Abstract
What happens when the urgent task of communicating climate change becomes entangled with the politics of fear, collective anxiety, and the defence of privilege? This is the central question animating Hanna E. Morris’s Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power, a theoretically ambitious study of how US climate journalism has come to operate as a vehicle for antidemocratic politics rather than a corrective to it. Morris’s argument is that a post-2016 convergence of climate catastrophe and Trumpian authoritarianism crystallised into a dominant representational mode she terms “apocalyptic authoritarianism,” one that exploits national anxiety to amplify the authority of historically privileged “visionary sages” while systematically marginalising those who advocate for more transformative responses to the crisis. The argument is as timely as it is unsettling.
The book builds its case in concentric circles. At the domestic level, the myth of American exceptionalism and the figure of the visionary sage work together to delegitimise progressive challengers. Moving outward to the planetary scale, a God’s-eye view of the Earth naturalises techno-utopian fixes and forecloses more democratic alternatives. At the international level, Malthusian fearmongering about climate migration from the Global South completes the architecture of exclusion. Across all three, Morris shows the same logic at work, whereby crisis concentrates authority and thereby defines who counts as a legitimate actor in responding to it. The conclusion, which turns to the Green New Deal, Afrofuturism, and alternative publications like Hammer and Hope, attempts to sketch what a journalism organised around different premises might look like.
The book’s most significant achievement is conceptual. “Apocalyptic authoritarianism” is a genuinely original category that names something real about the convergence of crisis communication and reactionary politics, one that, as Morris rightly notes, cuts across the supposed divide between conservative and centrist media. Her close readings are frequently striking. The juxtaposition of The New American’s fire-tinged image of The Squad with The New York Times’s framing of progressive voices as threats to party and national stability reveals how the logic of Othering operates across the ideological spectrum. In such moments, Morris demonstrates how what reads as routine coverage performs a consistent political function, finding for instance that the “repeated portrayal of Ocasio-Cortez as a myopic young woman effectively delegitimizes her speaking position” (p. 116). The argument that apocalyptic framing does not merely reflect polarisation but actively produces it, by narrowing the imaginable range of responses to climate change, is both distinctive and important, and has gained further resonance following Trump’s return to power in 2024.
The theoretical synthesis underpinning the book is handled with genuine fluency. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s analysis of regimes of representation, Foucauldian biopolitics, and postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, Morris assembles a framework that illuminates how these analytical traditions can be brought to bear on climate communication in mutually reinforcing ways. Equally notable is Morris’s care not to moralise at journalists. She acknowledges the structural conditions of shrinking newsrooms, fewer resources, and diminishing public support that make comprehensive climate reporting increasingly difficult, a recognition that grounds the critique in material reality rather than mere prescription.
The book’s limitations, however, merit consideration. The most substantive concerns the relationship between representation and effect. Morris makes consequential causal claims throughout. She argues that fearmongering of racialised Others works to animate reactionary movements, that repeated portrayals of Ocasio-Cortez delegitimise her speaking position, and that apocalyptic framing sustains a feeling of individual futility. In support, she marshals substantive evidence. Cases of state repression of climate activists, from the Cop City prosecutions in Atlanta to the jailing of Just Stop Oil activists in the United Kingdom, occurred in parallel with the consolidation of the militant Other stereotype. Hall’s Policing the Crisis provides a historical precedent, having traced a comparable mechanism from media fearmongering to police violence in 1970s Britain. This evidence is not merely analogical. What remains undemonstrated is the specific causal chain between media representations and these political outcomes. Both the media hostility and the state repression could plausibly be understood as concurrent symptoms of the same underlying political conditions rather than one directly causing the other. Establishing that connection requires empirical investigation the book does not undertake. A methodological concern also arises. Morris names her corpus as 27 ideologically diverse national publications analysed between 2015 and 2023, but the rationale for their selection and the criteria governing the choice of specific cover stories and features within that corpus are never made explicit. Without this transparency, it remains difficult to assess whether the patterns identified are broadly representative or reflect a sample organised around prior interpretive commitments.
Beyond these evidential concerns, the book’s analytical framework occasionally strains against its own theoretical commitments. Morris’s debt to Hall insists that meaning is always contested and that power invariably generates resistance, yet the empirical chapters leave limited room for this. Morris does analyse left-leaning publications including In These Times and Jacobin within those same chapters, and her readings are sharply critical. In These Times reproduces the visionary sage trope, while Jacobin, despite richer symbolism, still falls into a hero-villain binary. This thoroughness is analytically rigorous, but it leaves the reader with a landscape in which virtually no outlet escapes the gravitational pull of apocalyptic authoritarianism until Hammer and Hope arrives in the conclusion. A more explicit reckoning with what resistance within journalism looks like, and why it appears so rare, would have strengthened the book’s critical force. Similarly, Morris acknowledges that the militant Other construction is evident in media contexts beyond the United States, citing responses to the Just Stop Oil protests across the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Yet the analytical architecture of the book is so specifically rooted in US political culture, built around Manifest Destiny, the American jeremiad, and Cold War nationalism, that the concept’s cross-national applicability is gestured towards rather than examined. This is a missed opportunity, particularly given that the phenomenon Morris describes appears to be intensifying across those very contexts.
None of these limitations diminish the book’s real contributions. Apocalyptic Authoritarianism identifies a genuine and underexamined phenomenon, names it precisely, and brings serious theoretical resources to bear on it. At a moment when the political stakes of climate communication have rarely been higher, Morris’s insistence that the form of that communication matters as much as its content deserves attention well beyond academic circles. Scholars of media, journalism, and democratic politics will find rich material here, as will journalists, climate advocates, and anyone seeking to understand why the public conversation about climate change so often feels both urgent and strangely narrow. The work invites scrutiny and repays it.
