By Mary Harrington, UnHerd
The American wilderness has been fighting back. Less than a fortnight ago, Hurricane Helene swept across the South, leaving death, wreckage, and shattered livelihoods in its wake. It’s about to be followed by Hurricane Milton, which meteorologists warn will be even more deadly. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Fat Bear Week, which reimagines the pre-hibernation struggle for resources between Alaskan brown bears as a fun, furry elimination contest — a kind of Strictly Come Salmon Fishing — was briefly halted after one of the contenders killed another live on Bear Cam.
This is a salutary reminder that the taming of the American wilderness was only ever provisional. And the broader political and cultural response to such forces of nature in turn reveals an unexpected twist, in the ongoing election-year battle for the future of the American empire.
Bears once stood for everything about the American wilderness that had to be conquered. Early pioneers gained ground for their settlements via a pitched battle with the bears. As journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling puts it, they hated their ursine foes “with the sizzling, white-hot hatred that comes from living in constant fear”. Marauding bears would eat crops, livestock, or even — sometimes — human children. In response, the settlers hunted them ruthlessly, gradually beating back the bear population and wild forest to create space for farming.
In the 21st century, though, as Hongoltz-Hetling recounts, the same stubborn individualism that sustained such settlers in their endeavour ended up inviting the bears back in. In A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear (2020), he describes how a libertarian takeover of Grafton, New Hampshire failed after their aversion to collective action left them unable to maintain consistent, community-wide bear-proofing measures, such as secure bins. As a result, the local bear population grew dangerously numerous and intrusive, eventually precipitating the initiative’s collapse.
The inference of this cautionary tale is perhaps that we’re all only as radically independent as technological buffers against the elements (and bears) make us. Radical individualism, ironically, works best in a context already pre-cleansed of the kind of material threats that require human cooperation and ingenuity to overcome. And this matters: for despite the fact that America’s continent and civilisation are more stereotypically associated, today, with ultra-processed lifestyles of junk food, air conditioning, and driving everywhere, its forests are still there, and still full of bears.
This is difficult to grasp in Britain. Despite the best efforts of rewilding campaigners to reintroduce wolves and even bears to the temperate British Isles, humans have been apex predators here since the last wolf was killed in 1390. This epistemological gap is no doubt worsened by the urge to reimagine Alaskan brown bears as game-show contestants; something that also attests to just how far modern America has also slid toward forgetting its own underlying wildness.
America’s founding economy was one of republican localism, practical industry, and (in some regions) an ongoing war of attrition against the wilderness (including its bears). But modern, imperial America achieved hegemony precisely by tilting away from material practicality, toward an economy of ideas and information. And those of us out here on the imperial periphery, meanwhile, receive little except the culture that empire has since exported globally: one more likely to foreground the comic anthropomorphism of Fat Bear Week and Disney’s Baloo than the grim-faced, gun-toting mindset of American settlers guarding crops and livestock in 18th-century New Hampshire.
And as its reach has expanded and de-materialised, so America’s governance has also adjusted from the original, fiercely localist model beloved of the early settlers, toward a more centralised and managerial one. First articulated by Woodrow Wilson, this “progressive” mode of governance views the checks and balances baked into the older American republican tradition less as enabling conditions for liberty, than as obstacles to progress. In turn, one conservative commentator has recently characterised the resulting imperial order as no longer republican at all, but rather a “total state” that subordinates atomised individuals to a totalising, technocratic tyranny.
And whether or not they go this far, many modern conservative critics yearn for that bygone localism — even as others worry that the modern polity no longer possesses what Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart” required to achieve it. After all, the success of early American settlers at cooperative bear-hunting suggests they excelled at working together on highly focused local objectives. But following a century of imperial expansion, material comfort, and Wilsonian technocracy, is this still true? And yet, even if these habits of the heart have withered somewhat through lack of use, it’s possible they will be forced to make a comeback, for the same reason as Grafton’s libertarian experiment failed: keeping back the wilderness is not an achievement but an ongoing war of attrition.
In the American interior, this war has lost manpower as well as (perhaps) “habits of the heart”. Even as Wilsonian technocracy undermined republican praxis, the information economy drained talent to urban centres and the American coasts. In turn, as Hongoltz-Hetling recounts, much of the New Hampshire wilderness once clear-cut for farming has regrown — and as the woods have encroached, so have the bears.
But this is bringing its own backlash. For America’s persistent wildness exists in constant challenge to the softer coastal culture of bureaucracy and anthropomorphic bears. This, at least, is one interpretation of the way the Helene disaster response has been absorbed into America’s ongoing culture war. Social media has been full of images of aid efforts organised by practical people: mule trains, dirt bikes, and even Nascar. These images are emblematic of the kind of smaller-scale cooperation and practical skills strongly associated with America’s older “republican” culture. And against this FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been the subject of rumours and criticism such as having spent its budget on illegal immigrants, or even obstructing independent aid efforts so as to protect for-profit aid contractors or prioritise foreign-policy goals over the needs of citizens.
The US government has made vigorous efforts to debunk these rumours. But they have proliferated because they dovetail so neatly with longstanding perceptions of hostility toward “flyover country” — a world that, in this narrative, is descended from the pioneer culture that first beat back the bears, but whose capacity to flourish has since been parasitised by economic changes, cultural decline, and managerial politics. From this perspective, perceived shortcomings in the federal Helene response demonstrate the weakness of the “total state”, usually identified with the Left. Implicitly: managerial bureaucracy is no more equipped to manage a large-scale hurricane response than the cosseted coastal liberals it sustains would be to cope with a real-life bear, as opposed to one with a cute name on the laptop screen.
But I’m not sure it follows from this that a Trump win in November would tilt the scales back toward the more practical, republican America of collective nostalgia. From what I can make out, all the way across the pond, that capacity to mobilise for prosocial ends is already abundantly in evidence, in local Americans’ self-organised aid efforts. Meanwhile, to date, the main interventions from the Trumpist camp seem to have been firstly amplifying mistrust toward the government, and secondly a contribution of aid by Elon Musk.
This latter intervention is especially significant for the emerging Right-wing consensus, in that it didn’t come in the form of food, vehicles, manpower, or clean-up efforts, but distribution of Starlink satellite wi-fi routers. So much so that, to me, it foreshadows the new “fusionism” emerging out of the cold ashes of the 20th-century Reaganite variety.
The “New Right” has been fiercely divided for some time on what this should look like. Musk’s Starlink transmitters provide the answer. What use, after all, is a Starlink connection when your home has been flattened by a hurricane and the woods are full of bears? Well, one possible answer is that if you can get online it’s much easier to organise help. In other words, that internet connectivity enables the older, more decentralised American sociopolitical model to re-emerge from the technocratic grip of the “total state”.
“What use, after all, is a Starlink connection, when your home has been flattened by a hurricane and the woods are full of bears?”
In the same vein, since buying the social media platform X, Musk has been an energetic advocate of retrieving the republican free speech tradition. But it’s also true that this decentralisation obscures new forms of control. My speech on X is not free in the same sense as, say, a private conversation between two bear-hunters in 18th century New Hampshire — because Elon Musk owns the platform I’m using to speak. The same goes for Starlink, which remains a tool of decentralisation for as long as Musk wants it to be.
What this all foreshadows is a Right-wing consensus that opposes the post-liberal “total state” — but not exactly by trying to reanimate 18th-century republicanism. Where the post-liberal Left dreams of individual freedom governed by omniscient administration, for the post-liberal Right, the way forward looks like a tech superstructure owned and operated by an Olympian class of plutocrats and financiers, within which ordinary people are more or less left to figure it out for themselves.
At ground level, this probably looks like a dividend of freedom and flourishing to those able to forge strong local communities for practical support, while taking advantage of dematerialised opportunities for work or political organising afforded by the digital revolution. And by the same token, for those who lack the connections, capacities, or skills to flourish, it probably means “devil take the hindmost”.
What does any of this matter to the British Isles, thousands of miles away and still (thankfully) innocent of bear-based “rewilding”? Well, as long as Europe lives in the shadow of the American empire, when the Land of the Free sneezes the rest of the world catches cold. So should we end up with a post-liberal Right-wing government at the imperial core, we will probably, in due course, need to rediscover our own modes of localist cooperation. Even if the only bears that trouble us are those of London’s dematerialised, oligarch-riddled, and increasingly American-owned financial markets.
@Mary Harringtonis a contributing editor at UnHerd