Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
By Catelyn Fitzgerald ’23
Staff Writer
“As a case of partisan polarization and politics, environmentalism, broadly speaking, is one of the most curious and important ones out there,” Adam Hilton, assistant professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, said. The transformation of environmental issues’ place in the political sphere over the past century is unique, from its bipartisan origins to the Republican Party’s reversal of support for sustainable initiatives.
In the early 20th century, the romantic and transcendentalist movements, both of which emphasized the natural world’s aesthetic and spiritual value, inspired prominent leaders and led to the first conservation initiatives in the United States. One of these leaders was President Theodore Roosevelt, who established 230 million acres of public protected lands during his presidency and created the National Park Service and Federal Bird Reserves. Environmental action also thrived during this time period, known as the Progressive Era, due to the widespread faith in American scientific experts.
“One of the things that characterized the politics of progressivism was to actually try to remove a lot of policy out of partisan politics and place it in the hands of technocratic experts,” Hilton explained. Led by the conservationist value of preserving natural beauty, these actions marked the early days of environmental policy.
The modern environmental movement emerged in the 1960s. Over subsequent decades, a powerful coalition of environmental nongovernmental organizations and activist groups formed. These groups lobbied both Democratic and Republican presidents, leading to the establishment of key environmental legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the passage of the Clean Air Act under President Lyndon Johnson and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Richard Nixon.
The first organized opposition to the environmental movement arose in the early 1980s, consisting mostly of Republicans and corporate lobbyists who saw environmental policy as a form of government overreach. “[Their] anti-statist ideology was already predisposed to launch an attack against environmentalism,” Hilton said of the GOP. Anti-statism refers to the political ideology in favor of small, limited government, which is a central piece of the Republican Party platform today.
Despite a growing opposition to environmentalism, environmental policy remained a priority for both parties through the end of the 20th century. According to Hilton, it was Republican presidents who were often at the helm of major environmental legislation. This stance underwent a complete turnaround in what Hilton referred to as the “Republican reversal.” This drastic change has been attributed to “a broader ideological shift in the party as well as the mobilization of the business community.”
Anti-statism in the Republican Party emerged not only as a reaction to the expansion of government control of the environment but to other movements that peaked around the same time, including the civil rights and feminist movements. Unable to take the unpopular stance against equal rights for these groups, cultural and religious conservatives instead argued that government intervention against discriminatory practices breached individual freedom. At the same time, businesses began to organize politically in the 1970s. Their alliance with the Republican Party led to the integration of laissez-faire, anti-taxation and limited government ideologies into the party platform.
According to Hilton, these groups, paired with the geographical shift in the Republican Party coalition towards the fossil fuel-rich interior West and South, combined to create the political context that enabled the GOP to drastically alter its stance on the environment. “All of those things sort of happening over the last 30 years or so have become a really potent mixture and explain why the Republican Party not only stands out against its own history, in its dramatic reversal, but why now the U.S. stands out internationally as an outlier,” Hilton said.
As this perfect storm of political events cemented the limited government, and consequently anti-environment, pillar of the Republican Party platform, Republican presidents continued to oversee the passage of environmental legislation due to the power of the Democratic Party in Congress and of environmental lobbyists. Sustainability also remained popular among Americans despite staunch Republicans’ resentment of the issue, giving Republican presidents an incentive to back successful initiatives and increase their own popularity.
“We forget that Democrats still had firm control of Congress even under Republican presidents, so what we call divided government back then was a situation where Republican presidents actually saw it in their interests to work with the Democrats in Congress, or to build, at least, bipartisan coalitions,” Hilton said.
Today, Congress is often evenly divided between the two parties, leaving legislative power up for grabs every election year. “Neither side has any incentive to give in to the other, because why give in when you can just wait two years and see if Congress changes hands again?” Hilton commented. While this even division between the parties has occurred in the past, it has become a consistent occurrence in recent decades, creating a political climate marked by stalemate.
Party deadlock and political polarization, both of which have grown substantially over the past decade, have made bipartisan collaboration on environmental issues no longer an option. Environmentalism is now considered to be purely a progressive issue. The politicization of environmental legislation has brought it to a slow crawl in Congress.
According to Hilton, environmental politics are now conducted outside the halls of Congress as a result. Today, environmental policy is conducted primarily through executive action, which is vulnerable to becoming caught up in the courts or reversed by future presidents. The congressional stalemate also means that environmental laws are not regularly adapted to changing global circumstances, a phenomenon called “policy drift.”
This period of polarization may have an end in sight. “Someday,” Hilton said, “the party system will depolarize, and environmentalism, I assume, will return to bipartisan consensus. I don’t know when we’re gonna get there — I hope it’s soon — but I don’t see us getting there [in] this 50-50 polarized situation. … Something has to give … first.” Hilton added that we will likely see the beginning of a new era of environmental action as voters become more directly affected by climate change. “We actually have pretty good evidence that voters don’t really care if something is an ‘act of God’ or if there was bad policy that was made by an officeholder — electorates punish officeholders when they’re unhappy.” As climate change increasingly impacts everyday life, Americans will put pressure on politicians from both parties to support environmental legislation, leading to a return to bipartisan consensus on environmental issues.