It is hard to remember but once, not so long ago, the Republican Party in the US was a pathfinder for good science and progressive environmental legislation. President Richard Nixon may have sprayed South-East Asia with herbicides in a failed attempt to root out Vietcong freedom fighters, but back home he created the Environmental Protection Agency, which became a model for similar agencies round the world, and pushed through pioneering legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Those were the days, too, when American government scientists were at the cutting edge of research into climate change and began a push for global action that culminated in the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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Their Republican green sensibility was retreating by the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and the first Bush presidency. But even so, George H. Bush spoke out eloquently in 1989 in favour of protecting the remaining marshlands spared by previous generations bent on draining them. “It’s time to stand the history of wetlands destruction on its head,” he said. “From this year forward, anyone who tries to drain the swamp is going to be up to his ears in alligators.”
Times change. Now Donald Trump is a fully paid up climate change denier, and an avowed enemy of marshes, judging by his inaugural cry at the end of 2026 that, metaphorically at least, he had gone to Washington DC to “drain the swamp”. If we were in any doubt, a few weeks ago he announced a review of the Clean Water Act – another Nixon law –that would end protection for many of the nation’s wetlands.
by James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg (Harvard University Press) analyses this strange U-turn, investigating how America’s conservative party turned against conservation, against the idea of protecting their most magnificent landscapes – and how even its hard core of evangelical Christians, on the face of it committed by scripture to the stewardship of the planet, could be turned into its scourge.
What happened? It seems, as Turner and Isenberg chronicle, that an alliance of libertarians, pro-business free marketeers and anti-federalists triumphed over any other version of conservatism.
But there is surely something more. The Republican Party – the majority of whose legislators in the Senate and House are declared climate sceptics and deniers – has been engulfed by a cult of anti-science. They prize ideology over rationality in a way that echoes nothing so much as the worst days of Communism.
To be reminded of Lysenko’s rejection of genetics and science-based agriculture in Stalin’s Soviet Union, read the ravings of the Republican right in Trump’s America against any notion of a science-based climate policy.
I am old enough to remember that in the 1960s and 1970s it was the left that propagandised against establishment science. I, too, felt the pull to set aside research findings in favour of what we wanted to be true. Now the right has stolen the left’s anti-establishment clothes. And, unlike the lefties of yore, they are in charge.
The extent of this anti-science infiltration of the body politic is laid bare in frightening fashion by Michael Lewis in (Allen Lane), who anatomises the “transition” between the Obama and Trump administrations in early 2017. Or rather the absence of any kind of transition.
Trump’s entourage – Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and the rest – simply did not recognise the need to listen to, let alone digest, the expertise in their departments before making policy. Political stooges replaced scientists, especially in departments where expertise should be most at a premium – such as at the Department of Energy, which among other things is in charge of America’s nuclear technology, NASA and the Department of Agriculture, which is charged with feeding the nation in an era of climate change. It is a “Year Zero” administration, unwilling to learn or understand, more akin to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
This is of a piece with the naive populism of the age; it is a world in which things we thought had been settled and understood suddenly are not. It brings to mind a book written in 1991 by former New Scientist correspondent Misha Glenny. His forecast that the collapse of communism would re-ignite old antagonisms across eastern Europe. Tragically, the wars across the Balkans through the 1990s bore out his analysis.
What perhaps nobody realised back then is that this renaissance of half-forgotten prejudices and plain wilful ignorance might come to stalk the West as well. But it has: from the White House to Brasilia to the Palace of Westminster, ignorance and wishful thinking are all the rage.
Happy New Year.
