Floats, drums, masks and references to Palestine: Climate Pride took place yesterday in Rome. A parade billed as a demonstration for climate justice – with more than 80 associations supporting it – nevertheless showcases a political world increasingly having a lateral relationship with climate. Nothing new, even before the event occurred, the intention was clear: to reassert the identity of a militant world that puts everything in the same ideological cauldron.
«This is a moment to show that we care about the climate, that it is our priority – as expressed in a promotional video of the event on social media by an Extinction Rebellion activist – that we will not submit to extractivist and colonial patriarchy, but we will join in a just, bottom-up, eco-transfeminist transition».
«Eco-transfeminist». «Extractivist patriarchy». At this point the question is no longer ironic, but necessary: what does climate have to do with transfeminism? And most importantly, what does patriarchy have to do with rising temperatures? Is CO2 sexist now? Is melting glaciers a colonial act? Is methane patriarchal? This is where the essence of Climate Pride is revealed: not a climate demonstration, but another ritual of awakening, in which climate change becomes a pretext narrative for incorporating everything that makes up the imagination of the contemporary militant left into it. It was, after all, the school of Francesca Albanese, who gave the rallying cry “let us join the fight against one enemy”.
An ideology that can no longer differentiate between struggles and prefers to combine them, as if LGBTQ rights, anti-capitalism, Palestine, and legal marijuana were all part of one mysterious political equation. The procession speaks for itself: Propal groups with their olive trees and climate symbols, but also anti-prohibition groups from the Million Marijuana March who loudly called for the legalization of marijuana. All together, without order or hierarchy, as if putting them in the same basket could magically make everything coherent. Each group seems ready to use the climate crisis as a framework for their political battles, and attach their identities to environmental issues as if they were stickers. Climate Pride is not a climate demonstration: it is an ideological stage, a huge instrumental show, a single political platform in which the original cause, namely the climate crisis, disappears at the expense of the ideological altar. A grand theater of the woke left, which praises itself and celebrates its own visibility more than any tangible results.
Demonstrations do not inform, do not mobilize, do not change anything: they demonstrate identities, confuse causes, combine battles and reduce everything to a game of symbols. A grand parade of ideological arrogance disguised as political commitment, and all that’s left is exhibitionism.
