“Freedom” is often a Republican talking point, but Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to reclaim the concept for Democrats as part of her campaign for the presidency. In a speech last month at the Democratic National Convention, she declare that “fundamental freedoms” were at stake in the November election, including “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution fueling the climate crisis.”
A new study suggests that Harris may be on to something as she tries to convince voters who are torn between her and former President Donald Trump. Researchers at New York University found that framing climate action as patriotic and as necessary to preserve the American “way of life” can increase support for climate action among people across the political spectrum in the United States.
“It’s encouraging to see politicians adopting this type of language,” said Katherine Mason, a co-author of the study and a psychology researcher at New York University. Based on the study’s results, she said this rhetoric “could bridge political divides on climate change.”
About 70 percent of Americans already support the government taking action to address climate change, including most younger Republicans, according to a CBS News poll earlier this year. Experts have long suggested this appeal to Americans’ sense of patriotism could activate them.
The framework took shape under President Joe Biden’s administration, which pushed for policy manufactures electric vehicles and chargers domestically”so that the great American road trip can be electrified.” Harris underlined this approach to climate and energy in Tuesday’s presidential debate with Trump, emphasizing efforts to produce “American-made” EVs and turning a question about fracking into a call for less reliance on “foreign oil.”
Mason’s new studypublished in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the largest to date on the effects of patriotic language around climate change, with nearly 60,000 participants across 63 countries. Americans read a message declaring that being pro-environment would help “keep the United States the way it should be,” arguing that it is “patriotic to preserve the nation’s natural resources.”
The text is illustrated by photos of the American flag blowing in the wind, scenic national parks and climate-related impacts, such as a flooded Houston after Hurricane Harvey and a Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in an orange haze of wildfire smoke. Reading it increased people’s level of belief in climate change, their willingness to share information about climate change on social media, and their support for policies to protect the environment, such as increasing carbon taxes and expanding public transportation.
The researchers wanted to test a psychological theory that people often defend the status quo, even if it is flawed, because they want stability, not uncertainty and conflict. “This mindset presents a major obstacle when it comes to tackling big problems like climate change, as it leads people to downplay the problem and resist the changes needed to protect the environment,” Mason said.
For decades, environmental advocates have called people to make sacrifices for the greater good – cycling instead of driving, eating more vegetables instead of meat, and turning down the thermostat in the winter. Asking people to give things up can lead to backlash, says Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communications professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The framework in the study turns it on its head, she said. “It does not ask people to sacrifice or make radical changes, but doing things for the environment will prevent the radical change of the environmental catastrophe.”
Bloomfield, who studied how to find common ground with conservatives on climate change, was not surprised that the study found that appeals to patriotism worked in the United States. In other countries, however, the results were less clear – the patriotic language had some positive effects in Brazil, France and Israel, but backfired in other countries, including Germany, Belgium and Russia.
Bloomfield urged caution in implementing this strategy in the real world, as it could appear to be trying to manipulate conservatives by employing it. “Patriotism or any kind of framing message, I think, can definitely backfire if it’s not seen as an authentic connection about values,” she said.
Talking about a global environmental problem in an overly patriotic, competitive way can be another pitfall. Earlier this year, a study in the journal Environmental Communication found that a “green nationalist” frame – pitting countries against each other in terms of environmental progress – reduced people’s support for policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Natalia Bogado, the author of that study and a psychology researcher in Germany, said that the new study in PNAS “makes no reference to the key features of nationalism, but only briefly mentions a patriotic duty,” explaining the different results. can partially explain.
However, if executed smartly, an appeal to regional loyalty can lead to support for environmental causes. Take the “Don’t Mess With Texas” campaign started in the late 1980s to reduce litter along the state’s highways. His target was the young men who casually threw beer cans out of their truck windows, believing that littering was a “God given right.” Instead of challenging their identity, the campaign channeled their Texas pride, with astonishing results: Litter on the roads dropped 72 percent in just four years. Today, the phrase has become synonymous with Texas swings – so much so that many have forgotten that it was initially an anti-spam message.
