The media organisation Atmos recently highlighted research that showed the extent of fossil fuel funding for organisations that campaign against trans rights in the US.
Why would big oil bankroll the anti-trans movement? It doesn’t seem that there is any material connection between these two things – transphobia and fossil fuel extraction – no obvious shared policy interests that might lead an organisation to pursue both agendas in unison.
But perhaps we’re mistaken when we search for material connections in order to explain such campaign approaches. Perhaps there’s no need to establish such connections in order to pursue a coherent political programme. Perhaps, in short, we are still mistakenly thinking in terms of interests, rather than values.
It’s more than twenty years since George Lakoff published his little book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which clearly and succinctly sets out the importance of understanding values in resisting the rise of neo-conservatism.
Lakoff wrote:
“People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with. They may identify with their self-interest. That can happen. It is not that people never care about their self-interest. But they vote their identity.” (Lakoff, 2004: 18)
The book was a clarion call for the left to internalise such understanding.
At the time, it was widely read and discussed by campaigners and communicators working in NGOs. It was influential in shaping our work at Common Cause and led us to convene a meeting between Lakoff and a group of chief executives of large UK-based charities – though there was little sign that any of them acted on his recommendations.
Meanwhile, the populist right has continued to assiduously foreground and embed those values that propel its political project forward.
Writing of the reasons for neo-conservative success in the US – at a time when the politics of today’s Republican party could be barely imagined, Lakoff wrote:
“[T]he real reason for their success is this: They say what they idealistically believe… Liberal and progressive candidates tend to follow their polls and decide that they have to become more “centrist” by moving to the right. The conservatives do not move at all to the left, and yet they win.” (p.20).
The challenge that the left faces is, importantly, one of its own making. Many strategists on the left mistakenly advocate “reframing” a progressive agenda using the values of the right. Some even press Lakoff into service to justify this strategy – though it is the antithesis of what he recommended.
Underlying this misguided strategy is the conviction that material self-interest can serve as a proxy for the values of the populist right. This is manifestly not true: the right-wing populist project advocates a wide range of policy interventions, many of which are clearly not aligned with their voters’ immediate material self-interest.
This strategy is exposed whenever the liberal left expresses shock that their political opponents should vote for a policy agenda that does not advance their material self-interest – for example, the handwringing of liberal elites when opposition to immigration led some working class communities to vote for Brexit.
When liberal left voters cast their ballots in ways that depart from their immediate material self-interest, they say that they are putting their values first. But when they then witness supporters of right-wing populist parties voting in ways that seem unaligned to their self-interest, those same liberal left voters pity them as turkeys voting for Christmas.
Here the liberal left either fails to recognise that their political opponents may “vote their identity” or they assume that these voters’ identity and their self-interest map perfectly onto one another.
In a recent blog, I explored the alignment between extrinsic values and a social psychological measure called social dominance orientation (SDO), a measure of a general sense of entitlement to dominate others. SDO describes a nexus of attitudes, rooted in extrinsic values. It is strongly associated with various forms of prejudice: sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and speciesism. It is also linked to indifference to environmental crises, favouring exploitation of the natural world and resisting climate action.
These forms of prejudice reinforce one another, spilling over to strengthen one another as part of the same political constellation. The mistake, often made by the liberal left, is to imagine that this spillover must be driven by material connection.
There may, at times, be material connections. But this is not necessary for spillover, and it’s not what drives it. Material connections are not what ensure the psychological coherence and therefore appeal of a right wing populist political worldview.
Rather, the appeal of such a worldview arises from a matrix of psychologically cohesive and mutually-reinforcing values, of which self-interest may be only a small part.
So why the nexus between big oil and anti-trans campaigning?
As we’ve seen, viewed in material terms, this doesn’t seem like an obvious alignment of interests. Nonetheless, Atmos suggests that such alignment may drive the connection:
“The fossil fuel industry has a vested interest in maintaining the cultural status quo: the white-picket fence in the suburbs where the white wife stays home to take care of her white kids and her white husband drives to work in his gas-guzzling car.”
Heteropatriarchy may indeed be good for sales of inefficient vehicles. But anti-trans campaigning isn’t an obvious route to boosting SUV sales, and Atmos’s search for a material connection seems tenuous.
The more compelling reason for fossil-fuel lobbyists to have identified common cause with anti-trans campaigns doesn’t require immediate material linkages. Pumping oil and opposing trans rights are both forms of oppression, and multiple forms of oppression rely upon one another to propel each other forward.
Opposing trans rights is a vehicle for asserting supremacy: the supremacy of cis-gendered people over trans people. Promoting oppression in this domain will promote oppression in other domains – because the shared and underlying values (which transcend particular issues) are strengthened. Remember that pumping oil is a vehicle for asserting supremacy: that is, the supremacy of humans over non-humans (when climate breakdown is a driver of ecocide) and of white people over Black and brown people (when the climate breakdown disproportionately impacts the latter).
What might be done?
The first stage of resistance to the strategies that the populist right uses to embed its values was highlighted by Lakoff twenty years ago: the left needs a clear vision, he argued, “with values rather than mere interests determining its political direction” (p.74). Unfortunately, this is a hurdle at which many organisations on the progressive left fall. Interests are more immediate and can seem more tangible than values. Appeal to interests can support change – but outcomes are likely to prove fragmented and fragile.
The second stage of resistance is to recognise – as the right has done – that when viewed through the prism of values there are myriad opportunities to establish common cause with other issues which may – in policy terms – seem unrelated.
Recognising, for instance, that a just energy transition and promoting the rights of trans people are both manifestations of intrinsic values of compassion and community.
Photo by Giorgos Barazoglou on Unsplash