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Why So Many Nations Lean Right [1]
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Date: 2025-01-27
New York Times has a new article addressing why European politics are swinging right even as those in the United States are doing the same. It's the taxes. It's immigration. It's not being heard in government. It's immigration. It's rising prices. It's immigration. It's crime. It's immigration.
I suspect world population increase.
Years ago I read The Population Bomb . Even as a teen I didn't believe that the world was going to collapse from the weight of its population in the 1970s. But it made sense that world population couldn't expand forever. There would have to be a point at which the needs of the population outstripped available resources. Science would find solutions, as critics often pointed out, but eventually even those would run out. The population bomb would explode sometime if we didn't slow population growth. But governmental population control looked (and still looks) very unlikely.
As a teen I was thinking of food as the gating factor, of famine, and wondering how it would affect my life. I'm an American. “Greatest country in the world,” I thought. Long before starvation from overpopulation hit me, I would see it hit poorer countries. But I could already see poor countries suffering from famine. What would make population explosion different? How would I know if it was happening?
And then I saw it: immigration. People in places suffering from a population level that was outstripping the local resources would want to – need to - come to places that are not. Many more people would flee areas of famine and come to where they might get food. Perhaps they wouldn't do it right away but would stay in their home countries to fight for what food there was. Then wars would rise and warlords would thrive. Their victims would flee war instead of fleeing the famine itself. But it would really be the same thing.
In the US and Europe, with populations growing but not yet outgrowing their resources, we would be okay for a long time. But when we saw immigrants coming to put pressure on our own resources we would become concerned that there wouldn't be enough for us. Long before we actually suffered, we would begin to say, “Sorry but this is ours. We need it. You can't have it. Go back where you came from.”
Food would be the limiting factor, I thought. It never occurred to me that it might be water. “Cheap as water!” we used to say, but now lakes and seas are drying. Rivers and aquifers suffering the pressure of overuse. I never would have thought that nature's ability to absorb the population's emissions of CO2 would be a limiting factor but here we are. If it isn't one thing it's another: human pressure is affecting our environment, and the extent to which we can draw on its resources, in many ways.
Science has ways to solve many intractable problems. But that can only buy us time. Agricultural output has been massively increased. Limitations to oil were addressed with fracking. We can all learn to make do with less: reduce, reuse, recycle. But those solutions only go so far. If we could slash our resource demand in half we might continue until we doubled the population. Then we’d realize we were back in the same place. Population can’t grow forever.
We see population pressure today. In Africa, when population growth meets limited food supply, warlords arise and people flee toward Europe. In Central America, where population-caused climate change reduces farmers’ ability to grow crops, some come north. Some turn to a product more suitable to the climate — drugs — then warlords chase more people north. In India, where heat rises to dangerous levels, people seek safer places to live.
Just now the US and Europe are the likely places for people in dire straits. Our population isn't burgeoning and there are resources enough to provide for a comfortable standard of living. Immigration is nowhere near to exploding our national population and causing us to starve. But people extrapolate. They imagine that immigrants are coming to take away their housing, their jobs, their taxes, their health care. And they're afraid.
So first world countries lean away from leftist politics where the driving principle is win/win solutions: “Make this a good place to live for everyone.” They head toward right wing politics, where the driving principle is zero-sum: “If they have then we will have not.” They lean right. They lean right all together, all at once. While it feels like the Trump election is rare and unique, it isn’t. He isn’t.
The idea that electing a right wing leader will solve all problems by keeping immigrants out shows the right wing mind set that a nation is an isolated system. The often repeated idea that America or other first world countries need more babies to raise their population growth to replacement levels reflects the same isolationist thought. (It also assumes that today's population level should be sustained, which is another issue.)
Desperate people will go where they must. Whatever barriers a country may come up with to keep immigrants out will be foiled by solutions that immigrants, in their need, find to bypass those barriers. We need to address population as if we were one world and one people, as if the people suffering were our own. That’s a very tall order for left leaning thinkers facing the world’s current challenges. But however popular worldwide, right wing thinking – must keep immigrants out! – only addresses a symptom, not the problem. It won’t work.
(What will? I certainly don’t mean to suggest that first world countries should pressure third world countries to have fewer babies. It’s been tried and — moral issues aside — it never worked. So far, the programs that have made a lasting difference have been those that raise the standard of living, especially for women. But that’s a whole other discussion.)
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