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1. Jonathan Franzen? There's a common reaction (especially on twitter) to Franzen which is basically "Franzen? Fuck that guy!" This is understandable but, I think, wrong. There's good reason for trying to engage with Franzen, even at his worst.
2. The opposition to taking large-scale collective action against climate is breaking down, but it's still there. And as it breaks down, a barrier will be not just reactionaries like Charles Koch but ostensibly well-meaning liberals Franzen who are allergic to collective action.
3. It's gift of a certain type of writer to make articulate the confused motivated reasoning of usually inarticulate people. John Updike was like that with the Vietnam War, which he supported. His arguments were an eloquent expression of muddled nationalism.
4. In Franzen's case, he shows that there's a real hurdle that comes not just from Uncle Scrooge libertarians but a certain very attractive strain of American individualism, the Emersonian & Thoreauvian cherishing of small-scale democracy & conservation.
5. Via E.B. White, genteel, small-town tree-hugging liberalism has always been a part of the New Yorker's DNA. Robert Warshow, reviewing a White book in 1947, provided a devastating critique. 
6. Franzen's brand of liberalism has diminishing appeal but it does persist among a certain strand of that upper-middle-class that has disproportionate cultural power, hence it needs to be argued with. As I try to do here: thenation.com/article/climat…
