The Roots of Anti-Environmental Class Politics

Since the election, many gallons of ink have been spilled outlining the dystopias imagined by a burgeoning class of tech oligarchs who have cast their lot with Trump. However, the contemporary American right’s vision of class struggle has roots that go back roughly half a century. Between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, the American business community became class conscious.

In response to the strong environmental and workplace health and safety regulations of the 1960s and early 1970s, the changing political economic climate, and the insurgent New Right, which was desperate to destroy the New Deal coalition, the American ruling class started to organize. It developed from what Marxists call a class in itself to a class for itself.

Business ramped up its political efforts through national-level lobbies like the National Association of Manufacturers, Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable as well as various industrial trade groups including the American Petroleum Institute. Through these organizations, capital was able to drum up opposition to the gains of labor unions, the civil rights movement, and environmentalism.

The last of these posed perhaps the most serious problems for capital because the environmental protection laws created in the 1960s and ’70s were wildly popular. As one critic of environmentalism bemoaned; “There seems to be no issue, large or small, that can win more support, year in and year out, than the notion of ‘protecting the environment.’” This meant that the struggle for an anti-environmental order couldn’t be waged on an environmental terrain; instead, anti-environmental forces constructed a narrative of class struggle couched in cultural terms.

At the core of this emergent political project was the discovery of an alternative enemy that could function as a right-wing replacement for the Left’s attacks on capital: “the new class.” The concept of the new class is, in fact, old — entangled in historical debates over the socialist state that go back to the late nineteenth century. But in the mid-twentieth-century versions of Trotskyite-cum–National Review editor James Burnham, the new class referred to a managerial elite who purportedly controlled the process of production in both government and corporations, wielding its expertise as a weapon against both the nonmanagerial masses and capital.

Both the Left and Right grappled, in various ways, with the mid-twentieth-century shifts in relations of production and class politics — from the growth of white-collar workers to the rise of the suburbs, from the impacts of higher standards of living on class consciousness to the growing power of “expert” knowledge.

But in the 1970s, a number of conservative commentators — including William Rusher, Irving Kristol, Charles Murray, Robert Novak, Norman Podhoretz, and Peter Berger — turned to the concept of the new class as articulated by Burnham and Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas. These conservatives hoped that Burnham’s and Djilas’s ideas would help them combat the impacts of the New Left and the growth of the regulatory state — the unfortunate (in their view) outcome of the war on poverty, laws aiming to rid the nation of air and water pollution, and new occupational health and safety regulations.

Their central thesis was that, alongside the rise of the postwar welfare state, a class of well-educated professionals had ensconced itself within universities, think tanks, and government agencies. These special interest groups were leveraging expertise — rather than economic clout — to advance their own class interests.

Definitions of the new class varied. Barbara Ehrenreich noted that the concept of the new class often seemed to cohere around nothing more than an “arbitrary selection of people who are professionals as well as liberals” — but one near-constant was the supposed linkage between the new class and both the environmental movement and the governmental employees tasked with implementing newly passed environmental laws, like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

In a 1979 essay, the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Bartley, then an editor at that paper, bemoaned the environmental lobby’s overzealous use of the Endangered Species Act to stall development, and argued that the new class was seeking to create “a society in which rewards would no longer be distributed in wealth, but in power and status, to be won precisely by those skills (abstraction, moralistic rhetoric, manipulation of symbols) in which the highly educated New Class excels.” Characterizing environmentalists as part of America’s “nouveau aristocracy,” journalist William Tucker aptly captured the conservative position: “At heart, environmentalism favors the affluent over the poor, the haves over the have-nots.”

The rise of the new class was, in this vision, evidence of a new coalitional politics on the Left through which the Democratic Party was abandoning the working class in favor of the so-called “underclass” — usually imagined as the dark-skinned lumpenproletariat of the urban ghettos. Longtime National Review publisher William Rusher argued that the “basic cleavage in American politics today” was a “new division [that] pits Establishment WASPs plus their minority group allies against middle Americans and the hyphenated-ethnics (Italo-Americans, Polish-Americans).”

This alliance between the new class and poor racial minorities was, according to Rusher, “a new patronage network”: “Establishment WASPs are in a good position to ‘pay off’ their minority group allies with all sorts of cultural and economic goodies.” From this perspective, the emergent coalition on the Left provided an opportunity for the Right to further fracture the New Deal coalition.

Perhaps the most strategically astute version of this argument was voiced by the white supremacist paleoconservative Sam Francis. Francis observed that there had emerged a grouping of Americans who shared a deep “sense of resentment and exploitation, mainly economic but also broader, that is directed upwards as well as downwards. [Their attitude] points to a distrust of decision-makers in state and economy, as well as to fear of the economically depressed.”

These “middle-American radicals” existed in opposition to both the new class elites who dominate through their control of bureaucratic organizations and the underclass in whose interests the liberal elites often act. For Francis, environmentalism was irrevocably linked with the decadence and cosmopolitanism of a liberal managerial elite and rife with “opportunities for one-worldist mischief.”

His prescriptions, forged in deep dialogue with Burnham, will sound familiar to anyone paying passing attention to the politics of Trumpism: a marriage of economic and ethno-nationalism, a full-throated defense of “traditional” values, and an embrace of a Caesarist executive as “a spearhead against the entrenched elite” and its “main supports . . . Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, the media.”

The Rise of Anti-Environmental Rage

At the core of this conservative class strategy lay a series of struggles over land and resources in the US West, which entered the political agenda via the Sagebrush Rebellion of the late 1970s and eventually coalesced into the industry-funded Wise Use movement of the 1980s and early ’90s.

Working under the banner of organizations like Alliance for America and People for the West!, Wise Use combined the grassroots rage of the Sagebrush Rebellion with the legal logics and libertarian ideologies of the property rights movement and the institutional muscle of the Republican Party.

While the policies that it embraced read like a wish list for the National Association of Manufacturers and Chamber of Commerce, the movement used its narrow base of working-class support to great political effect. In struggles over logging in old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, organizations affiliated with Wise Use claimed that “Hard-working men and women — family people — are losing their jobs, the direct result of preservationist lawsuits and timber sale appeals that are locking up our forests.”

From this vantage point, the real environmentalists were “the farmers and ranchers who have been stewards of the land for generations, the miners and loggers and oil drillers who built our civilization by working in the environment every day, the property owners and technicians and professionals who provided all the material basis of our existence.” Environmentalists, on the other hand, were — as Wise Use leader Ron Arnold put it — “part of an elite, part of the Harvard Yale crowd in three-piece suits and expensive shoes that is destroying the middle class.”

Climate change provided an opportunity to take this strategy with regional resonance and deploy it nationwide. In 1993, congressional Republicans and their industrial allies fought against Bill Clinton’s proposed Btu tax on the grounds that it would be a massive job killer. In 1997, the Global Climate Coalition mobilized opposition to the Kyoto Protocol by making the case that it would “force jobs out of the United States.” And in 2008, Americans for Prosperity rallied the Republican base against a centrist cap-and-trade initiative by claiming that it would lead to “lost jobs, higher taxes and less freedom.” In this moment of triumph, climate denial guru (and future Trump appointee) Myron Ebell bragged that the Right had won the climate fight:

There are whole doubts among the urban bicoastal elite but I think we’ve won the debate with the American people in the heartland, the people who get their hands dirty, people who dig up stuff, grow stuff, and make stuff for a living . . . people who have a closer relationship to tangible reality.

For nearly three decades, the Democrats, led by the same Democratic Leadership Council and Third Way strategists who today embrace a “popularism” of the most reactionary sort, frequently seemed all too happy to peddle a slightly softer version of the Right’s talking points. They argued that command and control regulations ought to be replaced by market-based policies, the public sector is bloated and inefficient, the future lies not in manufacturing and unionized labor but in the entrepreneurs of the emergent information archipelagos, and free trade is a win-win for workers and the environment.

There was a deep irony to all of this. At the very moment the Right was decrying the politics of the new class and making a cultural pitch to workers, the Democratic Party abandoned unions and embraced the new class as the path toward progress.

While embraced by the Right and embodied by Democratic centrists, the new class narrative was far from hegemonic. In a 1990 essay, “The New Class Controversy,” Christopher Lasch wrote that “the explanatory power” of the new class “is weakened not only by its sociological imprecision but by the right’s refusal to implicate capitalism in its indictment of our moral and cultural confusion.” He concluded that “the right’s inability to get beyond cliches about hedonism, permissiveness, and moral relativism” kept their new class narrative from becoming persuasive to most Americans. Lasch was right, at least then.

Now, however, the political conjuncture is decidedly different. To say that inequality has skyrocketed has become cliché. For decades, the working class has faced stagnant wages and precarious employment, while the middle class — to the extent that such a label ever made analytical sense — has seen the very conditions that perhaps once justified a separate class status (i.e., earnings, benefits, and autonomy) all hollowed out.

Not only has the progress that we’d made in the fight against pollution stalled out, but we are now aware of pervasive toxic contaminants — like PFAS, or “forever chemicals” — that we seem incapable of responding to at the federal level even under the friendliest of administrations. The disruptions posed by climate change, no possibility in the distant future, are confronted by ordinary people in their day-to-day lives.

Meanwhile, faith in institutions is abysmal. Political cynicism is the norm. Rates of unionization continue to decline and a decade-plus of liberal pieties surrounding identity (absent any real material improvement in the lives of working-class people across lines of race or gender) have led to a social media–driven backlash against the cultural mores of “liberal elites.”

Here Lasch’s analysis is instructive. The same punch that swung and missed in the ’70s and ’80s delivers a glancing blow today. And the stakes of the fight are much higher now due to the nature of the opposition. Prior to the election, Project 2025 architect and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Russell Vought, was taped outlining his goals for the next four years. Warning of a “Marxist takeover” of the country, he mused:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

In this worldview, the new class bureaucrats of the ’70s and ’80s have morphed into conspirators of the “deep state,” enemies of democracy who must be crushed by a Caesarist executive. As Elon Musk put it, “There’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and cabinet. . . . [I]f the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented, and that means we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.”

While employees of agencies like the EPA — monitoring air and water quality, reviewing scientific studies, promulgating regulations in pursuit of goals written into statutes, etc. — are necessitated by legislation passed by Congress and signed by previous presidents, governmental employees here are portrayed as little more than self-interested pawns standing in the way of the democratic will of the people.

“The true threat to democracy,” observed Republican congressman Tom McClintock, “is an entrenched ruling class that operates entirely outside the control of the duly elected representatives of the people. . . . The federal bureaucracy increasingly acts independently and often in defiance of the people’s choices.”

Reminiscent of the 1970s, when the new class was seen to be in cahoots with an undeserving underclass, today’s bureaucratic elites are rhetorically tethered to the politics of “wokeness.” A 2020 article in the Journal of American Greatness made the case that there are “twin paths to socialism” in the United States today: “equity and climate change alarmism.” “To stop socialism,” the author concludes, “Americans must stand up to the alarmists that claim bigotry and fossil fuel are existential threats.”

When the Trump administration attempted to freeze all grants, loans, and financial assistance coming from executive agencies, a memorandum from the OMB provided the following rationale: “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” The argument here is more fossil fuels are a necessity for working-class flourishing, creating jobs while lowering energy costs and inflation. By contrast, environmental protections are part of a new class project. Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon contends that:

The Dems’ new base is the work-from-home pyjama class, the people with the luxury of caring about climate change and ‘January 6’, while their neighbours wonder if they should put food on the table or gas in the car because there isn’t enough money for both.

She recently summed up her position as follows: “The entire Green New Deal is class warfare against the working class.”

Herein lies the significance of the aforementioned slippage between the IRA and the GND. The IRA, even if it were to be fully institutionalized, wouldn’t make solar panels or heat pumps affordable for most working-class people, would do little to reduce electric bills for the Americans most in need, and wouldn’t in and of itself stem the flight of American manufacturing jobs. The intransigence of congressional Republicans is, of course, a major reason why the more ambitious Build Back Better agenda was reduced to the IRA, but there is, nonetheless, a kernel of truth to the narrative advanced on the Right.

By contrast, the GND laid out by Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign proposed a decade-long 16.3 trillion-dollar public investment in a massive green jobs program, a just transition for fossil fuel workers and frontline communities, and a shift to publicly owned utilities. It would be financed by increased taxes on fossil fuel industries, scaled down military spending, and new income tax revenue from the jobs created. Such a set of policies would, as industry well knows, send fossil capital packing. The Green New Deal is, in fact, class warfare against the ruling class.

But in the rhetorical strategy of the Right, factual accuracy is beside the point. The GND, as deployed by Trump and his allies, is nothing more than a signpost for the cultural and aesthetic commitments supposedly embraced by environmental elitists and their liberal allies — a pie-in-the-sky utopianism, a sniveling disdain for workers, a moralistic wokeism. In this vein, the nod to the GND is similar to earlier anti-environmental zealots noting the striking “coincidence” that Earth Day falls on Vladimir Lenin’s birthday, or asserting that environmentalists are simply Marxists in green garb. But without a socialist left of any significance to demonize, the lies get even more absurd and “wokeness” functions as a not-so-subtle stand-in for “Communist.” Meet the new enemy, same as the old enemy.

To stem the tide of class dealignment, it is first necessary to admit that elements of the Right’s new class politics are attractive for a reason: governmental institutions have done much to earn the distrust that prevails; bureaucracies can be opaque, impersonal, and often antidemocratic; and members of the professional managerial class — including many environmentalists and environmental bureaucrats — have often pushed policies that do little to help (and in some cases actively harm) working-class communities.

At the same time, however, the conservative attack on the so-called new class has been ongoing for nearly half a century, and the results have been nothing short of disastrous for the working class. The solution is not to dismantle the state but to democratize it; not to weaken the environmental regulations that hold corporations in check, but to make the regulatory process more transparent; not to get rid of scientific and technical experts who study and monitor pollutants, but to make these experts more accountable to ordinary people (especially those who are exposed to toxins in their workplaces, neighborhoods, or homes).

The Trump administration is banking on the fact that workers will channel their outrage at environmental and bureaucratic “elitists” and seek solace in the psychic comfort of a nation made great again by fossil fuels. But wrapping ourselves in the cloth of an oil-drenched flag won’t provide protection from rising tides and raging flames, from toxic fumes and contaminated water, from soaring home insurance and health care debt. The truth is that workers and environmentalists share a common enemy: the fossil fuel companies, their long-standing partners in finance, and their newfound allies in the tech sector — all of whom continue to reap absurd profits from exploiting workers and the earth.

Contra the Right’s talking points, a worker and community-led Green New Deal is, in fact, the best path forward.