It's absolutely authoritarian

A Disastrous Convergence: Masculinity, Fossil Fuels and Authoritarianism 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.41 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.42 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.43 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 [them] him particularly susceptible to antidemocratic propaganda’.44 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’.45 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.46 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’.47 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’.48 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: 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). 49 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’.50 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’.51 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’,52 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’,53 and so they, perhaps more than anyone or anything, inspire revulsion and fear.