The Duopoly of Doom

How Two Competing Collapse Narratives Define the Modern Political Divide

In his recent exploration of our modern anxiety, David Runciman points out how the idea of “doom” is no longer merely a form of religious prophecy abut has instead become a permanent fixture of our secular political and intellectual life. We are, he suggests, obsessed with the idea of civilizational collapse.

We are, however, in sharp disagreement about the source and mechanism of this coming collapse. If you look closely at the rich world today — at the fault lines that define every policy debate, every media outrage cycle, and every culture war skirmish — it becomes clear that we aren’t grappling with one shared existential crisis. Instead, the political landscape is structured around two distinct and mutually antagonistic long-term collapse narratives.

One way to characterize the division between the Left and the Right in the West is as a disagreement over which doom is real, and consequently, which doom we must fight. These two poles of existential anxiety can be summarized simply: the Left is defined by the narrative of Metabolic Collapse, and the Right is defined by the narrative of Demographic Collapse.

To accept the other side’s crisis is, by definition, to reject the political solutions and power structures you are currently championing, and vice versa. And these are existential threat narratives — e.g. narratives that see the other side as trying to literally eliminate you and yours, an idea that is at the core of most every genocidal campaign in history.

The Left’s Doom: The Metabolic Threat

The first, and most globally recognized, narrative of existential risk centers on the destruction of the planetary systems that sustain human life. This is the Metabolic Threat, and it is a dominant narrative engine of the contemporary political Left.

This doom argues that the capitalist, industrial structure of modern civilization has irrevocably breached the ecological limits of the planet. The focus is on the long-term, hard-physical realities: the thermal balance of the atmosphere, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion. In this worldview, the threat is not merely a political problem to be solved with new regulations, but a fundamental challenge to the metabolic basis of modern life — the flow of energy and material resources that allow billions to live as they do.

The timeline of this threat is geological, but the consequences are felt in our immediate future: crop failures, unlivable heat domes, climate refugees, and the destabilization of institutions unable to cope with cascading environmental crises. The ultimate collapse scenario is a fundamental loss of planetary habitability, rendering the sophisticated structures of liberal democracy moot when the basic needs of life (clean water, breathable air, stable food supply) are no longer guaranteed.

The political solution implied by this narrative is necessarily vast, technocratic, and globalist. It requires coordination of energy generation, production cycles, transportation, and consumption patterns on a scale never before attempted in peacetime. It implies a need to transfer of (at least some parts of) sovereignty from individual nation-states to supranational regulatory bodies, and a systematic re-engineering of the global economy — a “Great Transition” or “Green New Deal.” This shift requires moving away from fossil-fuel-driven capital accumulation toward managed, sustainable, and controlled allocation of resources. It represents a cornerstone of the modern Left’s agenda.

The Right’s view of this narrative is not merely skepticism; it is outright rejection, seeing the Metabolic Threat as a pernicious fiction. From this perspective, climate change is not a genuine crisis but a Trojan horse for technocratic-globalist control. The emergency rhetoric is deemed a pretext for the Left and its elite allies (WEF, UN, technologists, etc.) to seize control of national economies, strip away individual liberties, and enforce a centrally planned, low-growth socialist model under the guise of ecological necessity. The data, the models, and the predictions are dismissed as either fabricated or deliberately manipulated to justify a pre-existing ideological agenda of economic restructuring.

The Right’s Doom: The Demographic Threat

The second narrative of collapse is cultural, social, and civilizational. It is the Demographic Threat, and it has everywhere become the defining, non-negotiable existential fear of the nationalist Right.

This doom is driven by two interlocking crises. The first is the simple, quantifiable reality of falling birth rates across the rich world. In Western Europe, the average Total Fertility Rate (TFR) hovers around 1.5 children per woman, far below the 2.1 required for population replacement. In countries like Canada, South Korea, and Italy, the numbers are even lower. This trend is creating an inverted demographic pyramid: a shrinking base of young workers supporting an ever-expanding, longer-living elderly population. The collapse scenario here is the insolvency of the welfare state, the erasure of cultural vitality, and the economic stagnation of a society running out of workers, dynamism, and, ultimately, children.

The second, politically charged layer of this threat is the notion of the “Great Replacement Theory.” This notion, expressed in forms ranging from coded alarmism to explicit white nationalist rhetoric, argues that immigration from the Global South — the “brown hordes” of The Camp of the Saints — is not merely filling labor gaps but is part of an orchestrated, elite-driven process to replace the native (specifically, white) populations of Western nations. Collapse in this narrative takes the form of the cultural and ethnic death of the West: a loss of distinct national identity, shared heritage, and traditional values, submerged beneath an influx of foreign cultures and peoples perceived as incompatible with liberal democratic traditions.

The political solution demanded by this narrative is a fierce, nativist turn: pro-natalist policies incentivizing native birth, radical restriction of immigration (at least from non-white countries), and a conscious defense of national borders and cultural identity. The solutions are inherently local, national, and culturally conservative. They require a re-traditionalization of society, particularly regarding gender roles and family structure, often demanding a rejection of global market forces and cosmopolitan liberalism perceived as corrosive to the traditional nation-state.

The Left’s view of this narrative is just as unforgiving as the Right’s view of the Left’s existential threat narrative: it is a form of racist-eugenicist scare-mongering. The Demographic Threat is dismissed as a flimsy intellectual cover for xenophobia, white supremacy, and the hoarding of resources by the already-privileged. The genuine economic problems of population aging (which are very real, as Runciman discusses) are seen as being deliberately racialized and catastrophized to justify cruelty and exclusion. The term “Great Replacement” is depicted as a conspiracy theory with roots in far-right terror, used to validate a politics based purely on racial anxiety and cultural nostalgia rather than on rational policy. From this perspective, the Right’s doom is not a threat to the world, but a threat from a fearful, retreating segment of society desperate to maintain inherited economic and ethnocultural privilege.

The Zero-Sum Tragic Schism

The tragedy of modern politics is that both narratives speak to a deep, often legitimate anxiety about the future, yet both are regarded by the opposing camp as essentially a malicious fantasy.

This is not a simple policy disagreement; it is a fundamental clash of metaphysical priorities. The Left’s priority is the health of the planetary biosphere. All other concerns — national identity, existing economic structures, cultural continuity — are secondary to the imperative of surviving the ecological breakdown. By contrast, the Right’s priority is the health of the nation (defined ethnoculturally). All other concerns — carbon budgets, global regulatory structures, technological shifts — are secondary to the imperative of surviving the demographic and cultural erosion.

To the climate activist, worrying about the racial composition of a nation on a planet with a non-functioning atmosphere is the height of anthropocentric-narcissistic absurdity. To the demographic nationalist, allowing a global elite to destroy your national economy and cultural integrity to fight an exaggerated, speculative climate model is an act of self-imposed national suicide.

The duopoly of doom creates a zero-sum political game. The Left requires globalism to solve its crisis; the Right requires nativism to solve its crisis. Because their required solutions are antithetical, they must first delegitimize the other’s fundamental crisis. The result is a political system locked in a permanent, circular loop of accusation, denial, and distraction, paralyzed by the inability to agree on the very definition of the crisis we face. We are not just debating policy; we are debating what it means to be “doomed,” and whether the collapse will be green or brown.

But as David Runciman points out, narratives aside, these two macro-trends — falling birth rates in the Global North and the advance of climate change — are fated to interact inexorably:

In the face of declining populations and growing strains on labour forces, rich countries will become more and more dependent on immigration to maintain numbers. At the same time, as those parts of the world with growing populations become less habitable because of climate change, the impetus to move from South to North will increase. Just one of these factors on its own — either depopulation in the North or climate change in the South — could be enough to drive mass migration. Taken together they make it inevitable. Anyone who thinks the 21st century will not see the biggest global movement of peoples in history has not been paying attention.

That there will be massive migration by the end of the century is one of the clearest examples I can think of what my old boss Peter Schwartz liked to call an “inevitable surprise.”