The Lost Cause (2023) is Doctorow's climate novel — a near-future story set in a world that has accepted the reality of climate catastrophe and is engaged in the enormous collective project of mitigation, adaptation, and resettlement. It is his most politically hopeful work since walkaway and, like that novel, is fundamentally an argument about political economy expressed through fiction: an attempt to make legible what a serious, collective response to climate change might look like and who would resist it.
The Setting: After Denial
The novel's premise departs from most cli-fi (climate fiction) by skipping over the period of denial and inaction. It is set in a near future in which the United States has undertaken a massive Green New Deal-style mobilization — a managed retreat from coastal and fire-prone areas, large-scale infrastructure rebuilding, and the resettlement of climate refugees (both domestic and international) into communities across the country. The political battle is not over whether climate action will happen but over who bears its costs and who controls its direction.
This is a significant formal and political choice. Rather than writing a novel about the failure of climate politics — a story of what was not done — Doctorow writes about what doing something looks like, with all its conflicts, compromises, and costs. The novel treats serious climate action as a background given and examines the social and political dynamics of actually implementing it.
MAGA Remnants and the "Lost Cause" Frame
The antagonists of the novel are not climate deniers in the abstract but a specific social formation: elderly white men whose identity and worldview is organized around the "Make America Great Again" politics of the previous generation. The novel's title refers both to the climate crisis itself (is it a lost cause?) and to the Confederate "Lost Cause" mythology — the post-Civil War ideology that romanticized the defeated slaveholder rebellion into a noble cause.
The parallel is made explicit in the novel: the MAGA remnants are depicted as people who, like Lost Cause mythologists, have organized their identity around a defeat that they cannot accept. Their resistance to climate action is not primarily about economic interest (they are not particularly wealthy) but about identity — about refusing to accept that the world has changed in ways that render their previous worldview incoherent.
This analysis connects to Doctorow's broader thinking about how political constituencies form and what motivates resistance to change. It also connects to his concerns about political radicalization, explored in the title story of radicalized — the novel depicts how grievance-based identity politics can escalate toward violence, and what obligations communities have to people who have been radicalized.
Mutual Aid and Collective Infrastructure
The novel's protagonist is a young man in his early twenties who is involved in the community resettlement work and mutual aid networks that the Green New Deal mobilization depends on. His community is the organizing center of the novel — people working together to house, feed, and integrate climate refugees into existing towns that are themselves in transition.
This depicts mutual aid not as radical politics but as necessary infrastructure — the thing that keeps communities functioning under conditions of rapid change when formal institutions are overwhelmed. This connects The Lost Cause directly to walkaway's analysis of mutual aid as rational response to post-scarcity (or, here, to managed scarcity during crisis), and to the real mutual aid movements that became visible during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Climate Migration and the Politics of Hospitality
A significant portion of the novel deals with the politics of welcoming climate refugees — both domestic migrants from flooded or burned regions and international migrants from countries more severely affected. The MAGA remnants' resistance to refugee resettlement is the novel's central political conflict, and Doctorow depicts this conflict with care: the resistors are not simply bigots (though bigotry is present) but people who feel displaced in their own communities and whose concerns, even when grounded in bad faith or delusion, have real political force.
The novel's resolution argues that the politics of hospitality — the question of who is welcomed and on what terms — is not separable from the broader politics of climate response. A climate mobilization that cannot build coalitions across lines of race, immigration status, and regional identity will fail politically; the mutual aid networks at the novel's center are also political institutions that build the coalitions the mobilization requires.
Relationship to Doctorow's Political Vision
The Lost Cause is Doctorow's most explicitly optimistic novel about collective political action. Where walkaway imagines walking away from failed institutions, The Lost Cause imagines rebuilding them — a more demanding political vision because it requires working with and through existing institutions, including electoral politics, rather than building parallel ones. The novel was published as Doctorow was developing the most politically engaged phase of his nonfiction work, and it reflects a similar movement: from diagnosis of dysfunction to engagement with what constructive response looks like.