We expect our elected leaders to look out for our interests and the interests of future generations, not just those of extractive industries and others with deep pockets who seek short-term profits by weakening the laws that give long-term protection to the American people and the land and creatures we all love. (Rep America)
Rep America, a national pro-environment Republican organization, was founded to respond to what it terms "the unfortunate anti-environmental zeal of many GOP leaders in the 104th Congress () that filled conservation-minded Republican voters across the country with dismay." This is primarily a lobbying organization -- and appears to be an important conservative voice for good environmental policy in the United States. Recently I spent several hours on the organization's site, reading a good part of the analysis and agreeing with most of it.
We've seen a massive transfer of power from the grassroots -- and the middle class -- to special interests. The erosion of trust and civility in the public dialogue is one of key factors enabling this transfer. People withdraw from what they see as a corrupt, poisonous or simply irrelevant political arena. But the power they relinquish increases the influence of special interests. Rebuilding civic trust is one of the keys to restoring the balance of power -- and a prerequisite, I believe, to long-term sustainable environmental and economic policies. As I read Rep America's statements, I began to think of this organization as a voice of conscience that can help restore civic trust across party and ideological lines.
Jim DiPeso, Rep America's policy director, lives in the Seattle area. I wrote to thank him for his organization's work. Jim agreed to meet with me for an interview. I was interested in discussing two major areas. First, Rep America's environmental policies. Second, I am curious to gain more understanding of Republicanism -- independent from what I see as its most problematic current aspects.
Jim's views on non-environmental issues are his own personal opinions. As an organization, REP takes positions strictly on environmental issues and does not take positions on other issues. Its membership is made up of people with diverse views. The uniting issue is concern for the environment. The exchange recorded here is a reconstruction from hasty notes, not exact quotes.
Jim is a lanky person who gives an overall impression of quickness. His conversation has that quality of dimension that struck me as a probable reflection of an historical sensibility -- and perhaps a habit of considering many things at once. His previous profession as a journalist for a daily newspaper led to a four-year assignment covering the environmental beat near Lake Tahoe when it was first facing intensive development. This is the second deepest lake in the United States, Jim noted, renowned for its clear deep water. Unfortunately, the clarity -- and quality -- of the water was compromised by the sudden development of the land around it. Lake Tahoe faced an acute and very serious ecological threat. Much of it was averted because enviromentalists rallied to the cause. Although he had always been pro-environment, this journalistic assignment was a turning point for him, an intensive education in the mechanics and meanings of the environmmental movement.
Noemie: How do you think people who may disagree on many issues can work together help restore governance that represents our common interests?
Jim: We need to find ways to connect politics to real world concerns again. Politics needs to become relevant to people in their daily lives. Part of the answer is finding a way to get the money out. This Arctic thing is our number one pork barrel piece of legislation now. Conservatives have allied themselves with special interests and Congress' Republican leadership has lost touch with traditional conservative ideas of stewardship, saving for the future, and leaving ourselves enough margin for error with our life support system which is the environment. It's not only conservatives who have these problems. All politics -- Democrat and Republican -- has become machine politics. The pursuit of self-aggrandizement has edged out attention to real concerns.
Gerrymandering is another big problem we've got to address. As they say nowadays, it's as if voters don't choose their leaders any more -- leaders choose their voters. Here in Washington we have an independent state commission to do the districting for congressional representation and legislators have to vote yea or nay on their recommendations but can't offer amendments. This makes us a little more competitive.
Noemie: I am alarmed by the flow of big money into our judicial races as well as all the other races. The Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW), for example, is increasingly gaining the ability to swing important elections in our state and it's as if we have almost no defenses against this.
Jim: It's sickening, the influence of special interests on judicial and other races. As an organization, we don't have a position on this. In Arizona and Maine they've weakened the link between big interests and elections.
Noemie: I understand that in Connecticut, too, they've just passed major clean elections legislation. Another factor that disturbs me is that we win victories and money is set aside for environmental purposes and then it gets used for other things.
Jim: We need to restore the Republican party's stewardship role. If we could go back to the dynamic of the 1960s and early 1970s where Democrats and Republicans competed to be environmental champions, we'd be a lot better off.
Richard Nixon, the bête noire of Democrats, proposed a 37-point program in 1970 that set our current framework of environmental law, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. This was proposed by Nixon and enacted by a Democratic congress led by Edmund Muskie. In those days, money was in politics, but it wasn't as egregious as it is now. Also, we didn't have this political culture where our differences are personal and bitter. Goldwater and Humphrey would battle it out in the Senate and then go out for drinks at the end of the day. Goldwater and Kennedy in 1964 were planning to go from town to town to do a series of public debates. It's hard to imagine something like this happening in today's political climate.
We need our differences; we need the two party system. If all you have is two sides talking past each other, you're not going to have good policy. Our system is structured to force compromise. Our founders were afraid of just what has happened now - that we'd be polarized into many factions with an impaired ability to reach agreement on important issues. Both parties are unhealthy now. They are too ideologically uniform. It's an echo chamber - no one is there to question the ideology - and differences are demonized. If you differ from the party line, you are an apostate. The days of Dan Evans Republicans and Scoop Jackson Democrats are gone. We've got to get back to intellectually challenging people.
Noemie: Northwest Progressive Portal published an article by a former Chair of King County's Republican party not too long ago that also explored this unifying role of the political parties, how they can help reduce some of that polarization. (Political Parties Key to the Future of Grassroots Politics, by Reed Davis.)
Jim: I'd like to see that article.
Another thing would be media reform. Our media culture has been cheapened. What we see on TV is trivial and superficial. We unplugged our TV in my family three years ago. You can't get your information from the six o'clock news anymore. People are not well informed. Politics has become mean and personal. Democracy cannot function unless you have a civil society where you can have mature debate over issues that matter to people. To have a healthy culture, we need a variety of strains of political thought that compete with each other. We see the results of this decline in voter turnout.
William Raspberry, a liberal columnist, had a piece in the Seattle Times recently where he was reviewing the change in his approach over the years from one of confronting political "enemies" to one of engaging opponents in discussion. He pointed out that through civil discussion, you find more in common with your political adversaries than you'd think. When people are able to clearly describe where they disagree with each other, then they're also better equipped to find their common ground. (Seeing the other guy's side, Dec. 20, Seattle Times).
Noemie: Media reform, campaign finance reform, districting reform, a cultural change that brings back reasonable political dialogue. How do we get there from here? It seems almost beyond us now.
Jim: The analogy I like to use comes from a movie, The Shawshank Redemption. Did you see that one?
Noemie: That was a fantastic movie.
Jim: Morgan Freeman tells how his friend dug his way out of prison. He says, 'all it took is pressure and time - that's all it ever takes, is pressure and time.' That's the way through that I see to reforming the political culture within the Republican party, to preserving Republicanism. Rep America is working on that from the environmental standpoint.
What follows next is discussion on general political philosophy - most of it not related to Rep America's mission. Somewhere in this discussion, Jim suggested I look up paleo-conservatism and originalism to get a deeper perspective on some current traditional conservatism thought.
After our conversation ended, I realized that it was on issues of cultural plurality where I found my ideas most diverging from what I understood Jim to express. I don't disagree that we should preserve important elements of our Western culture. However, my perspective has been that our most pressing cultural challenges involve the other side of plurality - our need for more cross-cultural unity in a very diverse society and, more acutely, our need to better attend to persistent societal ills that afflict us along color and culture lines. Both sides of this are relevant to core challenges that our society faces. My feeling is that neither is getting a fair hearing.
Noemie: I'd be interested to hear more from you on some of the difference you perceive between traditional liberalism and traditional conservatism.
Jim: Well, one of the things that I identify with conservative thought is that it puts value on preserving Western culture - our scientific and literary and political heritage. Our Constitutional system of government is based on checks and balances. This is a revolutionary idea. I think it is in danger in this country now, when we have a government spying on its citizens, looking at library records and seeing a terrorist under every bed. It's worth preserving.
Another distinction between liberals and conservatives might be the emphasis that conservatives put on fiscal responsibility. What we have now doesn't represent conservative thought; it's topsy turvy. We have a supposedly conservative administration - that's put our country $600 billion in debt to the world's largest Communist power. This is like the Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. China now has this power over us. The reason American consumers can whip out their credit cards is because China and other countries are funding our debt.
Another thing is that conservatives want to keep government out of people's private lives. I don't want the government telling womenfolk what they can and cannot do with their bodies and their babies. And as far as gay marriage - you may have seen the piece by the conservative David Brooks who said that not only should we allow gay marriage - but we should insist on it - as it encourages fidelity and responsibility.
Noemie: Yes, I actually did see that piece.
Jim: Another conservative premise is that the role of government is limited. Government regulates commerce. And, in an industrialized society, government has a role to play in managing our life support system -- our environment. Private commerce also has a role to play. We are seeing an expansion of government power under this administration. For example, with the Executive branch arrogating war powers to itself. The Constitution provides a time limit on appropriations for a reason.
Noemie: Eisenhower, who warned us against allowing the military industrial complex to gain too much power was Republican, wasn't he?
Jim: Yes.
Noemie: When you talk about preserving Western culture, are you referring to things like limiting immigration to the United States or making sure that only English is spoken in the schools, things like that?
Jim: Not so much those things. Our culture in this country is based on European civilization. I believe this is something worth protecting. Western literature, a government philosophy that comes out of the Enlightenment, the scientific method. Our current popular culture is coarse culture; it lacks depth. Students are not challenged. It's not that students shouldn't be reading classics of Asian or African literature - they should. But they should also be reading classics of Western literature.
Noemie: As far as fiscal responsibility, this is something that progressives are now very concerned with as well. Many progressive candidates incorporate this as part of their platform.
Jim: Yes. But this is relatively new for progressives. It is actually progressives who conceptualized deficit spending in the 1930s as a stop gap measure during a depression. It was a way to get the government and country back on its feet. You hire the unemployed, borrow money to pay them, and then when conditions improve, you pay the money back and balance the budget. Then during Vietnam, Johnson borrowed to fund the Vietnam war. But I don't think any of the Democrats - from Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy, would have expected the level of debt we now see under Bush. I think they would have been stupefied. It is a real irony that under Clinton, a Democrat, we got out debt - and under a supposed conservative we have the highest level of debt ever.
Traditional conservatives, a Goldwater conservative, for example, would frame fiscal responsibility as a way to keep government limited and small. I'm not sure how progressives would frame it. Historically, I see progressives first adopting this principle under Clinton, who used the strategy of triangulation - co-opting traditionally conservative policies - to deflect the power of his opponents. So you had Clinton working on international trade agreements, reforming welfare, and getting us out of debt. You see the legacy of this approach in the DLC.
Noemie: As a social liberal, I find myself connecting with some social conservatives whom I know on a personal level - in more ways than I connect with some liberals. A concern with the quality and healthfulness of American foods is one of these. Midwifery is another. Not only is midwifery care a safer way to go for low-risk births, but also it helps keep the woman and the family in control of the experience of childbirth - and minimizes the interference of the medical bureaucracy. Midwifery seems both more conservative and liberal to me than mainstream obstetrics. I find a lot of convergence on educational thought with conservatives, as well. When I homeschooled my son, the other parents I met tended to be either very liberal or very conservative. And, even though my approach is secular, I'm very sympathetic to the reaction of the religious right against the commercialization of sex and violence -- the trivialization of important experiences -- that I see in mass media culture. I don't support censorship - but it really annoys me that these big media organizations that bring us misinformation in our news - and that profit by pitting conservatives and liberals against each other on social issues - that they then turn around and make money by exploiting our drives and emotional responses.
Jim: This sounds a little like what they call "crunchy conservatism" - except for the religious aspect. These are social conservatives who go to church. They are very alarmed by certain elements of popular culture - the trivialization and shallowness of the media. They favor small town life and community cohesiveness, the old lifeways. They don't want their children hanging out at the strip malls. They value whole foods and the preservation old traditions. I think in many ways they're right - except that I don't share their Evangelical world view.
They are responding to real cultural challenges. Everywhere you go in the United States, it looks like the same place. You see Home Depot and Dennys. I was on a trip not long ago to give a series of workshops on air quality. And I forgot what state I was in. I had to look at license plates to figure out where I was. We are seeing the homogenization of our culture. When I go traveling I want to eat local foods. Maryland is known for its crabs. But when I went there recently, the crabs were imported because Chesapeake Bay is too polluted.
Noemie: I was interested to read that Rep America favors reform of our agricultural subsidy system that would shift us from a commodity subsidy system to one that promotes environmental stewardship. I organized an environmental forum this past June where Don Stuart of American Farmland Trust spoke of that organization's campaign for a 2007 farm bill to institute those reforms.
Jim: Bush almost got it right on agriculture. At the beginning of his first term, there was a good report from the Department of Agriculture, which said, let's get away from these subsidies. Let's pay the farmers for conservation. It was this administration's policy to do just that - but they didn't push it. Now they're pushing it again. Reducing our subsidies is right in line with a traditional conservative viewpoint. We have a lot of farmers who are on a treadmill. They don't want to be dependent on government handouts, but it's part of their business plan now and they can't back away from it and stay in business. They are stuck there and their representatives in Congress are stuck with them. This is a moral issue, too. If our price supports are undercutting the ability of African farmers to make a living - then we are affecting the lives of those people as well.
Noemie: There's a statement on Rep America's site - something about pollutants being an invasion of the private rights and space of Americans. I'm very supportive of the incorporation of the precautionary principle into our policies. It seems to address at least part of this need we have to change our way of doing business, limiting the runaway ability of some individuals and entities -- for example chemical manufacturers -- to make decisions that change people's lives for the worse, that make them ill or even kill them -- all under our legal radar screen.
Jim: You may be interested in reading Gordon Durnil's, The Making of a Conservative Enviromnmentalist. Durnil served on the U.S.-Canadian International Joint Commission that deals with boundary issues and saw, first hand, some of the consequences, some of the effects on people's bodies of the persistent discharge of toxins into the Great Lakes.
Noemie: What did you think of the Shellengberger and Nordhaus article, The Death of Environmentalism? Jim: They made some valid points but I thought they overstated their case. They raise some good issues. Environmentalism does need to change. But it's not dead. New language needs to be formed to resonate with Red America. Where they went wrong, in particular I think, is where they advocated for making environmentalism an issue for progressives, part of a specifically progressive agenda. I think this is a mistake. Environment should not be a partisan issue. A couple of weeks ago Richard Pombo and Jim Gibbons proposed privatizing millions of acres of public land. They lost on this issue. It was shot down because conservatives in the West value the land, they value the old folkways of hunting and fishing. Conrad Burns from Wyoming - the only Senator I know of who drives a pickup truck, Wayne Allard of Colorado, and Craig Thomas from Wyoming put the thumb to it. It took those Westerners to kill this. They don't romanticize the wilderness. But they grew up hunting and fishing on it. They don't want it sold off to private interests. The environmental dialogue has gotten to the point where the environmental movement has a hard time talking with people like that. Environment should be a success story for both the Republicans and Democrats. We have to talk about environment in a way that relates to basic life concerns: clean air, clean water, places to go on Saturday afternoons. All people, regardless of political background, value nature. And we need to protect and preserve rural communities. No one is all red or all blue - most of us are purple.