Disaster Authoritarianism

What It Is, How It Works, and How We Beat It

Most people who are paying attention to the authoritarian consolidation underway in the United States are focused, reasonably enough, on what is happening right now: the executive power grabs, the dismantling of federal agencies, the targeting of immigrant communities and LGBTQ+ people, the assault on the press and civil society. These are urgent. They deserve the attention they’re getting.

But there is a second front that is not getting nearly enough attention - not in the pro-democracy sector, and certainly not in the general public. It is the intersection of environmental catastrophe, economic disruption, and authoritarian politics. It is what I want to call disaster authoritarianism, and it may ultimately be more consequential than anything the Heritage Foundation has put in writing.

We have a concept for part of this. Naomi Klein named it twenty years ago: disaster capitalism. The idea is straightforward and well-documented. When crises strike, including hurricanes, financial collapses, and pandemics, the normal political resistance to radical restructuring is temporarily suspended. People are frightened, disoriented, and desperate for relief. Institutions are overwhelmed. In that window, economic elites and their political allies push through changes that would be impossible in calmer times: privatizing public services, eliminating regulations, restructuring labor markets, redirecting public resources to private interests. The crisis is not just an emergency to be managed. It is an opportunity to be exploited.

Disaster authoritarianism works the same way, but the goal is political power rather than economic extraction, and, in practice, the two are increasingly inseparable. When catastrophe strikes, authoritarian movements use the moment to do several things simultaneously: concentrate emergency powers in the executive, eliminate the oversight mechanisms that would constrain them, scapegoat vulnerable communities to redirect public anger, and build the surveillance and enforcement infrastructure that outlasts the crisis itself. The disaster creates political permission. The authoritarian project builds the permanent architecture. By the time the emergency passes, or is declared to have passed, which is a decision the people in power get to make, the consolidation is real and the rollback is very difficult.

We have already seen this playbook run, in this country and around the world. After September 11th, the Bush administration used the crisis to push through the PATRIOT Act, dramatically expand domestic surveillance, create the architecture of indefinite detention, and launch wars that the political system would not otherwise have authorized. After Hurricane Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans’ public housing and public school system was not a tragic side effect of the response - it was a deliberate act of disaster capitalism that permanently restructured the city along class and race lines, displacing tens of thousands of poor Black residents who never returned. After COVID-19, governments around the world used emergency powers to restrict assembly, expand surveillance, and in several cases accelerate authoritarian consolidation that had been underway before the pandemic began. Viktor Orbán in Hungary used the pandemic emergency to rule by decree indefinitely. Narendra Modi in India used the chaos to advance Hindu nationalist policies under cover of the crisis. In the United States, the pandemic became a rehearsal space for the contestation of institutional authority that has now become the central feature of our political life.

What is coming next is not a single crisis. It is an era of crises, cascading and interacting in ways that will test democratic institutions more severely than anything we have faced in living memory.

The Drivers

Climate change is the most significant long-term driver of disaster authoritarianism, and it’s the one the pro-democracy sector is most consistently treating as someone else’s problem. This is a category error that we cannot afford.

The disasters themselves - hurricanes, floods, wildfires, droughts, and heat events - are becoming more frequent, more severe, and more geographically widespread. Each one is a potential trigger moment, for authoritarianism or for democratic resistance, depending on who is prepared and who isn’t. But the disasters are only the most visible layer. Beneath them are slower-moving catastrophes that are equally dangerous to democratic governance.

Water scarcity is already a source of conflict in the American West, across sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, and in the Middle East. As aquifers are depleted and glaciers recede, competition over water will intensify. And the politics of scarcity are almost always the politics of exclusion. Who gets access and who doesn’t is a question that authoritarian governments answer by deciding who counts as a member of the community and who doesn’t. Climate-driven water scarcity is a machine for producing the kind of zero-sum resource politics that authoritarianism runs on.

Food system disruption follows from water scarcity, from extreme heat events that reduce crop yields, from supply chain fragility, and from the monoculture vulnerabilities of industrial agriculture. We have already seen, in the food price spikes of 2007–2008 and again in 2022, how quickly food insecurity translates into political instability. The political instability that followed the Arab Spring was not solely a product of food prices, but food prices were a significant accelerant. Authoritarian governments respond to food insecurity by consolidating control over distribution, by creating dependency relationships between populations and the state, and by scapegoating the people they were already targeting.

Climate-driven migration is already generating the political backlash that authoritarian movements are most effectively exploiting. The number of people displaced by climate events, including floods, drought, sea level rise, and extreme heat, is already in the tens of millions and is projected to reach hundreds of millions by mid-century. Every wave of migration is an opportunity for authoritarian movements to activate the politics of threat and exclusion, to militarize borders, to treat human beings in motion as invaders rather than as people in need. The European far right has been built, in significant part, on exactly this dynamic. The American far right has studied the playbook carefully.

Beyond climate, there are other drivers worth naming. The fragility of critical infrastructure, of electrical grids, water systems, financial systems, and supply chains, means that cascading failures are increasingly plausible. A prolonged grid failure in a major region would create the conditions for emergency powers that could be used in the ways described above. Pandemic risk has not gone away; the conditions that produced COVID-19 - habitat destruction, live animal markets, global travel, and underfunded public health infrastructure - have not been meaningfully addressed. Economic disruption, including the kind that can be produced intentionally by tariffs and trade wars as well as the kind produced by technological displacement and financialization, generates the anxiety and anger that authoritarian movements have always known how to harvest.

None of these are hypothetical. They are all in motion. And the current administration is making several of them worse by gutting the agencies and international agreements that represent our best collective response to climate change while weakening the public health infrastructure that would allow us to respond to future pandemics, and concentrating economic power in ways that guarantee greater instability and hardship for working people.

How Disaster Authoritarianism Works

Understanding the mechanism matters, because it tells us where to intervene.

Disaster authoritarianism typically follows a sequence. The crisis hits, and the immediate response is necessarily centralized. Disasters require coordination, and coordination in an emergency tends to flow toward executive authority. This is not inherently wrong. Some degree of centralized emergency response is appropriate and necessary.

The authoritarian capture happens in the second and third phase. In the second phase, emergency powers that were justified by the immediate crisis are extended, broadened, and normalized. The emergency becomes the new baseline. Oversight mechanisms that were suspended “temporarily” don’t come back. Surveillance infrastructure that was built to manage the crisis is repurposed for political control. The framing of the crisis, of who is responsible for it, who is threatened by it, and who can be trusted and who cannot, becomes the dominant political narrative, and that narrative serves the consolidation.

In the third phase, the scapegoating becomes policy. The communities that were blamed for the crisis face targeted enforcement, legal jeopardy, and the withdrawal of the protections that democratic institutions are supposed to provide. The disaster has become the justification for doing what the authoritarian project wanted to do anyway.

The pattern is old enough to have a founding example. On the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day, when most of Lisbon was at Mass, a massive earthquake struck the Portuguese capital, followed by tsunamis and six days of fire. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people were dead. A third of the city was gone. Into that vacuum stepped Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, the king’s chief minister, who used the crisis to do what he could never have done without it: break the power of the aristocratic families who had checked royal authority for generations, expel the Jesuits, and rebuild Lisbon from scratch as a monument to centralized state power. The new city was rational, orderly, and secular - a masterpiece of Enlightenment planning, and an object lesson in who was now in charge. Pombal did not create the earthquake. But he understood, with cold clarity, that the earthquake had created an opportunity, and he moved faster than anyone else to claim it. The disaster didn’t just kill people. It reorganized power. And here is the part that matters for the present: the authoritarian political culture that Pombal helped normalize, the idea that crisis justifies the concentration of authority, that strongman governance is what competence looks like, that the destruction of checks on power is a reasonable price for getting things done, echoed forward through Portuguese history for nearly two centuries, until it found its fullest expression in António Salazar, who used a different kind of crisis, the exhaustion and chaos of a failed republic, to build the “Estado Novo”: forty-eight years of clerical authoritarianism that ended only when the military, bled dry by unwinnable colonial wars, finally said enough. The earthquake of 1755 and the dictatorship of the 20th century are not the same thing. But they are connected, through the habit of mind that disaster authoritarianism installs: the conviction that emergency justifies the surrender of accountability, and that the strong man who rebuilds the city deserves to run it.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern, documented across multiple countries and multiple crises, by scholars who study authoritarian consolidation. What varies is the specific form. In the current American context, we already know who the scapegoats are - they are the communities that have already been targeted: immigrants, trans people, Black communities, Muslims, and political dissidents of various kinds. A major crisis does not change the target. It removes the remaining constraints on how the target is treated.

There is a version of disaster authoritarianism that is particularly relevant to the climate crisis, and it deserves a name of its own. Call it “climate fascism”: the political program of a narrow, racially exclusive coalition that accepts the reality of climate catastrophe but responds to it by building walls, both literal and figurative, to protect the inside from the outside, rather than by addressing the crisis at its roots. Climate fascism is not a distant hypothetical. It is already visible in the politics of the European far right, in the “great replacement” ideology that frames immigration as an existential threat, and in the American right’s combination of climate denialism for domestic consumption and military preparation for the geopolitical consequences of a destabilized world. The logic is brutal and internally coherent: if there is not enough for everyone, the job of governments is to ensure that there is enough for us. The definition of “us” is the authoritarian project’s most important product.

What Preparation Looks Like

Here is the hard truth about trigger moments: they reward whoever is most prepared. The pro-democracy sector tends to be reactive. We are good at mobilizing in response to outrages, and we have demonstrated real capacity for mass action. But we are not consistently good at being ready before the moment arrives. We, too often, don’t have the plans, the relationships, the narratives, and the infrastructure already in place so that when a crisis hits, we can move quickly and strategically rather than scrambling to catch up.

Authoritarian movements, by contrast, are increasingly good at pre-positioning. They have developed narratives that explain crises in ways that serve their political goals; narratives that can be activated quickly when a disaster strikes, because the groundwork has been laid. They have networks that can be mobilized for specific political purposes. They have relationships with media infrastructure that can amplify their framing in the critical first hours and days of a crisis. But this is when narratives form and harden.

We need to do the same work, and we need to start now.

Preparation begins with scenario planning - not in the abstract, but concretely and specifically. What happens if there is a major climate disaster in your region in the next eighteen months? What is the likely government response? Who will be scapegoated? What emergency powers will be invoked, and on what legal basis? What are the specific institutions and decision-makers who will be under pressure to comply with authoritarian demands, and who, among them, can be supported in refusing? What are the mutual aid networks in your community, and how quickly can they be activated? What is the narrative you want to be telling within the first 48 hours, and who are the messengers who can carry it?

These are not abstract questions. They are operational ones, and the time to answer them is before the disaster, not during it.

Narrative preemption is one of the most important and most underinvested in forms of preparation. Authoritarian movements win the narrative war in crises partly because they’ve been telling their story for years before the crisis hits. When the crisis arrives, the audience is already primed. The pro-democracy sector needs to be doing the equivalent work: building the narratives that explain who is actually responsible for the conditions that made the disaster possible and that severe, building the relationships that create trust across difference before the moment of stress, and building the frames that make solidarity the instinctive response rather than exclusion.

This means talking about climate change not just as an environmental issue but as a democracy issue - as a driver of the instability that authoritarian movements exploit, and as a policy failure produced by the same concentration of corporate power that is now funding authoritarian consolidation. The fossil fuel industry has spent decades funding climate denialism not just because it protects their market but because the denial of shared reality is itself a democratic threat. When you can’t agree on the most basic facts about the physical world, you can’t build the shared understanding that democratic governance requires.

Mutual aid infrastructure is both a democratic good in itself and a form of disaster preparation that directly counters disaster authoritarianism. When communities have the capacity to take care of each other - when there are food networks, emergency communication systems, neighborhood-level support structures, and relationships of trust that cross racial and class lines - they are less dependent on the authoritarian state in moments of crisis, and therefore less susceptible to the dependency relationships that authoritarian governments use to consolidate loyalty. Mutual aid is not charity. It is the material expression of the democratic principle that we are responsible for each other, and it is infrastructure for the moments when the authoritarian state will try to use relief as a weapon.

Coalition infrastructure matters for the same reason. The pro-democracy coalition that can move together in a crisis is one that has been building relationships across differences before the crisis arrives. The labor union that has been in solidarity with the immigrant rights organization, the faith community that has been in relationship with the racial justice group, the disability rights organization that has been connected to the climate activists are not just morally important. They’re strategically necessary. Disaster authoritarianism depends on the isolation of targeted communities. Solidarity infrastructure is the direct counter to that strategy.

What Our Responses Should Look Like

When the trigger moment arrives, the response that builds democratic power rather than just managing the emergency has several distinguishing characteristics.

First, it names the political dimension immediately and clearly. When a climate disaster hits a community that has been systematically denied the resources to prepare for it - which is most frontline communities - the response does not just provide relief. It names the political choices that made the community vulnerable: the fossil fuel subsidies, the infrastructure disinvestment, the regulatory rollbacks, and the defunding of emergency management. It connects the immediate disaster to the long-term policy failures that produced it, and it names who made those choices and who profited from them. This is not politicizing a crisis. The crisis is already political. Refusing to name that is itself a political choice.

Second, it actively contests scapegoating. In the first hours and days of a crisis, authoritarian movements move quickly to establish who is to blame, and that blame almost always lands on the communities that were already targeted. The pro-democracy response must be equally fast, equally clear, and equally persistent in redirecting that narrative. This requires having the relationships with journalists and media platforms that allow you to get your framing in front of audiences quickly, and it requires having the narrative already developed, tested, and ready to deploy.

Third, it makes solidarity visible and contagious. One of the most powerful things a pro-democracy movement can do in a disaster moment is demonstrate, visibly and at scale, that people are taking care of each other across the lines that the authoritarian movement is trying to harden. When mutual aid networks that cross racial, class, and immigration status lines are visibly functioning and the images of the crisis that circulate are images of solidarity rather than images of chaos and threat it both serves the immediate need and contests the authoritarian narrative at the level of emotion and identity, which is where it operates most powerfully.

Fourth, it uses the moment to build lasting infrastructure rather than just surviving the emergency. Every crisis that the pro-democracy movement navigates well, that it uses to demonstrate the value of democratic governance, mutual accountability, and solidarity, is an opportunity to build relationships, expand the coalition, and develop the narrative that will serve the movement in future moments. The question to ask at every point in a disaster response is not just “what does this community need right now” but “what relationships, what organizations, and what capacities will be stronger on the other side of this, if we do this right?”

Fifth, it connects local response to national strategy. Disasters are inherently local in their immediate impact, but their political implications are national and often global. The pro-democracy movement needs coordination infrastructure that can connect what is happening on the ground in a specific affected community to the national narrative, the national political moment, and the national coalition. That coordination infrastructure is what makes local resilience into national democratic power.

The Deeper Stakes

The era of compounding disasters that we are entering is, at some level, a political choice. It is the cumulative result of decades of decisions made by people with enormous power in favor of their short-term interests and against the long-term welfare of everyone else. The fossil fuel industry knew about climate change in the 1970s and chose to fund denial rather than transition. The financial sector knew about the fragility of the global financial system and chose extraction over stability. The political class, with some honorable exceptions, chose the donor class over the public.

The authoritarian project that is currently attempting to consolidate power in the United States is, in significant part, an attempt by that same class of people to ensure that when the consequences of their choices arrive in full - when the disasters multiply and intensify, when the inequality becomes impossible to ignore, and when the instability becomes undeniable - they will be insulated from those consequences by political power that cannot be held accountable. Climate fascism is the wealthy locking the gates and deciding who gets in.

The democratic project, in this moment, is the opposite: building the capacity for collective response that is accountable to the people who will bear the greatest costs of the disasters that are coming, and using every crisis as an opportunity to demonstrate that solidarity and democratic governance are more equal to these challenges than walls and exclusion and concentrated power.

This is not an easy argument to make, and it is not an easy program to build. But the history of democracy is the history of people making exactly this argument and building exactly this kind of power under exactly these conditions. The question is whether we will build it fast enough, and whether we will build it together.

The answer to that question is not determined by history. It is determined by the choices we make now, before the next disaster, about what we are building and why.