Title: Kamala Harris is Trying to Make Climate Action Patriotic

Micah Loewinger: You're listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger. Brooke had to run out to a panel that she's going to be on this evening, so I'm reading this intro for her.

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The use of patriotism as a campaigning tool has for years been the domain of the GOP. A Gallup poll from June shows that 60% of Republicans, compared to 29% of Democrats, express extreme pride in being American. You can see it at Donald Trump's rallies where he wraps himself in a flag, walking out to God Bless America, his crowds a sea of red, white, and blue. It's not like Democrats have never employed the tactic, but this election cycle, they've been putting patriotism front and center at rallies,-

Crowd: USA, USA, USA.

Micah Loewinger: -and at the DNC.

Adam Kinzinger: I've learned something about the Democratic Party and I want to let my fellow Republicans in on the secret.

Micah Loewinger: Adam Kinzinger, former Republican representative of Illinois.

Adam Kinzinger: The Democrats are as patriotic as us.

Micah Loewinger: Partway through Kamala Harris's speech at the DNC, she listed a series of fundamental freedoms Americans should hold. For example, the freedom to live safe from gun violence, the freedom to vote, and--

Kamala Harris: The freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.

Micah Loewinger: This resonated with researcher Katherine Mason at New York University, who's been investigating the unlikely pairing of flag waving, steak grilling, good old American patriotism, and climate change to see if patriotism could be the missing ingredient when it comes to changing stubborn minds. For the study, Mason and her team surveyed around 60,000 participants from across the world.

They measured changes in people's understanding of climate change after reading a specially designed text and seeing images that emphasized that it was patriotic to take actions to limit the effects of climate change and how doing so would actually maintain the status quo or the participants' current way of life. Here in the US, she said she's noticed that politicians have taken up the charge.

Katherine Mason: Biden and Harris both have been adopting some of this new patriotic language. Biden has been discussing EVs and the push to manufacture vehicles here in the US, so they're "American-made."

Joe Biden: Today if you want an electric vehicle with a long range, you can buy one made in America.

Katherine Mason: This does seem to be pretty new when it comes to the Democratic Party, although I do want to highlight that this is not solely the democratic party that's doing this. Republicans like Bob Inglis, who's a previous representative from South Carolina, previously framed climate action as patriotic and aligned with conservation and other values that conservatives tend to hold.

Bob Inglis: Somehow we have to convince conservatives, the champions of free enterprise, that this fits with exactly what they deeply believe.

Brooke Gladstone: Democrats have always used patriotism. It's just that they're leaning into it more, and that language is a way to bridge divides over things like gun violence and climate change by putting us all in the same tribe. The patriotic tribe.

Katherine Mason: Yes. The science is showing that when we talk about things in ways that align with people's beliefs and values, they tend to be the most persuasive. It's actually equally effective for both liberals and conservatives. At first, we had maybe feared that if liberals tend to be a little bit less patriotic than conservatives, that it would maybe backfire, but it's really showing very promisingly that this is language that can bridge ideological divides, which is what we really need right now. The climate debate is so divided.

Brooke Gladstone: I thought that was getting better just because many areas that are red on our electoral map have been getting hit pretty hard by environmental emergencies.

Katherine Mason: Polling is showing that among the public, the divide about belief in climate change is decreasing. People's lived experiences can illuminate the reality of climate change. In terms of who our representatives are, the ideological divides are as strong as they've ever been. The language coming from the GOP and fossil fuel lobby groups is still of skepticism. They also will attack scientists themselves, saying they have some agenda.

Newer frames that are starting to arise really focus on the solutions to climate action and the effect that those solutions are going to have on the our personal lives, the economy. They're saying that our lives are going to change a lot if we actually try to address climate change. They are consistently emphasizing the cost of climate action.

Speaker 7: More people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.

Speaker 8: Governor. Hold on, hold on.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's get into the weeds of your study a bit. You measure people's beliefs in climate change after reading a specifically designed text. Tell me what they read.

Katherine Mason: The main passage basically says, being pro-environmental allows us to protect and preserve the American way of life. It's patriotic to conserve our country's natural resources because doing so allows us to protect and preserve the American way of life so that the United States remains the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: You had pictures of landscapes around the US people would be familiar with, like the Grand Canyon, a gorgeous picture of Chicago with the American flag waving. Colorado, Newport Beach in California, a Thanksgiving parade. What was that supposed to mean, and what else did you have besides the postcard view of the US?

Katherine Mason: What these were really meant to do were to remind people the dependence that they have upon the way that things are right now. After that, they were shown a little bit of what it looks like when climate change does impact our way of life. They also saw a picture of the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, and then they also saw a picture of forest fires in the San Francisco area. One of those really scary pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge when the air was orange and on fire.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that you wanted to test the psychological theory that people will rush to defend the status quo because they crave stability, that they're resistant to messaging about overhauling the system or radical change, but that's a lot of the messaging that we've heard from environmental scientists and activists, that we need to do just that to overhaul the whole system to save ourselves from extinction.

Speaker 9: We need a real revolution to transition us from the dirty fossil fuel economy of the past to the sustainable, renewable society of the future.

Brooke Gladstone: Your research suggests that is a very counterproductive argument, however true it may be.

Katherine Mason: It can end up backfiring in that people actually end up ignoring or downplaying information even more as a way to avoid that psychological discomfort that comes with acknowledging the reality of big problems. What we're suggesting instead is that among communicators whose specific goal is to bridge political divides, that they should probably avoid this overhauling the system language and maybe shift to the patriotic language that's more aligned with people's beliefs and values, specifically those of conservatives. This can create that entry point for the broader conversations that can lead later to more meaningful climate action.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about how this framework works in other countries or doesn't work. You found differences in the results between American participants and those from elsewhere.

Katherine Mason: In many countries like the US, Brazil, France, and Israel, the intervention was successful, but in other countries, like Germany and Belgium and a few others, it actually backfired. We looked at the political context of each country to try to understand why this could be happening. In Germany, for example, patriotism is still associated with the Holocaust.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean Deutschland über alles, that kind of thing?

Katherine Mason: Exactly.

Brooke Gladstone: Nationalism having been a driving force behind the Nazi party's rise to power.

Katherine Mason: Even though we were not trying to suggest anything close to that, people can still be weary of that type of language. It seems like they may have been. Because of this, we would probably opt for a different frame.

Brooke Gladstone: It's interesting, though, that you said it worked in the US, Brazil, and France because there's a lot of right-wing political rhetoric around climate change and climate change policy, that it's too expensive, it would impose a threat to our livelihoods. Your language worked in those nations?

Katherine Mason: Across all of our outcomes, the intervention was the strongest and most consistent in the United States and also in Brazil, too. It's because the message directly contradicts the rhetoric about climate action right now, which is that the cost itself are the thing that's really threatening to our American way of life. We hear this a lot. Republican politicians, fossil fuel organizations, as you just said, are constantly talking about the costs of climate action. We're trying to flip this around, highlighting, "No, it's the climate action itself that's going to protect us from climate change."

Brooke Gladstone: Do you have any examples of when patriotic environmental campaigns have been effective here in the past?

Katherine Mason: Yes, for sure. One prime example was the Don't Mess with Texas campaign, a campaign from the '80s to reduce litter along state highways. It was very successful. This slogan appealed to state pride, said that littering was untexan.

Speaker 10: What's a couple of football stars doing out here alongside the road?

Speaker 11: Picking up after some folks who really don't seem to care much about Texas?

Speaker 12: Oh, you mean the litter?

Speaker 13: Yes. You see the guy who threw this out the window, you tell him I got a message for him.

Speaker 14: Don't mess with Texas.

Speaker 15: That's the message.

Katherine Mason: The campaign was very successful. It decreased litter by 72% in four years, which is great.

Brooke Gladstone: Wow. Is there any risk to using patriotic language to get people excited about climate change? Any fears of exciting nationalistic emotions that would excite xenophobia or bigotry?

Katherine Mason: We're not seeing this as much in the US right now, but in some countries, there is an emergence of what's called eco-nationalist frames, where leaders will use the environment as a justification for xenophobic policies. It goes beyond mere patriotism. It's intentionally exclusionary, and it asserts that the interests of one's own country are more important than those of other nations. That is not a frame that we would encourage anyone to use.

The focus of what we're endorsing here is emphasizing the connection between environmentalism and the American way of life, which to us should include anyone and everyone. It should be egalitarian, it should be multicultural, and it should be inclusive, which I think is exactly how Harris is using it. Language about climate change and climate action, even when it is patriotic, should be explicitly anti-nationalist. Our message should emphasize that climate action is a global undertaking and that for us to successfully mitigate climate change, inclusive and collaborative collective action has to be taken.

Brooke Gladstone: Katherine, thank you very much.

Katherine Mason: Thank you. This was wonderful.

Brooke Gladstone: Catherine Mason is a researcher at New York University studying the psychology of social justice.

Micah Loewinger: Thanks for listening to this week's podcast. Remember, you should check us out on TikTok and Instagram. Just search On the Media and tune into this weekend's show. We are looking at why the word fascism has been popping up more and more in the media in the last week or so. Thanks for listening. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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