Conservative Ideology and the Environment.

• Author: Adler, Jonathan H.

The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environmentfrom Nixon to Trump By James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg 280 pp.; Harvard University Press, 2018

In 1970 a Republican president, Richard Nixon, created the Environmental Protection Agency through executive order. Less than 50 years later, a member of Nixon's party, Rep. Matt Gaetz, would introduce legislation to eliminate the EPA entirely. Whereas Nixon saw the need to embrace environmental protection for electoral advantage, 2016 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump called the EPA's work "a disgrace" and campaigned against the wastefulness of environmental regulation.

As is commonly observed, support for federal environmental regulation used to be a bipartisan enterprise. Most major environmental laws were adopted with broad, bipartisan majorities. In addition to creating the EPA, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act into law. Another Republican president, George H.W. Bush, advocated for and signed the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the most expansive environmental regulatory legislation in the nation's history.

Today, however, federal environmental regulation is a highly partisan and divisive issue. Most of the major environmental statutes have not been reauthorized in decades, and new environmental measures are rarely considered. Democratic officeholders tend to endorse and advocate for more expansive federal environmental regulation, while GOP officeholders resist. There are exceptions, to be sure, but the overall tendency is clear. When President Trump took office, the rollback of federal environmental regulations--particularly those adopted under President Barack Obama--was at the top of his agenda. Indeed, the Trump administration has ushered in the most aggressive environmental deregulatory effort in the nation's history, largely with Republican support.

Shifting ideology / What caused this change? Most explanations focus on the changes within the Republican Party, particularly increased hostility to federal environmental regulation. A common narrative is the GOP about-face is due to corporate influence, the fossil fuel industry in particular. Under this account, Republican officeholders have become beholden to coal barons, oil executives, and the filthy lucre of heavily polluting industries.

In The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump, historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg offer a more nuanced explanation of the Republican Party's change on environmental policy, grounded in a shift in the party's ideology. They point to three factors operating in concert: "rise of conservative ideology, the mobilization of interest groups and activists, and the changes in the environment and the regulatory state." "Republican legislators were not simply bought off by corporate interests," they argue. Rather, the alignment of particular economic interest groups with the Republican Party occurred in concert with changes within the conservative movement and the lived experience of those regulated by federal environmental laws. They write, "Big money alone does not fully explain the Republican embrace of the gospel of more." While business groups--resource extractive industries in particular--certainly played a role by supporting candidates and organizations that opposed regulations restricting resource development, there is also a strong grass-root opposition to federal environmental regulation.

Up through the 1970s, Republicans generally shared the belief that environmental problems required urgent government intervention, accepted the...