To state the obvious: we are not on the right track. Politically, societally, and academically, not only when it comes to climate change but generally. So, enough of euphemisms and sugarcoating, the inconvenient truth is not looming, it is not catching up, it surrounds us and penetrates us. Unfortunately it is our fault, our negligence.

Social Erosion and Symbolic Struggles

The politics trickled down or they were result of a trickle-up from societal sediment. The dialectics between politics and society are the most reasonable connection of what we see as result nowadays: in all western countries self-proclaimed leftists rarely protest for a more just society anymore. There are almost no fights for a better vision of society, like one that adheres more to distributive justice, more procedural justice, more corrective justice, more social justice, more transitional justice, more restorative justice, no fights against climate change and for environmental justice on the streets. Instead, "all eyes are on Gaza" where even queer people stand in solidarity with a Palestinian resistance that is dominated almost without exception by the most radical form of Islamism which despises LGBTQ and shares the ideology of the German Nazis back in the 1930s and 40s, and now. A deeply rooted sentiment that being queer, gay or even non-white naturally equals progressiveness has taken hold of the global political regime (in Foucault's meaning) over the years. It lacks both logic and scientific rigor.

The US Turnaround and the Symptom of Paralysis

Unthinkable only some years ago, the zeitgeist has shifted, not marginally but tremendously towards a regime (in Foucault's meaning) we long falsely thought overcome. Academia was in paralysis when Trump took office in 2016, apparently surprisingly for many. In good memory is the panel discussion at Philipps-Universität Marburg with a professor wearing a t-shirt displaying Hillary Clinton for president as if everything were better, had she won. The more critical assessment back then stands the test of time: "As long as politicians and researchers both privileged and [supposedly] progressive always defend the status quo as the best of all possible worlds when people are dying and suffering because the market cannot regulate the social alone, we are responsible for the Trumps of the world too." (cf. Kaufmann 2017, Make The World Great Again). The change in zeitgeist has never been Trump's fault. History does not work like that. History is made by constellations and power dynamics, and the truth is that the left always only argued from a moral standpoint, such as misogyny and racism are bad and everyone who is neglegent towards it cannot be supported, whereas those who state what mainstream progressives argue to be the most important value - like Hillary Clinton - must be the ones that have the solution for all struggles the world faces. No one was really listening to other voices. What if both - Trump and Clinton - were equally wrong? Both flaunted their wealth and were corrupt, in their way. As if Clinton's secret ally against the progressive's hopeful Bernie Sanders had not sabotaged the democratic process in the run-up and we had never known if not for WikiLeaks. Herbert Marcuse was right when he stated in Marxism and Feminism in 1974: "I believe the Women's Liberation Movement is perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have – even if the consciousness of this fact has not yet penetrated the Movement as a whole." Disrecognition of its radical core, however, leads to its demise. So it might be fair to say that the fact it never penetrated the Movement gave way to coining the feminist discourse as a thing that is first and foremost acceptable for bourgeois women, and thus is dominated by them.

International Political Shifts

The US, however, is only the most visible sign. The German Ampel-coalition broke and was replaced by the most conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, even within the CDU, Germany has seen in decades. The Green Party in Germany moved from a pacifist party to a supporter of weapon delivery to Ukraine, the Social Democrats have shrunk to an unrecognizable low of 13 to 15%, and the AfD, a party classified as right-wing extremist is leading the overall polls (as of today, September 29, 2025). In France, extremist politics became mainstream, in Latin America, Bolivia is set to elect the first non-left wing president in two decades in 2025, and with Javier Milei, Argentina's far-right outsider won the presidential election in 2023, and, despite a recent defeat in Argentina's most populous province, the sweeping new right zeitgeist, long hidden in the shadows, breaks loose, seemingly unstoppable, even in countries that had suffered decades from colonialism and are suffering from coloniality (Mignolo 2011).

Assange as Harbinger

Democraticly elected leaders with radical neoliberal and even illiberally democratic agendas tempting to authoritarianism were reserved for pariahs like Hungary and factions in the US Grand Old Party (GOP), not anymore. The persecution of Julian Assange - according to Ricketson 2022: 250 - "has been a carefully orchestrated plan by four countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and, yes, Australia — to ensure Assange is punished forever for revealing state secrets." Beyond punishing a whistleblower, Assange's example goes down in history as a Menetekel (harbinger of doom) of what we see today. From 2007 to 2018, the journalist and/or a hacker who has been criminally or lawfully obtaining and exposing war crimes of particularly those countries that lay claim to and take credit for their Human Rights standards and their obedience to the rule of law as guiding principle has been held in limbo for twelve years, his organization WikiLeaks is shattered beyond recognition. This is the legacy that lasts, this is the history that was symptom and symbol of a shifting zeitgeist until only words and moral claims remained. If the democracies like the United Kingdom, the US, Sweden, Australia, and yes, Germany is complicit too, are abondoning the freedom of press lightly over rightful allegations of war crimes like rogue nations, the final proof is given that the promise of liberal democracy's superiority is nothing more than a claim. The test of legimitacy is not in peaceful times but only when the society is challenged. If a single platform like WikiLeaks is able to shake our democracies in their foundations so that basic human rights are not worth the constitution's paper they are written on, then we face the hard question whether we are what we claim to be.

Contradictions: Queers for Palestine

At first glance, the disconnect is striking. Why would people, like queers, liberals, feminists etc., who are persecuted in every Muslim country for what they are and believe in be blindly supportive of a movement, like the Palestinian organizations Hamas and PLO¹, who aim at establishing a state just like that? How can this be justified from a mere logic point of reasoning? People who are so strongly against oppression and in favor of antifascism side with an anti-democratic, anti-emancipative, and highly oppressive ideology that - according to Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutzy) - deems to have a significant overlap with Neonazi ideology.

Academic Discourses and Their Paradoxes

This seems contradictive, as said "at the first glance", but it is not if understood in the aforementioned context. “In line with this, hpd author Moritz Pieczewski-Freimuth has published a comprehensive working paper at the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam under the direction of Prof. Dr. Susanne Schröter. He concludes comprehensively that Queers for Palestine represent the consistent continuation of dominant premises from gender and queer studies."

The refusal of Adorno's Never Again claim is today concealed as what may be termed 'honorable anti-Semitism,' expressed in the form of anti-Zionism. Annexation plans by parts of Israel's right-wing government — namely Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionism party — together with racist rhetoric are employed to legitimize questioning Israel's right to exist. Philosophers such as Judith Butler, herself Jewish, Angela Y. Davis, and gender studies scholar Jasbir K. Puar have become reference points for academically legitimized discourse.

Yet it remains puzzling how such positions withstand scholarly scrutiny. A precedent was Butler’s 2006 statement describing Hamas and Hezbollah as "social movements that are progressive, left-wing, and part of a global left." This position has been reinforced by Professor Jasbir K. Puar’s portrayal of the Islamist terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023 as instances of so-called pinkwashing, and by the instrumentalization of intersectionality against Israel. The lack of a coherent and universal theory of intersectionality — as criticized by Kaufmann (2014) — may be a contributing factor.

More generally, however, if all who suffer discrimination, as Muslims certainly do in Western societies, are automatically classified as progressive, then the very concept of progressiveness loses coherence. If Islamists — whose desired social order compels women to conceal their bodies and faces, at times forbids music, and imposes the death penalty on individuals of other sexual identities as well as on women who reject marital subordination — are categorized as "part of the global left," one must ask what content the notion of "left discourse" retains. This is why terms such as "left" and "progressive" have become tainted, while "right-wing" and "conservative" appear clearer and more logical to those who feel socially deprived.

The Crisis of the Left and Symbolic Capital

The self-righteousness of so called mainstream progressives - as portrayed very accurately in Wagenknecht's book Die Selbstgerechten - should puzzle critical environmental justice research far more than what the right is doing. Decrying the victorious campaigns in the world by conservatives and even right-wing extremists does not help. It is time to recognize and accept that morals are for the priviledged and the priviledged are not the majority in our societies. As long as the status quo is defended by the same people that claim to be on the side of the deprived while the very same status quo teaches those with low social background, and consequently less chance to good education and political participation, every day the lesson that morals do not pay their bills, do not make their life better, do not help them to making ends meet, and do not increase the symbolic capital (Bourdieu) of their social class but only makes them feel reduced to second-class status.

Naturally, those with low income seek to increase it. Environmental awareness, buying expensive organic labels, and using politically correct language are not currencies of symbolic capital for the majority of people in the world. The majority of voters are poor, struggle to put food on the table, their objective class interest is different from wealthy well-educated people. The leftist currency was its moral high standard, its uneunequivocally non-selfish desire to help those who cannot defend themselves. Based on this, their pride had ground. You compare an altruist to an egoist, you easily see the aim of the latter to be more legit.

The problem was that what called itself "the left" cared lesser and lesser for the less advantages but remained self-rightous by telling the people of how to see the world (from the leftist moral stance), how to speak (gender-inclusive) and what to buy (bio), even though the social and educational conditions of the people addressed were and are totally different. Trump understood this, he did not come out of the blue, he exposed the contradictions and self-rightousness of the privilidged political class but of the academic establishment too (Kaufmann 2018).

Climate Change, Elite Failure, and the Call to Action

As for the failure to combat climate change, it was everyone's desire to see the success at work even if COP21 already did not give much reason for it. Societal elites, to which the academic establishment certainly counts, have failed the peoples of the world and they continue to fail them as long as they look for a scapegoat to blame, Trump, Russia's aggression in Ukraine, or simply put the "unavoidable constraints".

There is no reason to accept this. There is an obligation to act. Research must focus on transformation but it must do so in a transformative manner. This is why the Environmental Justice Institute was founded. This is why it join the struggle for hegemony over the discourses but it can only be won if we take a coherent critical standpoint, critical and self-critical, unrelenting but based on an altruistic morality that goes where the facts lead and not where it is comfortable for us to be.