse environmental harm to come. If the far right prevails, its politicos will choke off any state or federal efforts to phase out fossil fuels. If, using means legal or not, they consolidate their power over the Supreme Court, Congress in 2022, and the White House in 2024, they will be spewing the political version of rollin’ coal and are guaranteed to smother the possibility of climate action, probably long enough to make runaway global heating inevitable.Keeping the anti-democracy party out of power will require massive get-out-the-vote efforts in 2022 and 2024, and record-breaking turnouts in the streets will undoubtedly be needed as well. In truth, there are many more of us than of the fascist wannabes in this country. Like the brave women in Cedar Rapids, we must neither surrender the public square to the extremists nor allow them to bestow rights on vehicles and fossil fuels while revoking rights that belong to us and to the rest of nature.</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div></div><div></div><div>When then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, he often described himself as a <a href="file:///C:/Users/breas/OneDrive/Documents/Windows%20Files%20(PC)/AlterNet%20Folder%202021%20(PC)/compassionate%20conservative" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">“compassionate conservative”</a> — which was Bush’s way of trying to win over swing voters, moderates and suburban soccer moms and convince them to vote for him instead of then-Vice President Al Gore. But the MAGA movement has angrily rejected such messaging, opting instead to project a fake machismo. Never Trump conservative David French discusses that “toughness” in an <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/the-new-rights-strange-and-dangerous-cult-of-toughness/620861/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">article published by The Atlantic</a> this week, explaining why he finds it so troubling.French opens his article by citing attorney Josh Hammer as an example of someone who is promoting “toughness” and a “less libertarian American right.” At the recent <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/scary-future-american-right-national-conservatism-conference/620746/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">National Conservatism conference</a>, French notes, Hammer railed against “fusionism” as “inherently effete, limp” as well as “unmasculine.”On the right, the term “fusionism” refers to President Ronald Reagan’s fragile coalition of the early 1980s, when a variety of right-wingers — including libertarians, fiscal conservatives, evangelical Christian fundamentalist social conservatives and neocons — rallied around Reagan. There was plenty of infighting within that coalition; although Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and the Moral Majority’s <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-moral-majority-founder-jerry-falwell-sr-helped-pave-the-way-for-trumpism-and-the-white-nationalist-horrors-of-the-trump-era/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr.</a> were both Reagan supporters, they couldn’t stand one another. Goldwater, in fact, believed that Falwell and others of his ilk were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/16/us/goldwater-vows-to-fight-tactics-of-new-right.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">terrible for the GOP</a> and terrible for the conservative movement. But Goldwater and Falwell were both glad to see Reagan in the White House.According to Hillsdale College’s David Azerrad, the MAGA right views Trump as “manly” because he forcefully speaks his mind — which French finds peculiar.READ: <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/anti-roe-movement/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The real history of US anti-abortion politics began in 1662 — and is bound to the legacy of slavery</a>]“This is a curious definition of manliness,” French writes. “Saying what you think or what others seem afraid to say isn’t inherently ‘manly.’ Speaking your mind isn’t even inherently virtuous, much less inherently masculine. Trump has said many false and harmful things, and the fact that other people might whisper them does not mean that they should be shouted from the presidential bully pulpit.”The MAGA cult of “toughness,” according to French, manifests itself in the form of “the increased prevalence of open-carried AR-15s at public protests, the increased number of unlawful threats hurled at political opponents, and outbreaks of actual political violence, including the large-scale violence of January 6.”French writes, “The author and academic Freddie deBoer has compiled a depressing list of articles, essays and interviews in prominent publications excusing and justifying violent civil unrest. The right-wing cult of toughness, in its distinctly Trumpist version, is no exception to this trend. When it is drained of limiting principles and tied to a man who would rather seek to upend our nation’s constitutional order than relinquish power, then the threat to the republic is plain. That threat will remain until the supposedly weak classical liberals on the left and the right do what they’ve always done at their best: rally in defense of liberty, the rule of law, and the American order itself.”</div><div>
</div><div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829818775817">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829818775817</a></div><div>
</div><div><div class="hlFld-Title" style="line-height: 1.5; font-weight: 700; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="publicationContentTitle" style="margin-bottom: 0px; position: relative; width: 750.906px;"><h1 style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px;">Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire</h1></div></div><div class="copyrightStatement" style=""><div class="articleMetaDrop publicationContentDropZone" data-pb-dropzone="articleMetaDropZone" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-bottom: 4px; margin-top: 2px;"><div class="publicationContentAuthors" style="margin-bottom: 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="author-container js__articleAuthorContainer" data-max-authors="5" data-authorname-selector=".contribDegrees "> .entryAuthor" data-author-container-selector=".NLM_contrib-group"><div class="authors"><div class="hlFld-ContribAuthor"><a class="entryAuthor" href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829818775817" aria-label="Open contributor information pop-up for Cara Daggett" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Cara Daggett</a><a class="ref corresp" id="corresp1-0305829818775817" tabindex="-1" /><a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7313-6660" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><img src="https://journals.sagepub.com/templates/jsp/images/orcid.png" style="border: 0px; max-width: none; height: auto;" /></a></div></div></div></div>First Published June 20, 2018 Research Article<div class="articleMetaDrop publicationContentDropZone publicationContentDropZone1" data-pb-dropzone="articleMetaDropZone1" style="margin-bottom: 4px; margin-top: 2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="widget doiWidget none widget-none widget-compact-all" id="66028d4c-d8fb-4855-92bd-8d3e954d6d44" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px;"><div class="wrapped " style="float: none; margin-left: 0px;"><div class="widget-body body body-none body-compact-all" style="padding: 0px; text-align: inherit;"><div class="doiWidgetContainer" style="margin-top: 2px;"><a class="doiWidgetLink" href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0305829818775817" style="text-decoration-line: none;">https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817</a></div></div></div></div></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny. Rather than consider these resentments separately, this article interrogates their relationship through the concept of petro-masculinity, which appreciates the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity is helpful to understanding how the anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene can augment desires for authoritarianism. The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit; fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics. Moreover, through a psycho-political reading of authoritarianism, I show how fossil fuel use can function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><div id="section1-0305829818775817" class="NLM_sec NLM_sec-type_intro NLM_sec_level_1" style="line-height: 26px;">Global warming poses a problem for fossil fuel systems and those who profit from them; leaving fossil fuels in the ground likely means leaving trillions of dollars of profit in the ground.<a class="ref fn" id="fn1-0305829818775817" style="">1</a> Vast networks of privilege that are sustained by fossil economies are likewise threatened. As Jairus Grove reflects, ‘environmental justice will require unequal roles: significantly constraining, even repressing, the powers of the Eurocene’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn2-0305829818775817" style="">2</a> Similarly, the ‘Planet Politics Manifesto’ reminds us that ‘the planet is telling us that there are limits to human freedom; there are freedoms and political choices we can no longer have’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn3-0305829818775817" style="">3</a> Perhaps not surprisingly, given the amount of money and privilege at stake, the tragic ethos demanded by global environmental justice is being resisted. Those regions that have emitted the most carbon dioxide are positioning themselves to profit from a warming earth by advancing a militarised and corporatised version of climate security.<a class="ref fn" id="fn4-0305829818775817" style="">4</a> The result, as Christian Parenti foresees it, is the likelihood of a ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’, given that, already,<div class="quote" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">the North is responding with a new authoritarianism. The Pentagon and its European allies are actively planning a militarized adaptation, which emphasizes the long-term, open-ended containment of failed or failing states – counter-insurgency forever. This sort of ‘climate fascism’ – a politics based on exclusion, segregation and repression – is horrific and bound to fail.<a class="ref fn" id="fn5-0305829818775817" style="">5</a></div>‘Climate fascism’, with its camps, barbed wire and police omnipresence, is a likely outcome of climate (in)security.<a class="ref fn" id="fn6-0305829818775817" style="">6</a>A nascent fossil fascism is already evident in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and the conservative capture of the US Congress. In a short time, the Trump Administration and the Republican Party have shored up fossil fuel systems by denying climate change and dismantling a host of environmental policies including: withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, installing a climate denier (Scott Pruitt) to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, taking steps to kill the Clean Power Plan, weakening the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, lifting a moratorium on new coal leases on federal land, ending a study on the health effects of mountaintop coal removal, and moving to open nearly all US coastal waters to offshore drilling for oil.Climate denial obviously serves fossil-fuelled capitalist interests. However, coal and oil do more than ensure profit and fuel consumption-heavy lifestyles. If people cling so tenaciously to fossil fuels, even to the point of embarking upon authoritarianism, it is because fossil fuels also secure cultural meaning and political subjectivities. Since the new imperialism of the 19th century, fossil fuels have become the metaphorical, material, and sociotechnical basis of Western petrocultures that extend across the planet.<a class="ref fn" id="fn7-0305829818775817" style="">7</a> In other words, fossil fuels matter to new authoritarian movements in the West because of profits and consumer lifestyles, but also because privileged subjectivities are oil-soaked and coal-dusted. It is no coincidence that white, conservative American men – regardless of class – appear to be among the most vociferous climate deniers, as well as leading fossil fuel proponents in the West.<a class="ref fn" id="fn8-0305829818775817" style="">8 [INTERSTING, I THOUGHT us BS SPREAD TO ANGLOPHONE WORLD VIA CTT]</a>This article undertakes a feminist reading of climate denial and fossil fuel boosterism in new authoritarian movements in the West in order to interrogate the entanglement of masculinity and fossil fuels. Through the concept of petro-masculinity, I emphasise the relationship – both technically and affectively, ideationally and materially – between fossil fuels and white patriarchal orders. While misogyny and climate denial are often treated as separate dimensions of new authoritarian movements, a focus on petro-masculinity shows them to be mutually constituted, with gender anxiety slithering alongside climate anxiety, and misogynist violence sometimes exploding as fossil violence.<a class="ref fn" id="fn9-0305829818775817" style="">9</a>Despite a growing interest in gendered analyses of climate change,<a class="ref fn" id="fn10-0305829818775817" style="">10</a> the intersection of gender and energy remains understudied, with most research located in the development field, where the focus is on equal access to fuel.<a class="ref fn" id="fn11-0305829818775817" style="">11</a> Meanwhile, research into masculinity and energy, as well as environmentalism, is even more limited.<a class="ref fn" id="fn12-0305829818775817" style="">12</a> Nevertheless, masculine identity, and the patriarchal orders that it supports, is important for understanding (the lack of) political responses to climate change, especially in the global North. Sherilyn MacGregor, for example, argues that environmentalism itself has become masculinised as a result of the dominance of science and security frames for understanding climate change. These ‘hardened’ framings result in a preference for ‘the kinds of solutions that are the traditional domain of men and hegemonic masculinity’, which lead to a ‘downgrading of ethical concerns’ like justice, health, or economic equity.<a class="ref fn" id="fn13-0305829818775817" style="">13</a>Appreciating the historic relationship between fossil fuels and white patriarchal rule is helpful in terms of understanding the authoritarian desires and anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene. A feminist reading of fossil fuel systems points to the emergence of another dangerous ‘catastrophic convergence’, to adopt Parenti’s phrase: in this instance, the convergence is between climate change, a threatened fossil fuel system, and an increasingly fragile Western hypermasculinity. For Parenti, convergence does not ‘merely mean that several disasters happen simultaneously, one problem atop another’, but ‘that problems compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through another’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn14-0305829818775817" style="">14</a> Analysing petro-masculinity alerts us to those perilous moments when challenges to fossil-fuelled systems, and more broadly to fossil-soaked lifestyles, become interpreted as challenges to white patriarchal rule.Petro-masculinity, like fossil fuel systems, arguably has global dimensions. However, like other masculinities, petro-masculinity should be understood as manifesting in multiple, and locally specific, ways. This article focuses upon its most prominent recent appearance: in new authoritarian movements in the US.<a class="ref fn" id="fn15-0305829818775817" style="">15</a> The US case is instructive, as American wealth, high energy consumption, and militarism make its climate politics crucial to planetary security. The article is oriented around the three convergent phenomena of fossil fuel systems, white patriarchal rule, and authoritarianism. The first two sections establish the historical relationship between fossil fuels and authoritarianism, on the one hand, and fossil fuels and white patriarchal rule, on the other. The remainder of the article employs petro-masculinity to understand the combustible convergence of all three in new authoritarian movements in the US. Here I focus on a psycho-political analysis of authoritarianism, positing fossil fuel use as violent compensation for the anxieties provoked by both gender and climate trouble. The article concludes by considering the wilful continuation of fossil fuel regimes as a misogynist practice, adopting Kate Manne’s understanding of misogyny as the policing activities that punish deviants and reinforce patriarchal rule.<a class="ref fn" id="fn16-0305829818775817" style="">16</a></div><div id="section2-0305829818775817" class="NLM_sec NLM_sec_level_1" style="line-height: 26px;"><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><div class="sectionInfo" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); overflow: hidden;"><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><h2 class="sectionHeading" style="font-weight: 400; margin-bottom: 0px; float: none;"><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i6" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;">Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Politics</a></h2></div>Fossil fuels built the modern world. There remains an appreciation for fossil fuels – or, at least, for the high energy consumption they provided – as a catalyst of mass liberal democracy. This is evident in ecomodernist calls for a good Anthropocene that would decouple the benefits of fossil fuels from the fuels themselves.<a class="ref fn" id="fn17-0305829818775817" style="">17</a> After all, while industrialisation wreaks planetary destruction, its spread was coterminous with humanist victories like the abolition of slavery, increased literacy rates, gender equality and poverty reduction. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that this cannot be a coincidence, and that ‘the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn18-0305829818775817" style="">18</a>However, in addition to the ecological harms caused by oil and coal, fossil fuels have also done serious political harm. Timothy Mitchell argues that fossil fuels have had contradictory effects in terms of assembling democracy.<a class="ref fn" id="fn19-0305829818775817" style="">19</a> On the one hand, due to coal’s material traits, its extraction and supply were vulnerable to choke points that could be exploited by a growing labour resistance in the 19th century. In contrast, oil systems were less vulnerable to democratic hijacking. The global oil systems of the 20th century required a host of illiberal and violent measures on the part of Western states and oil companies in order to ensure oil scarcity and, in turn, a profit. In the case of oil, the West touted a democratic creed while simultaneously benefiting from and supporting authoritarian regimes and extremist movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Likewise, fossil fuel and mineral extraction were secured, both within the US and abroad, by racist regimes of differential pay and access to benefits that were aggressively anti-democratic on the part of corporations and the states that supported them.<a class="ref fn" id="fn20-0305829818775817" style="">20</a>Carbon democracy thus arose in tandem with, and reliant upon, authoritarianism. Put more strongly, authoritarian politics have historically been part and parcel of the project of securing Western (fossil) rule. By fossil rule, I mean a logic of governing that is dependent upon intensive fossil fuel consumption in both material and, as I will explore below, psycho-political ways. Fossil rule is mobilised through ‘fossil capital’, Andreas Malm’s term to describe how modern capitalism was erected around a belief in ‘self-sustaining growth … welded to the combustion of fossil fuels’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn21-0305829818775817" style="">21</a> Fossil capital requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of other people and things, and this necessitates authoritarian tactics in certain sites and moments, a phenomenon that has been exhaustively catalogued by postcolonial theorists and thinkers in the global South.<a class="ref fn" id="fn22-0305829818775817" style="">22</a>As a result, authoritarianism, rather than a perversion of modernity, or a lurking risk of mass industrial society to be avoided, appears instead as the very marrow of a contemporary life predicated upon burning fossil fuels. We cannot take comfort that, over time, creativity will shed its destructive possibilities.<a class="ref fn" id="fn23-0305829818775817" style="">23</a> The novelty and freedoms enabled by fossil-fuelled civilisation are entangled with horrific violence, such that to embark upon fossil-fuelled life is to spark off mass species extinction just as much as it is to make possible the internet or global social movements.Carbon democracy strives to conceal this underbelly of mass destruction from privileged publics, whether in subterranean pipelines, in zoning plans that place heavy industry alongside poor communities and people of colour, and in the very notion of throwing things away. Similarly, the authoritarian practices required by fossil capital in the global South were often geographically separated from liberal forms of governance in the West. This made it possible for many Westerners to remain ignorant of their complicity in fossil authoritarianism, and to continue to believe that fossil fuels and liberal democracy are natural and inevitable partners. The narrative of righteous fossil democracy is crucial not only to American identity writ large, but to its hegemonic white masculinities. However, as Aimé Césaire pointed out more than 60 years ago, the violence that Anglo-Europeans have practiced abroad returns with ‘a terrific boomerang effect’, and that despite efforts to turn a blind eye or justify the violence, ‘colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn24-0305829818775817" style="">24</a></div><div id="section3-0305829818775817" class="NLM_sec NLM_sec_level_1" style="line-height: 26px;"><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><div class="sectionInfo" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); overflow: hidden;"><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><h2 class="sectionHeading" style="font-weight: 400; margin-bottom: 0px; float: none;"><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i7" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;">Fossil Fuels and Masculinity</a></h2></div>The American public understands Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ mission as an homage to a mid-20th century fantasy of American life, when white men ruled their households uncontested, a formula that relied upon widespread full-time employment for white men with wages that could support housewives and children. In the words of reporter Zoe Chace, reflecting on the 2016 election, ‘for a lot of people, “Make America Great Again” was about “make men great again”’.’<a class="ref fn" id="fn25-0305829818775817" style="">25</a>Trump’s motto is a kind of petro-nostalgia,<a class="ref fn" id="fn26-0305829818775817" style="">26</a> in that the achievement of the mid-20th century patriarchal ideal in the US was predicated upon an ongoing supply of cheap fossil fuels. Cars, suburbs, and the nuclear family, oriented around white male workers, formed a triumvirate that yoked the desires of Americans not only to wage labour, but to the continued supply of cheap energy that made the dream possible. These privatised consumer perks, along with New Deal infrastructure and policies that supported them, were intended to inoculate the American public against the twin threats of communism and fascism, both of which lurked in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II.<a class="ref fn" id="fn27-0305829818775817" style="">27</a> On the supply side, and especially prior to the 1970s’ oil crisis, the state helped to secure an artificial oil scarcity that ensured profits for oil companies.<a class="ref fn" id="fn28-0305829818775817" style="">28</a> On the demand side, the state also helped to cultivate oil desires, such that fossil fuel consumption became necessary to achieving the American dream.Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this article, the American way of life was centred around a version of white, patriarchal rule in which the achievement of hegemonic masculinity required intensive fossil fuel consumption and, for the working- or middle-class, jobs within or reliant upon fossil fuel systems (jobs and wages that, like state welfare benefits, were unequally distributed by race, often with the conscious corporate intention of dividing labourers in order to prevent unrest).<a class="ref fn" id="fn29-0305829818775817" style="">29</a> For many, extracting and burning fuel was a practice of white masculinity, and of American sovereignty, such that the explosive power of combustion could be crudely equated with virility.No wonder that access to cheap and plentiful gas and energy became the sine qua non for American well-being, and a right demanded both of the state and for the state. Even as Americans in the 21st century disagree about whether health care or food should be considered a right, there is a widespread, bipartisan assumption that Americans deserve cheap energy, and that the state has a duty to ensure it.<a class="ref fn" id="fn30-0305829818775817" style="">30</a> In turn, any threat to energy supply appears simultaneously as a threat to the American dream and, in turn, the dominant position of the US in the world.Make America Great Again thus insists upon a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ innocence about fossil fuel burning – that there are no downsides to burning more oil and coal, or at least none for white Americans. Exit polls show that it was a campaign message that resonated not only with white men, but also with just over one-half of white women voters,<a class="ref fn" id="fn31-0305829818775817" style="">31</a> some of whom may also find security in the status quo, and therefore resent threats to fossil fuel systems and/or hegemonic white masculinities. Through the rosy nostalgia afforded by petro-masculine identity, the affront of global warming or environmental regulations appear as insurgents on par with the dangers posed by feminists and queer movements seeking to leach energy and power from the state/traditional family.Petro-masculinity approaches masculinity as a socially constructed identity that emerges ‘within a gender order that defines masculinity in opposition to femininity, and in so doing, sustains a power relation between men and women as groups’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn32-0305829818775817" style="">32</a> Masculinities are always multiple, and involve ongoing struggles over which version of masculine identity will become socially dominant, or hegemonic, to adopt R.W. Connell’s influential concept. Petro-masculinity draws upon aspects of a traditionally hegemonic masculinity, but at the same time, its appearance in the American far-right today is better understood as a kind of hypermasculinity, which is a more ‘reactionary stance. It arises when agents of hegemonic masculinity feel threatened or undermined, thereby needing to inflate, exaggerate, or otherwise distort their traditional masculinity’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn33-0305829818775817" style="">33</a>Petro-masculinity is reactionary in part because it is not the only hegemonic masculine identity available in the late industrial US; it is perhaps not even the most dominant one in terms of the gendered experiences of energy or electricity systems.<a class="ref fn" id="fn34-0305829818775817" style="">34</a> Ecomodernism, for example, has become a prominent environmental disposition with arguably masculinised dimensions, and is especially popular among elite men (think of Elon Musk).<a class="ref fn" id="fn35-0305829818775817" style="">35</a> Instead of the ‘limits to growth’ mood of the 1970s, which proposed decreasing energy consumption, ecomodernists claimed that ‘there was no conflict between economic growth and environmental problems’ and that technological solutions, often private and market-based, would solve any difficulties,<a class="ref fn" id="fn36-0305829818775817" style="">36</a> a belief that continues to reign in much of Western corporate culture. Not only was growth not a problem – it was the solution, the very foundation of the innovation and entrepreneurship required to fix things.<a class="ref fn" id="fn37-0305829818775817" style="">37</a>According to Martin Hultman, ecomodernism arose alongside a shift in hegemonic masculinity in the West, which Hultman traces through the changing roles played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became a globally influential ecomodernist figure. Older, industrially-aligned masculinities, embodied by Arnold Schwarzenegger in his youthful days of machismo and pumping iron, were discarded for the hybrid masculinity of Governor Schwarzenegger of California, an ecomodernist champion of fuel cells and greenwashed Hummers. Ecomodernism contributed to a new style of masculinity ‘in which toughness, determination and hardness was mixed with appropriate moments of compassion and care’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn38-0305829818775817" style="">38</a> However, like Sherilyn MacGregor, who critiques the masculinisation of climate security, Hultman insists that ecomodernism, and the Silicon Valley masculinities often aligned with it, are ‘asymmetric’ in how they organise these values. Care and compassion remain subordinate to techno-rationality, toughness, and economic growth.<a class="ref fn" id="fn39-0305829818775817" style="">39</a>In contrast to ecomodernist masculinities, petro-masculinity disdains any veneer of hybridity or care, and it also has no truck with sunny, California technoscientism.<a class="ref fn" id="fn40-0305829818775817" style="">40</a> Ecomodernist masculinity may seek to adapt itself to new energy technologies and cultures, but petro-masculinity, as a reactionary stance, aims to defend the endangered status quo, entrenching the petrocultures that have historically propped up Anglo-European fossil-burning men. And while petro-masculinity is built upon mid-20th century fantasies, there is nothing nostalgic about its orientation to fossil fuels. After all, the fabled past of innocent fossil fuel consumption is irretrievable. In the US post-war economy, fossil fuel systems functioned as the means to becoming a real man – if burning them entailed violence, this was constructed as an unfortunate side effect to be made invisible to privileged consumers. But fossil fuels have become a dead end, both for the planet and for the goal of middle-class jobs. In this context, burning fossil fuels can come to function as a knowingly violent experience, a reassertion of white masculine power on an unruly planet that is perceived to be increasingly in need of violent, authoritarian order.</div><div id="section4-0305829818775817" class="NLM_sec NLM_sec_level_1" style="line-height: 26px;"><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><div class="sectionInfo" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); overflow: hidden;"><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><h2 class="sectionHeading" style="font-weight: 400; margin-bottom: 0px; float: none;"><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i8" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;">A Disastrous Convergence: Masculinity, Fossil Fuels and Authoritarianism</a></h2></div>A political-economic reading of fossil fuel systems, such as that undertaken by Mitchell or Huber, is indispensable to understanding the formation of fossil authoritarianism. The threat to fossil-fuelled privilege can motivate authoritarian practices to secure ongoing profits and privileged ways of life. However, as many have pointed out, fossil fuels may no longer make economic sense for many American voters, much less for the planet. Coal companies do not provide the secure, high-paying jobs that they once did in the US, a trend that will continue no matter how committed Trump is to bringing back coal.<a class="ref fn" id="fn41-0305829818775817" style="">41</a> Even Texas, which continues to revel in its identity as an oil and gas titan, has been vigorously developing wind power, which supplies up to half of the state’s electricity needs.<a class="ref fn" id="fn42-0305829818775817" style="">42</a> In many formerly fossil-bound regions of the US, like Appalachia or Texas, fossil fuels have become potent conservative symbols that represent autonomy and self-sufficiency, rather than real economic interests for most of the public.<a class="ref fn" id="fn43-0305829818775817" style="">43</a>In addition to considering the political economy of fossil fuels, then, it is also important to understand their psycho-affective dimensions, paying attention to the collective desires of those whose identities are most tied to petrocultures. In order to do so, this section puts the concept of petro-masculinity into conversation with psycho-political studies of authoritarianism. The Frankfurt School was involved in the most influential early research, which drew heavily upon Freudian analysis, including The Authoritarian Personality (to which Theodor Adorno contributed), a study of fascist-prone Americans, and Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. These texts sought to trace the contours of the authoritarian personality – an ideal figuration, rather than descriptions of actual people. Many authoritarian traits were, to some degree, common in public life, but when amplified and in combination, they described a character ‘whose structure is such as to render him particularly susceptible to antidemocratic propaganda’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn44-0305829818775817" style="">44</a> And because authoritarian desires circulate everywhere, albeit with local intensities, authoritarianism persists as an ongoing temptation amid democratic collectives. In this vein, Foucault, in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, famously encouraged a conceptual distinction between ‘historical fascism’ and ‘the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn45-0305829818775817" style="">45</a>Psychological studies of authoritarianism in the 20th century are best taken as narratives of specific historical movements, rather than as universal scientific truths. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify patterns. One of the most consistent themes that runs across Western authoritarian movements is a widespread sense of gender anxiety – especially having to do with masculinity.<a class="ref fn" id="fn46-0305829818775817" style="">46</a> Patriarchal ideals are manically proclaimed (by adherents who identify as women, too), but beneath the obsession with hyper-masculinity reveals an underlying fear of the social fragility of masculinity, as well as a shared sense among members of each having personally fallen short of that ideal. Capitalist crises, such as the worldwide depression of the 1930s or the 2008 financial crisis, do not help; they only make it more difficult for many to achieve that essential emblem of modern masculinity: a breadwinner job. The Authoritarian Personality notes that ‘high-scoring’ men (those with more authoritarian traits) ‘show deep-seated fears of weakness’ in themselves. The meaning of weakness to these men seems to be tied up with intense fears of nonmasculinity. To escape these fears they try to bolster themselves up by various antiweakness or pseudomasculinity defences, where pseudomasculinity means ‘boastfulness about such traits as determination, energy, industry, independence, decisiveness, and will power’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn47-0305829818775817" style="">47</a>Gender anxiety – or a sense of masculine weakness – is intertwined with another common trait of the authoritarian character: sadomasochism. After all, masculine displays of strength and independence would seem to be at odds with unquestioning submission to an authoritarian leader. But as Fromm argues, ‘the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness … It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn48-0305829818775817" style="">48</a> In other words, sadomasochism reflects a desire to overpower others that is aroused by, and at the same time stymied by, one’s own sense of impotence. The failures of fossil capitalism to sustain its white masculine order, which it helped to erect, with wages and commodities, only exacerbates the sense of collective impotence. In order to manifest power, the impotent, authoritarian personality is forced to subsume its urge to dominate within submission to a stronger external force, be it God, the laws of the market, the military leader, or a tyrant. Or fossil fuel burning.Petro-masculinity points to such moments, suggesting that masculinity can be reaffirmed through an obeisance to oil. Oil itself reflects the contradictory impulses of sadism and masochism at work in the fossil-inflected authoritarian personality. Petro connotes both hardness and flow: it is from the Greek for rock or stone, but as petroleum, it is the liquid produced by pressurised decomposition of plant and animal matter over millions of years. It is both death (fossils), and life (energy, wrought from death), both compression and escape.As hardness, petro- captures the desire to congeal masculinity, and to protect it from dissipation. Alongside gender anxiety and sadomasochism, rigidity is yet another omnipresent trait of the authoritarian personality. In Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit’s study of the proto-Nazi freikorps, rigidity is an enduring theme for the ‘soldier-male dam’, who seeks to guard his dam against all that flows:<div class="quote" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">none of the streams we’ve mentioned can be allowed to flow. He is out to prevent all of them from flowing: “imaginary” and real streams, streams of sperm and desire. … All of these flows are shut off; more important, not a single drop can be allowed to seep through the shell of the body. One little drop of pleasure … threatens to undermine the whole system (the system of dams).<a class="ref fn" id="fn49-0305829818775817" style="">49</a></div>Theweleit is important for understanding petro-masculinity because he opens up a link between feminist theory and political economy, between the fear of women and the fear of communists, both of which animated early Nazis. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Theweleit connects the freikorps’ fear of flow to the forces of industrialisation.Here we can begin to intuit how fossil fuels might feature in authoritarian desires. Theweleit describes how industrialisation ‘opens up the borders of a hitherto unknown human productive potential, setting in motion streams of money, commodities, and workers’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn50-0305829818775817" style="">50</a> In parallel, though, runs ‘a process of limitation’ that the capitalist elite erects against pleasure, an effort to capture more and more surplus, and ‘to prevent the new productive possibilities from becoming new human freedoms’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn51-0305829818775817" style="">51</a> Transgressive desires that are not coded by money cannot be allowed to flow – especially not queer desires, nor unregulated desires for women. Theweleit argues that it is the Western image of Woman, an image that ‘lives in water’,<a class="ref fn" id="fn52-0305829818775817" style="">52</a> that comes to stand for flow qua flow, for all that threatens to escape and dissolve the male ego. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s foreword to Male Fantasies, she observes that ‘women’s bodies are the holes, swamps, pits of muck that can engulf’,<a class="ref fn" id="fn53-0305829818775817" style="">53</a> and so they, perhaps more than anyone or anything, inspire revulsion and fear.The damming up of the authoritarian body, and state, against desire is justified as necessary to guard its strength, and to properly direct its energy into productive pathways. Too much flow, too much desire, saps its ‘energy’, letting it seep out into wasteful, swampy tributaries, threatening to make it soft and effeminate. Therefore, rigidity is especially necessary when energy itself is threatened. Such rigidity – often practiced as damming up the masculine body – reappears everywhere authoritarianism creeps in. In The Reactionary Mind, for example, Corey Robin observes that American conservatives share the belief that the US has gone soft since the New Deal, as the welfare state<div class="quote" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">sapped the nation’s energy and patriarchal vigour. Instead of sturdy husbands and firm fathers controlling their wives and children, lisping bureaucrats and female social workers were now running the show. World War II exacerbated the problem: with so many men away at the front, and women working in the factories, male authority was further eroded.<a class="ref fn" id="fn54-0305829818775817" style="">54</a></div>The answer to the queerness and softening of the US was to make her hard again, to narrowly channel desire into the streams of heterosexuality and money, and to redirect all excessive desires into violence.<a class="ref fn" id="fn55-0305829818775817" style="">55</a>Proto-fascist movements in the US who celebrate Trump’s victory likewise pair masculine rigidity to violence. As a proto-authoritarian leader, Trump alone is permitted laxity in his habits; his ‘pseudomasculine’ boasts of sexual exploits and aggressive deal-making serve as conduits that channel his followers’ pent-up desires.<a class="ref fn" id="fn56-0305829818775817" style="">56</a> Meanwhile his deputy, Mike Pence, is excessively, even comically, rigid and anti-sexual, celebrated among evangelicals for avoiding spending any time alone with women who are not his wife. What about Trump’s followers? While further empirical study is required, a hate group called The Proud Boys offers an illustrative example. The Proud Boys are a white male organisation that became associated with the 2017 fascist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, and whose members believe in reinstating traditional gender roles by ‘venerating the housewife’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn57-0305829818775817" style="">57</a> Their platform reverses the shame of white consumption and imperialism: in order to achieve the first of three ‘degrees’ required to join the group, a member declares, ‘I am a western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world’. The second degree involves enduring a beating while naming breakfast cereals, and also ‘no wanks’, or limiting masturbation to no more than once a month, a practice that one Proud Boy describes as ‘more of a religion’. Group member Dante explains that ‘[masturbation] mutes me. It mutes my masculinity’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn58-0305829818775817" style="">58</a> The final, third degree is getting a Proud Boys’ tattoo.White power pledges, breakfast cereals and masturbation may at first appear as adolescent pranks, but in the context of Trump’s America, they are all too serious. As initiation rites, they adhere to Theweleit’s analysis of the bodily practices of proto-fascist groups. By staying calm during beatings and limiting masturbation (making the body rigid), Proud Boys aim to enhance their masculinity, and in turn to become more successful with ‘real’ women, who nevertheless remain, as among the freikorps, off-screen and imagined figures who threaten humiliation. Lurking behind the tactics of rigidity is a sense of personal failure; a shared frustration among white men who have struggled to find a housewife willing to receive their veneration. Chace, who interviewed group leaders, explains that rigidity seemed to function as an inspiration that would get the men to ‘go out, talk to women, and then marry them, procreate, be strong American family men, help restore the natural order of things that had been knocked out of whack by feminism’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn59-0305829818775817" style="">59</a>Although many far-right groups, including the Proud Boys, may not explicitly organise around fossil fuels, it is important to consider their misogynist rigidity in relation to the fossil-fuelled excesses pursued by their revered leaders. Seen through the lens of Theweleit, the contrast between Trump’s groping, Pence’s patriarchal purity, and The Proud Boys’ #nowanks is not as contradictory as it might appear. Trump alone can flow. With his supermodel wives and rumoured affairs with porn stars, he lives out his followers’ fantasies.<a class="ref fn" id="fn60-0305829818775817" style="">60</a> But the vicarious release of frustrated patriarchal vigour through the authoritarian leader’s sexual prowess represents only one method of rechannelling desire. As in Theweleit, the more intensely one’s own productive desires are dammed up, the more one longs for the violent, explosive release of flows elsewhere: destructive flows in place of productive ones.Petro: both hard and soft. Both the solidification of toxic masculinity, and the grimy, deathly flows (oil, gas) let loose as psychological compensation for that self-discipline. Like the freikorps’ cruelty, or the clamour to torture detainees after September 11 analysed by Robin, burning fossil fuels in an age of global warming can offer a compensatory practice of violence. Fossil fuel systems provide a domain for explosive letting go, and all the pleasures that come with it – drilling, digging, fracking, mountaintop removal, diesel trucks. In the words of Sarah Palin, ‘drill, baby, drill!’<a class="ref fn" id="fn61-0305829818775817" style="">61</a>Helpfully, the aesthetics of fossil fuels – most particularly oil – are ripe for recoding as expressions of sexualised power and orgasmic satisfaction. The parallels between rape and extractivism have been well documented.<a class="ref fn" id="fn62-0305829818775817" style="">62</a> Stephanie LeMenager writes of ‘oil’s primal associations with earth’s body, therefore with the permeability, excess, and multiplicity of all bodies’, such that ‘the spectacle of [oil’s] gushing from the earth suggests divine or Satanic origins, a givenness that confers upon it an inherent value disassociated from social relations’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn63-0305829818775817" style="">63</a> In Upton Sinclair’s novel, Oil!, too, LeMenager observes how a gushing well becomes an orgasmic woman (‘There she came!’), while ‘for a thirteen-year-old male narrator, industrial-scale pollution and waste translate into arousal and premature ejaculation’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn64-0305829818775817" style="">64</a>A psycho-political understanding of authoritarianism, and its demand for masculine rigidity, points to the social function and pay-off gleaned from such petro-sexual violence. For example, fossil fuel industries have taken ample advantage of gendering fossil fuels in this way. Shannon Elizabeth Bell describes how, even as the coal industry provided fewer benefits to Appalachian communities, it worked to sustain community support through an influential ‘Friends of Coal’ public relations campaign. Friends of Coal traded heavily in traditionally aggressive masculine symbols, tying coal to football, the National Association for Stock Care Auto Racing (NASCAR), hunting, fishing, the military, and other ‘provider and defender’ icons, such that ‘by reinforcing the hegemonic image of the working-class provider as a man, and a particularly masculine man, the images in this commercial lubricate the process of the coal industry’s becoming synonymous with the family provider’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn65-0305829818775817" style="">65</a> Similarly, Trump’s professed love for coal is most often expressed through the discourse of putting miners to work, a promise that resonates strongly with a community primed to associate mining jobs with masculine identity. In other words, Trump and his supporters ‘dig coal’ (a popular campaign slogan) because it is an icon of masculinist empowerment.Another recent trend, ‘rollin’ coal’, exemplifies fossil fuel violence experienced as masculinised power. Rollin’ coal means retro-fitting a diesel truck so that its engine can be flooded with excess gas, producing thick plumes of black smoke. Coal, which is not actually burned, functions as a symbol of industrial power expressed as pollution. The truck becomes its own mini-factory, complete with belching smokestacks; the driver becomes a coal baron. Rollin’ coal has long been popular in the world of diesel truck racing, but in 2014, the practice emerged on roadways as a conservative protest against environmentalism, the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and, soon after, anti-Trump protesters.It is difficult to estimate its frequency, but rollin’ coal has become common enough that some states, including New Jersey, Maryland and Colorado, have passed measures specifically banning it;<a class="ref fn" id="fn66-0305829818775817" style="">66</a> the Colorado Health and Environment Department also set up a ‘smoke school’ that trains police officers in enforcing the ban.<a class="ref fn" id="fn67-0305829818775817" style="">67</a> Instagram has over 300,000 posts on two of its largest rollin’ coal streams,<a class="ref fn" id="fn68-0305829818775817" style="">68</a> while tens of thousands of user-generated videos show (mostly) men blasting smoke at bikers, protesters, and hybrid cars, especially Priuses, as ‘Prius repellent’ against hybrid cars that have become widely recognised as symbols of green consumerism. Gender and race also play a role in target selection; it has become popular to roll coal at ‘rice-burners’ (Asian-made cars)<a class="ref fn" id="fn69-0305829818775817" style="">69</a> and unsuspecting women pedestrians (‘hot girls’).<a class="ref fn" id="fn70-0305829818775817" style="">70</a> One commentator fittingly called the videos ‘pollution porn’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn71-0305829818775817" style="">71</a> Hyper-masculine discourse surrounds the practice (‘It’s just a testosterone thing. It’s manhood’, Sean Miller told Slate magazine).<a class="ref fn" id="fn72-0305829818775817" style="">72</a>Spectators and coal rollers express pleasure in the noise, the smell, and the beauty of the smoke, all of which give them a sensation of power that, not coincidentally I suggest, is directly related to the smoke’s violent effects. One man told Vice News that people roll coal because it feels good: ‘When you sit there and you can hear and you can see the horsepower, it does something to people around here. It makes them giddy. It happens naturally, but there’s an awe effect’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn73-0305829818775817" style="">73</a> The Denver Post described rollin’ coal as ‘a way to have fun at the expense of other people’<a class="ref fn" id="fn74-0305829818775817" style="">74</a> – a fitting description of the desires animating petro-masculinity.Whether it is the Proud Boys who proclaim white, Western chauvinism, or the coal rollers who revel in conspicuous pollution,<a class="ref fn" id="fn75-0305829818775817" style="">75</a> Trump’s brand of fossil authoritarianism feels good because it bursts the constraints of liberal, Western hypocrisy. Despite the occasional pretence of innocence, fossil authoritarianism gets its kicks precisely because fossil fuel consumption has become undeniably destructive in an era of global warming. Controlling fossil fuels, and being controlled by fossil fuels, comes to feel good as a practice of power/being overpowered, especially because it has become a game of life and death, of flirting with apocalypse. Fossil violence is brought into the light and celebrated – a welcome respite from the guilt, resignation, and often paralysis that otherwise grip the West in the face of global warming. The circle of concern has been narrowed, in a satisfyingly simple moral taxonomy, to the pleasures of the white paterfamilias, who will be the sole guarantor of the welfare of his legitimate household members (e.g. white women, pets, trucks, white children, white neighbours). The paterfamilias is justified in using every tool at his disposal – coal, oil, survivalist bunkers, guns, border walls – to secure his household against insurgent others.When petro-masculinity is at stake, climate denial is thus best understood through desire, rather than as a failure of scientific communication or reason. In other words, an attachment to the righteousness of fossil fuel lifestyles, and to all the hierarchies that depend upon fossil fuel, produces a desire to not just deny, but to refuse climate change. Refusing climate change is distinct from ignoring climate change, which is effectively what many people who otherwise acknowledge its reality do.<a class="ref fn" id="fn76-0305829818775817" style="">76</a> Ignoring can be dangerous, too, but it is a passive disposition, often connected to emotions of frustration or confusion, or even fear. Refusal is active. Angry. It demands struggle. In the case of climate change, by refusing it, one also subscribes to an accelerated investment in petrocultures. Refusal can no longer rest at defending the status quo but must proceed to intensifying fossil fuel systems to the last moment, which will often require resorting to authoritarian politics.The concept of petro-masculinity alerts us to additional psycho-political catalysts that might fuel armed lifeboat politics in the West. More specifically, authoritarian desires are likely to be aroused not only by the appearance of the Other at the gates – e.g. climate refugees from the global South – but also as a reaction to perceived enemies within the state, both human and nonhuman. This can include poor people of colour in hurricane-ravaged cities like New Orleans or Houston, or feminist and ecojustice movements as they strive to undermine toxic masculinity and fuels; it might also include global warming, mega-storms, ocean acidification, fish die-offs, and other phenomena that appear as an affront to fossil fuel resilience. In addition to the possibility of violence levied against the poor, we should also be alert to moments in which gender-based and climate change-induced violence appear simultaneously, wherein the reinforcement of gender binaries or heteronormativity works alongside the armouring of lifeboats.</div><div id="section5-0305829818775817" class="NLM_sec NLM_sec-type_conclusions NLM_sec_level_1" style="line-height: 26px;"><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><div class="sectionInfo" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); overflow: hidden;"><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><h2 class="sectionHeading" style="margin-bottom: 0px; float: none;"><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="i9" style="font-weight: 400; padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;" /><a name="_i9" style="padding-top: 0px; margin-top: 0px; display: block;">Conclusion: Fossil Fuel Violence and Misogyny</a></h2></div>Fossil-fuelled life has always been violent, but much effort has been expended to make the suffering subterranean, and to render it as invisible as possible to privileged American consumers. However, the industrial, capitalist system built to hide its waste, with its subterranean pipes, shunted refuse, oceanic dumps and accounting fantasies, is breaking down. Death is overwhelming the seawalls and flooding back into the carefully sanitised cores of privilege. The Western belief in the impenetrable body, and of those bodies being ‘tucked up like little hobbits into the safety of our burrow’, as Timothy Morton charmingly describes it, has become increasingly difficult to maintain.<a class="ref fn" id="fn77-0305829818775817" style="">77</a>Leakages can be met with either receptivity or hostility. Most environmentally-sensitive scholars and activists are attempting the former. The goal is to develop an ethics, and an emotional capacity, for living on an earth marked by radical change and periodic mass deaths, while avoiding an escape into either nihilism or transcendentalism.<a class="ref fn" id="fn78-0305829818775817" style="">78</a> A host of creative proposals are emerging, all of them seeking lifeways that are less anthropocentric, and better attuned to death and decay: living ‘amid the capitalist ruins’,<a class="ref fn" id="fn79-0305829818775817" style="">79</a> ‘posthumous life’,<a class="ref fn" id="fn80-0305829818775817" style="">80</a> ‘learning to die in the Anthropocene’,<a class="ref fn" id="fn81-0305829818775817" style="">81</a> ‘trying to perish better’,<a class="ref fn" id="fn82-0305829818775817" style="">82</a> ‘loving your monsters’,<a class="ref fn" id="fn83-0305829818775817" style="">83</a> queer futurity and failure, making kin instead of babies,<a class="ref fn" id="fn84-0305829818775817" style="">84</a> or art as ‘grief-work’ for ‘after the end of the world’.<a class="ref fn" id="fn85-0305829818775817" style="">85</a>However, grief work can be decidedly unappealing, especially when avoidance tactics are readily available. The key problem that confronts these proposals is that of desire. While this difficulty is duly appreciated, we have only begun to imagine alternative desiring strategies for the new Earth. The permeability of our bodies and the leaky waste that pervades modern life may be the reality of our existence, and we may even believe that we should attend to them, but they can disgust more than they seduce. As the leakages multiply, and neoliberal tactics falter, the desire to shore up the body, and the state, can become an authoritarian urge, an obsession with a purified future. Life in the ruins is as likely to invoke rage as generosity. Rollin’ coal and other methods of fossil fuel burning become tempting weapons for seeking vengeance against the forces that threaten petro-patriarchal orders.Fossil violence most obviously punishes the Earth (ever allied to femininity in the Western imagination), but it should also be appreciated as a misogynist tactic, if we follow Kate Manne to think of misogyny not as an individual belief – the hatred of women – but instead as a set of practices, as ‘the system that polices and enforces’ the norms of patriarchal rule.<a class="ref fn" id="fn86-0305829818775817" style="">86</a> Manne argues that the traditional definition of misogyny, as an extreme belief, makes it overly difficult to declare its presence. We become mired in debates over a perpetrator’s true meanings and intentions. However, if misogyny is instead understood as a policing practice, the focus moves from decoding the misogynist’s worldviews to detailing the suffering of its targets, making room for structural as well as direct manifestations of violence. Using Manne’s logic of misogyny, it becomes far easier to recognise, and contest, the pattern of omnipresent aggression experienced by women and others deemed to be gender deviants.Manne’s focus, understandably, is largely on women as the main targets of misogyny, especially when they are perceived to have transgressed patriarchal norms, and/or when they intersect with other marginalised identities (black women, queer women, or trans women, for example, are at greatest risk). However, I see no reason not to put Manne’s helpful reconceptualisation of misogyny into conversation with ecofeminism in order to analyse all the other modes of violence committed in the name of policing the norms of white Western patriarchy. This could include some instances of violence against the planet and its oceans, creatures, waterways, and mountains.To describe fossil violence as misogynistic is not to claim that gendered norms offer a totalising explanation for fossil fuel consumption and the authoritarianism it underwrites. Instead, it is to recognise that gender identities have something to do with the pleasures of fossil fuel life, and quite a lot to do with the more extreme versions of fossil authoritarianism. Fossil fuel extraction and consumption can function as a performance of masculinity, even as it also serves the interests of fossil capitalism. Similarly, the concept of petro-masculinity emphasises that global warming may sometimes be interpreted as a breach in the patriarchal dam. It alerts us to the possibility that climate change can catalyse fascist desires to secure a lebensraum, a living space, a household that is barricaded from the spectre of threatening others, whether pollutants or immigrants or gender deviants. Taking petro-masculinity seriously means paying attention to the thwarted desires of privileged patriarchies as they lose their fossil fantasies.</div><div class="fn-group" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div></div></div><div></div></div></div>