Climate Change is the New Bipartisan Consensus Republicans Have to Combat

Two seismic events happened this summer on the issue of climate. In June, on a 6-3 conservative vote, the Supreme Court went most of the way to reversing a 1984 ruling that allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to creatively interpret congressional legislation to increase regulations, vindicating conservatives. In August, along completely partisan lines, Congress passed and the President signed a $750 billion spending bill to fight climate change. But for Democrats and some anti-Trump Republicans, this bill isn’t just a seismic event on its own. It’s a different opportunity: to make climate the new bipartisan cause for expanding government.

Exhibit A in this move is a new column by Bret Stephens, who five years ago began his first column in The New York Times arguing that the science behind climate change wasn’t definitive. The “radical” message of a column that led to letters demanding Stephens be fired, and to the publisher entreating subscribers to stop cancelling, was this:

None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism.

On October 26 of this year, Stephens reported in a column that he now believed climate change was a clear and present danger. But he also argued that outside of the occasional “nudge,” markets, not the state, should solve the problem. This column, by someone who identifies as a conservative and enjoys respect from some Republicans and some Democrats, signals the new institutional consensus around climate change anti-big government Republicans should confront. Here’s the bottom line: Stephens is lending his voice to national government expansion, and he’s doing it a way that’s hard to trace or even define because he’s using conservative “free-market” bona-fides to do it.

Stephens isn’t arguing for government intervention overtly. Instead, with a short reference and a link, to a review of a book by Harvard professor and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, he opens but doesn’t own the possibility of a “nudge.” The review Stephens links to summarizes Sunstein’s book, Nudge, this way:

The point of the book is that people are often not the best judges of what will serve their interests, and that institutions, including government, can help people do better for themselves (and the rest of us) with small changes—nudges—in the structure of the choices people face. 

This raises questions Stephens doesn’t address. What does a nudge mean for actual policies? Who gets to define how far we nudge: legislative or executive? How big of a nudge are we talking about…is there a limit? And what does “structure of…choices people face” mean for our daily lives?

Here are more questions. Why doesn’t the piece show how government already underwrites corporations that spend money to fight climate change? Why doesn’t it talk about the influence of too-big-to-fail corporations on climate nonprofits? Why doesn’t it mention the conflicts-of-interest caused by foreign funding of these nonprofits: are we willing to allow Chinese corporatists to fund American nonprofits in the name of fighting for cleaner air?

Here’s another question. Why does a major policy shift by a respected national columnist read like a personal growth story? (Stephens started his Times’ career questioning climate science, now he’s coming around, the text includes giant stills of melting ice in Greenland and ends with a poem by a Victorian poet?)

Finally, the bottom-line question—why isn’t Stephens addressing the climate issue in what a conversative would think is the obvious way? Since the two major pieces of climate news this year are the Supreme Court ruling and the Congressional legislation, why not write a column (1.) marking his changing stance on climate change (2.) registering his objections to the bill, since he thinks climate change demands a market solution, and (3.) stating his support of the Court ruling? Why write a column advising climate scientists how to talk to climate deniers and urging Republicans to become the party of the environment along the lines of Theodore Roosevelt, the biggest-government Republican in history next to George W. Bush, whom Stephens supported?

The answer is that Stephens believes in big government. Every past bipartisan consensus of the past thirty years, the ones done in the name of protecting Americans that end up expanding government and diminishing our liberties, earned his support. He backed the war on crime, creating spiraling incarceration rates President Trump only just reduced in 2018. He was an ardent backer of the war on terror and the Iraq invasion, which ballooned the debt ($3 trillion for Iraq alone) and created the bureaucratic colossus that is the Department of Homeland Security. And though he opposed the Obama-era extra-judicial kangaroo courts monitoring campus rape, his main theme has never been national abuse. His main theme, from his criticisms of “churlishness” on Twitter to his criticism of Democrats over their actions during the Kavanaugh hearings, has been more idealistic: ordered and gracious government to manage an evolving society.

Stephens styles himself a writer of ideas, and if there was an ideas source for him, it would probably be Edmund Burke. Some conservatives revere Burke for his criticisms of the French Revolutionaries trying to “invent the world anew,” as they tore down the monarchy and put a Revolutionary order in its place. But Burke's argument is limited. A frequent Stephens’ ally put it best: Burke's is an extended argument for caution about the reasons for change and the pace of change. What it’s not is an argument about whether change should or should not be happening.

That argument comes from another conservative student of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville, who went much, much deeper than Burke. He didn’t care about the monarchy being abolished, he cared why the Revolution was happening. And he argued that the centralizing policies of French kings from the 1660s to the 1790s, the ones that made the country richer by pumping up public debt, made totalitarianism inevitable by demolishing intermediate structures like local councils that checked centralized power. Tocqueville’s argument is an argument about structures, not surfaces. And it operates from the sureness that if power rests in always-growing institutions, it will become tyrannical.

Stephens would probably argue that the politics that come from this position aren’t re-balancing—they’re reactionary. Most conservatives, though, would argue that a rebalancing from an expanding and oppressive national government is necessary: that’s why they’re thrilled with the Court’s ruling on the EPA. This split in the party helps explain Stephens’ turn on climate. To a Burkean conservative like Stephens, working in a Democratic institution and estranged from most of his party, there are clear short-term benefits to the move.

For one thing, it takes away from the Democrats’ focus on gender, race and sexual identity which centrists like Stephens have spent ten years fighting. Rather than talking about reparations or racial ideology, the focus is policy: good government, expert government, unified government in the name of averting climate catastrophe. For another, it creates a rational debate built on the assumption that the national government should address climate and the only question is about how much government to use. This replaces an argument about actual beliefs with an argument about process.

Conservatives have an effective response to each hope.

When it comes to de-radicalizing the Democratic Party using climate, any achievement is short-term. In ten years, the growth of the administrative state to fight climate will allow Democrats already equating identity politics with climate politics plenty of room to push their agenda without much public scrutiny. Then there’ll be any number of racial and social and gender justice programs inside the EPA. Look at a similar situation with the Department of Homeland Security: an administrative agency created in 2002 to protect Americans from terrorists was for most of this summer about to start monitoring Americans’ speech to protect them from COVID. Only public outcry and (probably) an upcoming election stopped it.

When it comes to the quest for rational discourse, at the risk of being glib, look at the top comment from The New York Times’ website on Stephens’ article:

Welcome to twentieth century realization, Bret. Glad to have you getting a bit more in tune with reality, even though your epiphany is almost 25 years late. Thing is, you had to go see for yourself (using lots of fossil fuel to get there, BTW). Glad to know you are open minded (liberal!) enough to do that. Doubt many of you denier cohort would be so liberal as to trouble themselves with a threat to their cherished beliefs. As we’ve observed, such folk will make a grandiose speech holding a snowball to assert it’s all madey-uppey by charlatans who just want gummint funding. You’ve done the thing every scientist is obligated to do which is to change one’s mind when presented with evidence contrary to prior belief. Nice of you to sue for peace but I think you’ll find you are now to be branded a traitor and an enemy rather than a mediator. To more than a few, you will now be associated with the tree hugging libs. Good luck with that.

This isn’t rational discourse, this is polite hate speech. “Gummint funding”?: Whose humanity is being targeted here? It has 252 recommendations.

Like the party-line emails that go out to activists, the commenters on the Times are the newspapers’ most reliable consumers, the drivers of what it produces. They’re like the most active parts of the Democratic nonprofit world, who increasingly drive legislation (a major complaint of Democratic senators during the Biden Administration’s thwarted push on Build Back Better.) They’re not Burkeans, they’re believers. They’re not going to be balanced by the rational voice of Bret Stephens, because they don’t care, and because he has no institutional or political base to push them from.

But if you’re a Burkean like Stephens, you think that the instiutions can stop the political war happening between centralizers and de-centralizers, something we haven’t seen in this country since the 1790s. If you’re like Tocqueville, and most Republicans are, you think that politics is about power and where it resides: nation or states, legislatures or administrators. That means it’s about balance and trade-offs, not movement in one direction (government growth) that counts as “progress.” These are the terms of the fight, and they won’t change.

Moves like Stephens’ (and some of his allies) show that climate is the new bipartisan front of the expansionist agenda, the one where “rational” institutional conservatives will lend their support to the wrong side of this fight. Republicans and de-centralizers should prepare.

*photo credit Grant Wickes