Paehlke, Robert. Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
In Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics, author Robert Paehlke argues that for “environmentalism” as a holistic creed to have any meaningful impact in the country “environmentalists must develop clear and consistent positions on a full range of political and social issues … A full development of environmental ideas—an environmental ideology—becomes possible only when environmentalism is seen as neither ‘left’ nor ‘right.’” This seems reasonable enough, and reflects a viewpoint lately incorporated into the gun rights agenda, with the NRA rightly proclaiming the 2nd Amendment a “civil right.” And it seems clear that the current compartmentalization of environmentalism (itself a nebulous term signifying almost anything dealing with our physical surroundings and their interaction with our selves and our societies) into the “liberal” camp has served to devalue the impact of environmentalist ideals as seen apart from the usual litany of other “liberal” issues such as abortion rights, the political and economic enfranchisement of non-European races, and the governmental regulation of firearms. But while Paehlke sees the possibility that “environmentalism can be developed into an ideology as coherent as any of the three classical Western ideals of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism,” he fails to fully explore what his proposed plan of “bringing within the system” will do to American environmentalism at the popular level.
The great schism in the conservation movement today is between the DC-based “corporate environmentalists”—those who pushed for the Clinton administrations to get elected and then sat on their hands while Bill Clinton sold them down the river to his allies in industry—and their disgruntled grass-roots constituents, who feel betrayed and alienated by the national elite. In developing an elaborate scheme to further politicize, bureaucratize, and administer environmentalists, Paehlke risks a continued alienation of the very “populist” aspects of the movement he claims to support, with further fragmentation of what is and always has been a very loosely-banded confederation of thought and feeling. And this is another problem with Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics. The environmental “movement” encompasses a tremendously diverse array of ideological agendas, from wilderness preservation to animal liberation to pollution trading. No one party can or should promise to deliver the full range of hopes for an expansive political spectrum running from the harshly conservative to the dreamily liberal; to do so would invite ridicule and further marginalization, as we’ve seen in the national media when Ralph Nader gained too big a lead in the polls.
What we are witnessing today in this halting formulation of a third national party and in the almost messianic stature afforded any candidate with a fresh political message is that the stolid power bases of the Democratic and Republican cliques are ebbing. The GOP has over the past decade moved further and further to the right, while the Democrats, rather than holding their guns as the statist champions of the poor and the downtrodden, now find themselves having sold their moral souls for eight years in the White House, and forced to follow their rivals’ adamant lead. The political center clearly cannot hold, particularly among the disillusioned adherents of the old “New Left,” whose Kennedy-era claim to moral superiority was shaken to its arthritic foundations by the sneering fixers of the Clinton regime, that cabal of apparatichiks and selfish users who smugly exploited the idealists in their ranks as surely as did the strutting warlords of the final Nixon administration.
The ability of one “movement” or party to appeal to the wide range of people and ideas that characterized the now defunct New Deal seems to be no longer possible. Why then try to force a rowdy pack of square pegs like the American environmental “movement” into the controlled homogeneous niche of national political parties? What we need is not another national Green Party (whose failure to mobilize any broad support is indicative of the wariness with which most American environmentalists regard “environmental parties”), but the political pressure of millions of outraged conservationists brought down on politicians of all ideological persuasions. Pox vobiscum. As more and more Americans cast their votes hither and yon according to the prevailing issues of the day—wholly regardless of political party affiliation (“Independent” is by far the fastest-growing registration choice for new voters)—it is increasingly apparent that the ward-heeling party blocs of the past are no more viable in the long-term than strip mining, strip malls or “political correctness.”
The “Loyal Party Man” is an obsolete throwback to a time when choosing a political party really was a decision of belief, rather than the agonizingly puerile coin toss that today discourages hundreds of thousands of citizens from voting. These days it is the many and varied environmental problems we face every day that count, not the creaking and senile machinery of orthodox party politics.
In Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics, author Robert Paehlke argues that for “environmentalism” as a holistic creed to have any meaningful impact in the country “environmentalists must develop clear and consistent positions on a full range of political and social issues … A full development of environmental ideas—an environmental ideology—becomes possible only when environmentalism is seen as neither ‘left’ nor ‘right.’” This seems reasonable enough, and reflects a viewpoint lately incorporated into the gun rights agenda, with the NRA rightly proclaiming the 2nd Amendment a “civil right.” And it seems clear that the current compartmentalization of environmentalism (itself a nebulous term signifying almost anything dealing with our physical surroundings and their interaction with our selves and our societies) into the “liberal” camp has served to devalue the impact of environmentalist ideals as seen apart from the usual litany of other “liberal” issues such as abortion rights, the political and economic enfranchisement of non-European races, and the governmental regulation of firearms. But while Paehlke sees the possibility that “environmentalism can be developed into an ideology as coherent as any of the three classical Western ideals of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism,” he fails to fully explore what his proposed plan of “bringing within the system” will do to American environmentalism at the popular level.
The great schism in the conservation movement today is between the DC-based “corporate environmentalists”—those who pushed for the Clinton administrations to get elected and then sat on their hands while Bill Clinton sold them down the river to his allies in industry—and their disgruntled grass-roots constituents, who feel betrayed and alienated by the national elite. In developing an elaborate scheme to further politicize, bureaucratize, and administer environmentalists, Paehlke risks a continued alienation of the very “populist” aspects of the movement he claims to support, with further fragmentation of what is and always has been a very loosely-banded confederation of thought and feeling. And this is another problem with Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics. The environmental “movement” encompasses a tremendously diverse array of ideological agendas, from wilderness preservation to animal liberation to pollution trading. No one party can or should promise to deliver the full range of hopes for an expansive political spectrum running from the harshly conservative to the dreamily liberal; to do so would invite ridicule and further marginalization, as we’ve seen in the national media when Ralph Nader gained too big a lead in the polls.
What we are witnessing today in this halting formulation of a third national party and in the almost messianic stature afforded any candidate with a fresh political message is that the stolid power bases of the Democratic and Republican cliques are ebbing. The GOP has over the past decade moved further and further to the right, while the Democrats, rather than holding their guns as the statist champions of the poor and the downtrodden, now find themselves having sold their moral souls for eight years in the White House, and forced to follow their rivals’ adamant lead. The political center clearly cannot hold, particularly among the disillusioned adherents of the old “New Left,” whose Kennedy-era claim to moral superiority was shaken to its arthritic foundations by the sneering fixers of the Clinton regime, that cabal of apparatichiks and selfish users who smugly exploited the idealists in their ranks as surely as did the strutting warlords of the final Nixon administration.
The ability of one “movement” or party to appeal to the wide range of people and ideas that characterized the now defunct New Deal seems to be no longer possible. Why then try to force a rowdy pack of square pegs like the American environmental “movement” into the controlled homogeneous niche of national political parties? What we need is not another national Green Party (whose failure to mobilize any broad support is indicative of the wariness with which most American environmentalists regard “environmental parties”), but the political pressure of millions of outraged conservationists brought down on politicians of all ideological persuasions. Pox vobiscum. As more and more Americans cast their votes hither and yon according to the prevailing issues of the day—wholly regardless of political party affiliation (“Independent” is by far the fastest-growing registration choice for new voters)—it is increasingly apparent that the ward-heeling party blocs of the past are no more viable in the long-term than strip mining, strip malls or “political correctness.”
The “Loyal Party Man” is an obsolete throwback to a time when choosing a political party really was a decision of belief, rather than the agonizingly puerile coin toss that today discourages hundreds of thousands of citizens from voting. These days it is the many and varied environmental problems we face every day that count, not the creaking and senile machinery of orthodox party politics.
