Towards a climate-resilient America? Tracing climate-resilient nationhoods in US climate politics

Abstract

Exploring connections between climate resilience and national identity under the Obama and Trump presidencies, this paper argues that discourses of climate-resilient American nationhood constitute an intersection of neoliberalism, populism and immunopolitics. Under Obama, a climate-resilient America is an adaptive subject that embraces climate-insecure futures; under Trump, the anti-climate resilient national subject is a ‘frankenstein neoliberal’ [Brown, W. (2018). Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein: Authoritarian freedom in twenty-first century “democracies”. Critical Times, 1(1), 60–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-1.1.60] identity grounded in white supremacism. For both of these subjects, albeit in radically different ways, climate-resilient nationhood acts as an immunopolitical drive for self-preservation: a resilient American subject adapts to climate insecurities at the expense of those demarcated as non-adaptive and non-resilient.