> (I do believe that climate change worries are also the root of the resurgence of authoritarianism, but that's a story for another time. Just in short the key hypothesis: adopting a hate ideology is just another type of looking away from the problem that has no simple convenient answers)
Oh that's an interesting insight. I'd be up to hear more if you're up for sharing...
Really not that complicated, actually: even at the best of times, it's always a struggle between ideas roughly in the corner of "a better world for everybody" (positivity!) and ideas built on some form of "us vs them" (zero sum, or worse). The latter come in different colors, they can co-opt religious concepts, the idea of community anywhere between the small scale of family all the way to the large scale of nation, or even social constructs orthogonal to those such as class. Or some combination thereof. At the best of times, it's still close enough to a tie between positivity and the others.
Enter climate change: positives become a much harder sell, those can't really ignore it. But the zero sum ones (or negative sum, that difference does not really matter) remain unaffected - or in some ways even become more attractive.