How nationalist rhetoric drives polarization over climate change in the US

This article explores how American politicians–on both the right and left–use nationalist rhetoric to frame climate change. We undertake a contextual content analysis of all speeches by Republican and Democratic presidential nominees during the 2016 and 2020 elections. We show that nationalism was among the most prominent frames for these nominees when referring to climate change, whether they supported positions that were ‘skeptical’ (ie Donald Trump) or ‘activist’ (ie Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden). Nationalism was so prevalent that it structured the terms of the climate change debate, with the candidates dividing over which position was better suited to strengthen the identity and power of the American nation. Embedding the climate change debate in a struggle over American nationhood is indicative of a wider, problematic process of ‘nationalist polarization,’ where elites draw from competing conceptions of the nation’s identity to drive polarization over a policy problem.