In May 1980, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan traveled to Detroit, the symbolic capital of the labor movement, to deliver an address in which he excoriated Jimmy Carter’s environmental protection efforts, which Reagan characterized as a “continuing devotion to job-killing regulation.” The epithet persists.Footnote 1 Reagan was not, of course, the first Republican politician to criticize environmental regulation on economic grounds. Reagan’s rhetoric, however, displayed a recognition that the antienvironmentalism of his day was at its most potent when it went past abstract complaints about inefficiency or cost to a more pugnacious indictment of environmentalism as class warfare: elite intellectuals with idiosyncratic values against blue-collar workers suffering from recent deindustrialization. Reagan “commonly lumps environmentalists together with those who espouse a ‘no-growth’ economy,” journalist Constance Holden astutely observed in the pages of Science shortly after his election.Footnote 2 “A tree is a tree,” Reagan infamously remarked during his reign as California governor. “How many trees do you need to see?” As president, he took the steam out of the environmental movement not merely by axing funding for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but also by cementing as common sense the notion that America faced a choice between trees and jobs.Footnote 3
Well understood by contemporaries, Reagan’s attempt to appeal explicitly to the interests and self-understanding of white working-class Americans is less clearly remembered today, including in historical analyses of late twentieth-century deregulation and the “neoliberal” turn in American politics. In one common account, “neoliberalism” is treated as synonymous with an “economic” style of reasoning, an approach to policy making whose hegemony waxed with the social and political power of practicing economists. The regulatory state—including the nascent environmental protection apparatus constructed in the early 1970s—was slain by a thousand cost–benefit-analysis paper cuts, this story goes; the qualitative goods prized by environmentalists were marginalized in the dollars-and-cents quantitative reasoning style that became dominant in Washington bureaus in the age of Reagan.Footnote 4 A related historiographical current emphasizes the role of Democrats during the Clinton administration in clinching the shift to a deregulatory paradigm. Clinton Democrats’ skepticism of the traditional administrative state, in turn, is commonly attributed to the party’s growing dependence on affluent, suburban white-collar workers who were, as one account puts it, “considerably less sympathetic to the state-centered, market-skeptical, redistributive policies of the New Deal order than the traditional Democratic constituencies had been.”Footnote 5 This identification of the “neoliberal” politics of deregulation with professional-class apathy towards the interests of the working class also animates media judgments about the supposed break of contemporary Republican politicians like Donald Trump and his 2024 running mate JD Vance with the Reaganite rhetoric and ideology of their predecessors—and about the need for Democrats to respond by talking more about class and workers’ interests, something neoliberal politicians allegedly forgot how to do.Footnote 6
There is surely something to all these narratives: economists did see their authority rise in Washington in the late twentieth century; the Democratic voting base did become more highly educated and more affluent; there are differences between the kinds of things Trump says and the kinds of things Reagan said in the 1980s (although Trump did, in fact, promise in 2017 to “remove every job-killing regulation we can find”).Footnote 7 Nonetheless, the fact that Reagan launched his assault on environmental regulation by talking about unemployment in Detroit suggests that there is more to the story. As I show in this article, Reagan’s warning that environmental policy making was immiserating the working class was far from an incidental or opportunistic piece of rhetoric. It resonated with an important line of argumentation pursued since the 1940s by Friedrich Hayek and other leading voices in the “neoliberal thought collective,” centered around the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS).Footnote 8 No less than Reagan-era Republican strategists, mid-century neoliberal intellectuals maintained that ordinary working people were potential—even natural—allies for strongly pro-capitalist, ostensibly “free-market” politics because industrial growth and technological progress tended to raise working-class standards of living. Left-wing critics of industry dissembled, they thought, in styling themselves tribunes of the working class: in reality, such radicals sought to deceive workers about where their material interests lay in order to advance a political agenda rooted in idiosyncratic and elitist aesthetic preferences.
Like other arguments developed by Hayek and his neoliberal comrades—such as the proposal of currency denationalization, as Whitney McIntosh has shown—the accusation of left-wing Luddism arrived prematurely.Footnote 9 In the United States, it did gain some traction among extremist libertarians as well as the nascent neoconservative movement. As a guide to political strategy, however, its utility was constrained by the fact that the style of liberalism regnant in the postwar decades explicitly sought to foster economic growth and industrial development as the precondition for class collaboration—and for a time was quite successful in pursuing these ends. The neoliberal story about anti-industrial ideologues tricking workers into supporting a politics of underdevelopment did not plausibly describe the stewards of the New Deal order. It became tenable for Reagan to adapt this line of attack for deployment on the campaign trail in 1980 in large part due to the dynamics of controversy about environmental policy in the 1970s. That decade saw, simultaneously, the dramatic expansion of federal environmental regulation in response to mass activist pressure and the advent of long-term economic stagnation, including a marked uptick in plant closures and an absolute decline in manufacturing employment in many traditional strongholds. Leaders of large industrial corporations, informed by the arguments of conservative activists, seized on this conjuncture to accuse environmentalists of exacerbating deindustrialization through overregulation, sacrificing the welfare of blue-collar workers in the pursuit of an ecological utopia.
The underlying economic claims were empirically baseless, but the charge stuck, I show, in large part because it was legitimized by voices within the postwar liberal establishment, including EPA and labor union officials. The fact that industrial jobs were evaporating in many places throughout the US seemed to demand serious consideration of the hypothesis that environmental overregulation was responsible, even in the absence of any concrete evidence in its favor. Embracing the alternative hypothesis, that corporations were exploiting the downturn to extort their employees and federal regulators, would have required an appetite for confrontation with capital that postwar liberal governance lacked. The fact that even environmental officials admitted the menace of job-killing regulation, in turn, solidified the appearance of an inherent opposition between environmentalists and industrial workers, lending credence to the idea that these constituencies had competing interests that needed to be balanced in some way by a neutral state. What had once seemed a tendentious charge by ideologically motivated activists on the right quickly acquired the patina of common sense.
The story I tell here suggests that in order to fully understand the connection between the ideas of mid-century neoliberal intellectuals like Hayek and the politics of the Reagan era, it is necessary to take a detour through the social history of the postwar decades. My goal is to chart a path between what Ben Jackson has characterized as the “inside-out” and “outside-in” approaches to the historiography of neoliberalism.Footnote 10 Outside-in historiography highlights important political, economic, and intellectual continuities across the putative neoliberal divide, while justly ascribing explanatory significance in explaining political-economic change to material factors such as the shifting structure of capital accumulation and the dynamics of class struggle. The basic insight of inside-out historiography, on the other hand, also needs to be taken seriously. It is possible to identify a discrete, coherent constellation of “neoliberal” ideas that were championed in the mid-century era by intellectuals who were widely identified—by their opponents as well as themselves—as marginal or heterodox, but which had become commonplace, especially in the corridors of power, by century’s end.Footnote 11 The prehistory of the “job-killing regulation” accusation shows that these perspectives need not trade off with one another. The intellectual production of the neoliberal thought collective helped frame the terms of debate over how best to interpret and respond to deindustrialization, even when its members were not crucial actors in particular policy disputes. In turn, it was the independent economic and political developments of the 1960s and 1970s—the coincidence of nascent environmentalism and accelerating deindustrialization, and the failure of liberal governance to protect the welfare of the working class during the downturn—that allowed previously unconvincing neoliberal ideas about the class basis of left-wing agitation to take on new plausibility.
Capitalism and the historians
The intellectuals and activists who responded to Friedrich Hayek’s call to join the MPS in the years after World War II believed that their side was losing. “The central values of civilization are in danger,” they warned in their founding Statement of Aims. “The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power,” by which they meant not only fascism and communism but social democracy and welfare statism. What was worse, this pervasive assault on “private property and the competitive market” appeared to be popular.Footnote 12 “It is because nearly everybody wants it that we are moving in this direction,” as Hayek confessed in The Road to Serfdom (1944).Footnote 13 But if socialism was bad, why did so many people want it? The first-order answer to this question that Hayek and his circle developed was that the masses had been indoctrinated by left-wing intellectuals. Walter Lippmann, whose interwar writings inspired a famous 1938 conference attended by Hayek and many other future members of the neoliberal thought collective, argued that public opinion in modern democratic polities tended to be shaped, for better or for worse, by the propagandizing of an intellectual elite through the organs of mass media. By the time he published The Good Society—the book that galvanized Hayek and others—in 1937, Lippmann concluded that the mind of the opinion-shaping class had acquired a dangerously statist bent. “In the modes of their thinking, the intellectuals who expound what now passes for ‘liberalism,’ ‘progressivism,’ or ‘radicalism’ are almost all collectivists in their conception of the economy, authoritarians in their conception of the state, totalitarians in their conception of society,” he warned.Footnote 14 Joseph Schumpeter, who knew Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in Vienna and shared aspects of their intellectual and political outlook despite distancing himself from nascent neoliberalism in other respects, echoed this judgment in his widely read 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. While conceding that “the general hostile atmosphere which surrounds the capitalist engine” was not wholly attributable to “the hostility of the intellectual group,” he did maintain that the “thoroughly discontented frame of mind” endemic to intellectuals made them natural enemies of the capitalist system and that contemporary intellectuals “invaded labor politics,” goading workers into taking an ever more revolutionary posture.Footnote 15
In the MPS’s first years, its founding generation came to ascribe special culpability to a surprising group of intellectual villains: historians of British industrialization. The Statement of Aims committed the group to developing “methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance of creeds hostile to liberty,” the only academic discipline thus singled out.Footnote 16 The precise meaning of this campaign became clearer at the society’s 1951 meeting in Beauvallon, France. The Beauvallon conference was in some ways the MPS’s first proper meeting, following three inaugural, agenda-setting sessions in 1947, 1949, and 1950. Hayek had first suggested the need for an international society that would facilitate conversation between concerned liberal intellectuals in 1944, at a meeting hosted by the Political Society of King’s College, Cambridge and chaired by eminent economic historian John Clapham.Footnote 17 Though Clapham died shortly before the MPS’s founding conference, Hayek devoted a significant part of the Beauvallon meeting’s program to Clapham’s central professional concern: workers’ standard of living during the Industrial Revolution. Clapham maintained that despite a degree of inevitable turbulence, wages had risen “markedly” and sanitary conditions had improved, and so the historian was entitled to a positive evaluation of the overall effects of industrialization. Among his contemporaries in the British academy, Clapham’s sanguine outlook was outstripped only by that of T. S. Ashton, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics—and Hayek’s choice for chief polemicist at Beauvallon.Footnote 18
In his talk, Ashton complained that his work, along with the evidence adduced by Clapham and other conservative historians, had done little to dislodge what he perceived as the popular and academic consensus that industrialization caused immense suffering. More than a century later, the Industrial Revolution was still imagined as replete with dark satanic mills and Dickensian misery. The damning assessment delivered by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 still held sway, Ashton believed, even among those “who do not accept the historical materialism of Marx, with which such views are generally connected.”Footnote 19 Indeed, in the aristocratic British intellectual world in which Ashton and Hayek worked, indictments of the baleful effects of industrialization were often deployed during the early twentieth century in service of a non-Marxist “ethical socialism”—issuing forth from the pens of J. L. and Barbara Hammond, R. H. Tawney, and other defenders of tradition against the ravages of capitalism.Footnote 20 But anti-industrialism—“hostility to the machine … to its products, and indeed to all innovation in consumption,” as Ashton put it—was by no means confined to elite British scribes, the lecturers at Beauvallon warned.Footnote 21 Historian Louis M. Hacker testified that matters were just as dire in the United States; American historians found their judgment warped by the influence of anticapitalist (though, mercifully, non-Marxist) historians such as Charles and Mary Beard and Gustavus Myers, as well as the nation’s Jeffersonian intellectual lineage.Footnote 22 French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel, recently reconciled to liberalism after a stint advocating collaboration during the Nazi occupation, claimed that “Continental intellectuals” also shared a dim view of the Industrial Revolution. He averred, however, that discontent was not especially pronounced among historians compared to other scholars. Instead, he wrote, echoing Schumpeter, that the root of the problem was “the intellectual’s attitude,” which engendered an indiscriminate “hostility to the economic and social institutions of their society.”Footnote 23
Whatever their disagreements with each other, the presenters overall confirmed Hayek’s view that a widespread cultural pessimism regarding industrialization was the soil in which the seeds of collectivism were growing throughout the North Atlantic world. In 1954, Hayek published the papers presented by Ashton, Hacker, and Jouvenel at Beauvallon with the University of Chicago Press in a volume titled Capitalism and the Historians. It was and would remain unusual for the publicity-shy MPS to publish the proceedings of its meetings, which testifies to the importance Hayek ascribed to the subject. In his preface, Hayek explained his belief that “the widespread emotional aversion to ‘capitalism’ is closely connected” with the idea that industrialization “brought untold new suffering to large classes who before were tolerably content and comfortable.” In addition to the original papers documenting the pervasiveness of this view in the historical profession, Capitalism and the Historians contained two more papers showing at greater length why it was mistaken, one by Ashton and one by English economist W. H. Hutt. The Industrial Revolution, Hayek summarized, “was the first time in history that one group of people found it in their interest to use their earnings on a large scale to provide new instruments of production to be operated by those who without them could not have produced their own sustenance.” The misery of enclosure and wage labor was simply the gauntlet through which the working class needed to pass en route to consuming widgets the likes of which had never been seen before.Footnote 24
The unreconstructed Whiggishness on display in Capitalism and the Historians clashes somewhat with the portrait of Hayek that many of his admirers have sought to construct, especially in the twenty-first century: a Burkean conservative (his denials notwithstanding), a traditionalist critic of science and rationalism, a Romantic “communitarian,” even—mirabile dictu—an intellectual kinsman of Alasdair MacIntyre.Footnote 25 Hayek did, of course, have choice words for the “scientism” of the Promethean left, and like other MPS members, such as Wilhelm Röpke, in other contexts he could wax poetic about tradition with the best of his guild-socialist rivals. But as Naomi Beck has pointed out, there is no reason to presume that Hayek always (or ever) succeeded in fashioning his modernist and traditionalist impulses into a coherent synthesis. Different themes were more pronounced in his thinking in different conjunctures, as Hayek’s sense of the relative salience of his various enemies evolved.Footnote 26 The key lesson of Capitalism and the Historians is that in the years after World War II Hayek deemed liberalism to be jeopardized not only by the ultra-progressivism of “scientistic” socialists, but also by a latent Luddism that questioned whether the commercial fruits of the Industrial Revolution were really worth the human cost.
Many libertarians and other neoliberal fellow travelers, especially outside the core MPS group, saw matters in much the same way, though often without Hayek’s ambivalence towards techno-scientific modernity. Ayn Rand and her Objectivists, in particular, often characterized their socialist opponents as elite intellectuals determined to force their antimodern and anti-industrial proclivities on the rest of society. The word “industrial” possessed an almost talismanic quality for Rand; the heroic businessmen in her fiction are virtually always labeled “industrialists” rather than capitalists, and her narrative voice is typically at its most affectionate in describing the steely, muscular technological and infrastructural output of their enterprises. One protagonist of Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is introduced with an especially evocative metaphor: “Through the years, he had been the trigger that had sent unexpected, spectacular bullets of industrial success shooting over the country.” The novel’s chief antagonist, a wealthy capitalist whose extreme ideological predilections have led him to oppose the system that made him rich, fails to appreciate the ejaculatory majesty of industrial production. At one point, in describing his diabolical socialist scheme, he announces, “We’re going to have security—for the first time in centuries—for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution!” To which one of his henchmen remarks that their goal might as well be called the “anti-industrial revolution.” This was a coinage for which Mises, in a letter to Rand shortly after the novel’s publication, expressed a particular fondness.Footnote 27
The New Class
Who were these anti-industrial revolutionaries, who so spooked neoliberal intellectuals in the postwar era? At first glance they are challenging to detect. Certainly, an unremitting hostility to industrial progress fails to characterize the mid-century communist world; Stalinist and Maoist varieties of state socialism were developmentalist programs that deployed the most productivist strands of Marxist ideology to justify rapid and often brutal industrialization.Footnote 28 The dominant governing factions within European social democracy and the American welfare state were similarly modernist, enthusiastic about the social benefits to be reaped from appropriately regulated technological prowess. In the United States in particular, the wartime economic mobilization made enthusiasm for the power of the American industrial machine something of a political imperative across the political spectrum, including within the labor movement. Following the 1947 Taft-Hartley purges of Communist Party organizers, American union leaders by and large consented to a collective bargaining regime that gave workers access to a privatized welfare state—employer-sponsored health care and retirement benefits—in exchange for acquiescence to managerial decisions regarding new technology and other schemes to boost productivity. In 1950, Forbes magazine declared that CIO cofounder and United Mine Workers of America president John L. Lewis was “the best salesman the machine industry ever had.”Footnote 29
The decidedly pro-industrial tenor of both the official ideology of the Warsaw Pact states and liberalism within the US and its protectorates helps to explain why Capitalism and the Historians, though widely reviewed, met with a chilly reception even among readers hostile in other respects to the volume’s socialist enemies. “What British or American historian … has argued that living standards for the working class have failed to rise under capitalism?” asked Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in a contemporary review. “No doubt some one has, some time, somewhere; but Professor Hayek, while pleading as if against overwhelming odds for ‘the recognition that the working class as a whole benefited from the rise of modern industry,’ does not name a single historian who would argue to the contrary.”Footnote 30 The Stanford historian H. Stuart Hughes quipped that he could “personally vouch for the general acceptance of Hayek’s and Ashton’s theses even as far from the centers of light as the American West Coast.” Hughes furthermore found the book’s outlook in some ways “surprisingly similar” to that of John Maynard’s study of The Russian Peasant, which sympathized with the efforts of Soviet agricultural planners to use mechanization and collectivization to ameliorate the misery of preindustrial farm workers.Footnote 31 An assessment in the American Historical Review observed that the results of the November 1952 US elections, in which president-elect Dwight Eisenhower’s Republicans gained a trifecta in Congress and the White House for the first time since the Great Depression, suggested that the mass “forgery” of history denounced by Hayek and his collaborators had perhaps not entrenched the socialistic mind-set as securely as they feared.Footnote 32
The Hayekian complaint about the anti-industrial left thus awaited, for its popularization, a more plausible set of nemeses to which it could attach. It took a while. There was a real current of suspicion toward the emancipatory power of technological development within the postwar American left, but it flowed beneath the surface—and often among rank-and-file industrial workers, as opposed to their official union representatives. The Johnson–Forest Tendency, a post-Trotskyist collective based in Detroit and led by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, and various offshoots spent the postwar years documenting and interpreting the emergence of this sentiment (many of the circle’s members, including James Boggs and Martin Glaberman, worked in auto factories). In contemporary waves of mining strikes “the initiative comes from the most mechanized mines,” Dunayevskaya wrote to James in 1950. “There is no richer mine for Johnsonism than a real mine.”Footnote 33 Dunayevskaya, James, and their collaborators recognized that the issue of technological change was dividing the leadership of the largest American business unions from their rank-and-file workers. Leaders would happily trade automation and sped-up assembly lines for higher wages, because higher wages meant higher dues payments, and they would not have to suffer the consequences—their day-to-day labor process was not at risk of degradation and their jobs were not at risk of redundancy. Signs of this simmering conflict were already visible in the 1950s: in 1955, in 1958, and again in 1961, the vast majority of General Motors workers carried out wildcat strikes to protest United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther’s consent to continued assembly-line speedups in successive collective-bargaining agreements.Footnote 34
Rank-and-file unrest reached boiling point in the second half of the 1960s. “By the autumn of 1966,” labor activist Stan Weir wrote at the time, “every major union that contributed to the creation of the CIO in the 1930s had experienced a major revolt,” with the exception of the already rank-and-file-friendly United Packinghouse Workers. Life magazine warned about an outbreak of “Strike Fever.” In 1970, a record 3.3 million workers were involved in work stoppages, nearly double the number for the steel strike year of 1959.Footnote 35 As Weir recalled in the aftermath of the strike wave, the revolt was in part “a response to increased production quotas and to negative experience with new technology.” Rank-and-file workers resented new technology above all for enabling speed-ups and for its tendency to “kill jobs,” as Weir put it in 1980.Footnote 36 In the 1960s and early 1970s, job-killing technology struck the working class as a significantly greater threat than job-killing regulation—especially black workers, who by the early 1960s were unemployed at twice the rate of their white counterparts.Footnote 37 In 1972 the Black Panther Party formally added a call for “people’s community control of modern technology” to its platform.Footnote 38
By the early 1970s, the environmental consequences of technological change increasingly also troubled contemporary labor activists—especially Tony Mazzocchi, the leader of the reform movement in the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW). Mazzocchi felt that the industrial toxicity highlighted by environmentalists like Rachel Carson underscored the inadequacy of postwar labor leaders’ compromise with management on technology, surrendering workers’ collective claim on the production process for better wages and benefits. Richard Nixon cited Mazzocchi by name when he signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, a piece of legislation built on the premise that “environmental” issues like toxicity and air quality were also labor issues. In 1970, the year when the rank-and-file movement reached its zenith, Mazzocchi was named honorary chair of the first Earth Day rally in New York; even Reuther affirmed that “the environmental crisis has reached such catastrophic proportions that I think the labor movement is now obligated to raise this question at the bargaining table in any industry that is in a measurable way contributing to man’s deteriorating living environment.”Footnote 39
In prosecuting their critique of the deleterious consequences of industrial technology, labor radicals were, of course, joined by a contemporary movement of intellectuals and professionals concentrated on college campuses and in other affluent milieux. Student activists excoriated the spirit of technocracy that they saw as the glue of the military–industrial–academic complex; countercultural dropouts sought to live simple lives that made use of small-scale, preindustrial “appropriate technology”; ecologically minded lawyers signed up to staff nonprofit organizations like Ralph Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law and the Environmental Defense Fund, with its famous unofficial slogan, “Sue the Bastards!”Footnote 40 This movement of what Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich influentially termed the “professional-managerial class” unquestionably helped to furnish the labor revolt with theoretical vocabulary and a certain degree of aesthetic inspiration, but influence flowed bidirectionally. As the Ehrenreichs observed, the New Left activists who developed the most penetrating and wide-ranging critique of capitalist society were those who were worked most closely with working-class radical movements, especially among the black proletariat, while those whose political relationships remained confined to the professional-managerial class (PMC) tended to orient themselves toward a correspondingly more modest horizon.Footnote 41 Within the environmental movement, in particular, white professional-class activists were often preoccupied with the related causes of population control and wilderness preservation, following Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s best-selling jeremiad The Population Bomb (1968) and the blockbuster report Limits to Growth (1972), as opposed to the issues of workplace and community health that preoccupied labor environmentalists and were the focus of federal regulatory initiatives in the 1970s.Footnote 42
Nonetheless, right-wing critics of environmentalism saw a convenient opportunity to resuscitate the neoliberal charge that criticism of capitalism—and of industrial production specifically—was at its core an elitist pastime. The upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, they argued, was yet another expression of the discontent of the overeducated, masquerading as a popular uprising. Rand believed that the much-dreaded Anti-industrial Revolution had come at last. “The survival of technology is at stake,” she thundered in a 1971 essay that appeared under that title. “Make no mistake about it: it is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy.”Footnote 43 The libertarian journalist John Chamberlain, a champion of Rand’s work and an MPS member, wrote in 1973 that “the environmentalist movement in the U.S. … fell into the hands of the elitists who despise anything that smacks of trade”—“well-to-do folk of the Park Avenue Pink variety.”Footnote 44 Writing in 1974 in Russell Kirk’s conservative journal Modern Age, the economic historian R. M. Hartwell—another MPS member and the organization’s future president—argued explicitly that the “myth” of industrial “immiseration” criticized by Hayek and his collaborators was still “basic to the naïve acceptance of alternative economic and political systems which allegedly achieve progress without cost to the working classes.” It was because “so many of the young in the universities” accepted the “Marxist interpretation” of the Industrial Revolution, whether they knew it or not, that the “frantic and fanatical attack on liberal democracy and its institutions” was proceeding with such force.Footnote 45
The most influential version of this critique was formulated by Irving Kristol, the foremost voice of what came to be known as the “neoconservative” movement. Kristol argued that the social base of contemporary protest movements was the “New Class” of college-educated knowledge workers—the overproduced intellectuals of advanced capitalism singled out by Joseph Schumpeter for their subversive effect. Like Schumpeter, whose arguments he echoed, Kristol was not a member of the MPS, judging that what he saw as its narrow focus on economics was inadequate to the task of restoring social stability. Yet he shared its interpretation of anticapitalism as an elite ideology opposed to the material interests of the working class, and he viewed environmentalism through this prism. Environmentalists, Kristol argued in an address to the MPS in 1972 delivered at then president Milton Friedman’s invitation, were not “really interested in clean air or clean water at all,” but rather in “modern industrial society and modern technological civilization, toward which they have profoundly hostile sentiments.” The environmentalist movement, like the other strands of the New Left, ultimately expressed an elitist “revulsion against the kind of civilization that common men create when they are given the power, which a market economy does uniquely give them, to shape the world in which they wish to live.”Footnote 46 The idea that environmentalism was a New Class crusade, with the health and safety concerns emphasized by labor activists merely pretextual, quickly became de rigueur among neoconservatives. Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Bartley, immensely influential among movement conservatives and business leaders alike, suggested that the EPA and OSHA participated in “a concentrated attack on business that looks suspiciously like the work of the New Class.” The “public interest advocates” determined to “bedevil business over issues like pollution” ironically formed “a whole new industry” in their own right, Bartley suggested.Footnote 47 While radical labor leaders like Mazzocchi saw environmental protection as an opportunity to build an alliance between workers and discontented intellectuals against the power of capital, conservative and libertarian advocates instead saw an expression of naked professional-class self-interest.
Early warnings
Corporate executives took swiftly and enthusiastically to the idea that hypercritical intellectuals were the animating force behind the various protest movements that pestered them in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 48 “Thanks to popularizations of Joseph Schumpeter and others, people in industry and commerce have the strong impression that their problems with over-regulation, environmentalism and public relations can be traced to a ‘New Class’ of professionals, intellectuals and other ‘knowledge workers’,” reported the Wall Street Journal in 1978—by which time the notion had become, according to the paper, a “standard cliché.”Footnote 49 The clear implication of this premise was that it ought to be possible for industrial corporations to peel off working-class recruits to the cause of environmental regulation, since it wasn’t really their fight and was ultimately not in their material interest.
That was indeed the strategy that many beleaguered polluters adopted in the 1970s. The chemical manufacturer Union Carbide fired the first salvo in early 1971, in response to an EPA order to bring fly-ash and sulfur dioxide emissions at its Marietta, Ohio plant into compliance with the agency’s new standards.Footnote 50 Environmentalism had long been a thorn in the side of Union Carbide, enmeshed for years in controversy about its pollution record; in 1970 a small group of environmental activists attempted to interrupt the corporation’s annual meeting in New York City.Footnote 51 The 1971 EPA order provided an opportunity to try a new tactic: Union Carbide executives announced that after studying the matter, they had concluded that the requested emissions reductions would require the plant to lay off 625 workers. This threat was plausible on its face, but not exactly because of the cost of regulation. The company’s profits had been in freefall since the mid-1960s, driven primarily by pervasive overcapacity in the chemical sector and aggravated by poor management. Earnings in 1971 were down by 15 percent compared to 1969 levels, and top executives spoke publicly of the need to make fundamental changes to the company’s business model.Footnote 52
It took some chutzpah, then, for Union Carbide to blame its layoffs on its critics in the environmental movement, and environmental leaders responded with fury. Senator Ed Muskie vowed to hold congressional hearings on the layoff threat that would prove that the company was scapegoating the EPA for layoffs that would have been necessary in any event. Nader charged that Union Carbide was engaging in “environmental blackmail.” Taken aback by the ferocity of the backlash, Union Carbide’s leadership soon announced that they had investigated further and were now cautiously optimistic that it was possible to meet EPA standards without layoffs after all.Footnote 53 But the horse was out of the barn. By the time Muskie’s hearing rolled around, Nader had testified that nineteen chemical plants had recently threatened layoffs in response to pollution abatement orders. It would be difficult to subject each case of “environmental blackmail” to the same public scrutiny that Union Carbide had received. Nader’s proposed solution was for the EPA to systematically monitor reports of alleged regulation-induced plant closures and investigate their validity to develop a more comprehensive picture of the impact of environmental regulation on industrial employment. Nader was confident that such a picture would show most claims to be specious.Footnote 54
Mazzocchi, quickly recognizing the threat that environmental blackmail posed to the labor–environmentalist alliance that he had worked to construct, maintained that more drastic action was necessary. He accompanied OCAW president Alvin F. Grospiron to the Capitol for the Muskie hearings, where Grospiron testified that, in the union’s view, “on balance more stringent pollution controls will provide increased job opportunities,” because “workmen will have to design, build, and install and thereafter maintain and service the various devices which reduce or eliminate harmful emissions from stacks and sewers.” It was not inconceivable that a regulation or abatement order could trigger layoffs in certain cases, Grospiron conceded. But the union’s position was not that corporations should be allowed to continue polluting in such circumstances—it was that the government had a responsibility to ensure the continued welfare of any affected workers. After all, “government always has exercised great power over private property whenever necessary to protect the people.”Footnote 55
The OCAW continued beating this drum after the Muskie hearings, goaded by Mazzocchi’s agitation. At the AFL-CIO annual convention in November 1971, the OCAW proposed a resolution urging “the passage of legislation providing that any employer” making the “threat of unemployment as a method [to avoid] compliance with pollution control standards” would be subject to injunction, “forbidding the layoff of any worker until the necessity of such layoff or layoffs has been proven, with burden of proof on the employer.” The convention ended up adopting a modified version of this resolution, calling for amendments to the Clear Air and Clean Water Acts that would levy civil penalties against companies “alleging that an abatement order will cause layoffs, dismissals, or cessation of operations” without adequate justification. The resolution also demanded “federal manpower training and other special programs” to assist displaced workers.Footnote 56
It was Nader’s more moderate proposal, however, that ultimately triumphed in Washington. On 7 October 1972, the EPA established a program called the Economic Dislocation Early Warning System, structured as an interagency initiative with the Department of Labor. Under the Early Warning System, each EPA regional office would collect information on both reported and threatened plant closures in their area on a quarterly basis. The EPA would then report this information to the Department of Labor, so that it could “take prompt and appropriate action to avoid or minimize unemployment problems”—a vague gesture of acknowledgment to the AFL-CIO demands, but one which did nothing to discourage layoff threats.Footnote 57 As environmentalists expected, the Early Warning System initiative found that plant closures attributable to the cost of compliance with EPA regulation were extremely scarce and almost always at facilities that were already teetering on the verge of shutdown. In 1978, the EPA reported that since January 1971 it had identified only ninety total cases of plant closure or significant layoffs for which Early Warning System staffers deemed regulation to be even partly responsible, affecting a mere 19,000 workers in total. “The vast majority of these closures,” wrote EPA Economic Analysis Division director Roy Gamse, “involved old, economically marginal plants in which a number of factors contributed to the management’s decision to close.” Furthermore, Gamse explained, EPA economists estimated that these job losses were more than outweighed by job creation for which the EPA was directly responsible—both in the workforce of the agency and in its partners, as well as in the nascent pollution-control equipment industry.Footnote 58
Nonetheless, environmental regulators in the 1970s were strangely reluctant to declare victory. The EPA went to arguably excessive pains to demonstrate its concern, publishing notices in the Federal Register urging plant managers to report “any closings that may have occurred or might occur in the future because of environmental controls.” Gamse himself cautioned that “assessing the total impact of governmental regulations on employment is complex because there are several ways in which jobs are both created and eliminated” due to EPA activity.Footnote 59 While the Clean Air Act of 1970 explicitly forbade federal regulators from modifying standards in response to calculations about their likely economic effect, the Clean Water Act of 1972 required, as a later EPA report summarized, that “control requirements not be set at levels which could result in widespread plant closures or production cutbacks.”Footnote 60
EPA leaders, in other words, made clear in public that they welcomed the opportunity to practice more stringent vigilance about the economic fallout of the agency’s decision making. This posture of preemptive self-scrutiny also shaped agency decision making. EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus invoked the specter of mass unemployment to explain his decision in 1973 to override a Clean Air Act provision whose implementation would have required all cars sold in the US to come equipped with catalytic converters by 1975. A catalytic-converter mandate was in fact technologically feasible, Ruckelshaus conceded—a point that the auto companies had disputed. There was still, however, an unacceptable “risk of economic dislocation,” namely “the unplanned cessation of production, with attendant layoffs of employees and possibly serious disruption of the national economy.” Ruckelshaus admitted that “these risks cannot be quantified,” and indeed the data the Early Warning System had collected in the early days of its existence showed that manufacturers almost always opted to pay the costs of regulatory compliance rather than shut down noncompliant facilities. Ruckelshaus concluded, however, that the unquantifiable risk of mass layoffs “must be considered to outweigh the slight gain in air quality that might result from requiring catalysts on all 1975 cars,” compared with the more gradual phase-in that his decision prescribed. Ruckelshaus insisted that he was suspending the letter of the Clean Air Act only to better execute its spirit; his decision, he maintained, was “fully consistent with the overall objectives of the Act.”Footnote 61 Nonetheless, as historian Charles Halvorson has argued, the ruling—and other similar decisions by Ruckelshaus—set a precedent that was not easily reversed. The belief among EPA regulators that they needed to “balance” their environmental mandate with the economic interests of American industry gradually corroded their authority.Footnote 62
As artificial controversy raged, mainstream liberals began almost unthinkingly to assent to the neoliberal and neoconservative charge that the interests of environmentalists and workers were inherently opposed. “Yes, government has the duty to protect the public from pollution of the country’s air and water,” the New York Times editorialized in 1978, commenting on Minnesota’s ongoing prosecution of the Reserve Mining Company for polluting the Duluth area’s drinking water with asbestos. “But the brunt of change,” the editorial board continued, “must not be allowed to fall on those who are most vulnerable and most innocent of all,” which is to say, the industrial working class. The idea that working-class people had interests other than employment—an interest in asbestos-free drinking water, for example, or working conditions free from toxic contaminants—was implicitly excluded by such formulations. Environmentalists, and even “the public” as such, were almost ontologically opposed to the working class. “I have long been of the opinion that one of the substantial failures of the environmental movement has been the inability to translate its concerns to the working people of this country,” Senator Gary Hart declared in 1978. Hart was speaking, ironically, not to a nonprofit staffer but to United Steelworkers legislative director John J. Sheehan, who had come to the Capitol to urge Congress to amend the Clean Air Act to sanction companies that engaged in environmental blackmail and to expand federal assistance for unemployed workers in “those relatively few cases where air pollution enforcement actually does cause a shutdown.” Sheehan argued that “without the types of employee protection which we are urging the worker can easily be isolated from the [pollution] control effort and pressured into opposition to it,” falling prey to employers’ manipulative warnings that “their jobs are at stake unless there is relaxation in the control requirements.”Footnote 63
Hart utterly failed to comprehend Sheehan’s argument: that whatever conflict had erupted between workers and environmentalists was not due primarily to clashing cultural priorities or rhetorical postures, but because corporations were able to exploit the decade’s unemployment crisis with impunity. “I am hopeful that through statements such as yours that [sic] the working people of this country will begin to understand that if their children’s lungs are polluted … they can get cancer and other diseases just as readily as the Sierra Club members’ lungs and children’s lungs in Colorado and other outdoor areas,” Hart told Sheehan.Footnote 64 But as Sheehan tried to explain, workers already understood perfectly well that their lungs could be assaulted by industrial pollution. Such an awareness drove the reform movement within the United Mine Workers, for instance, which challenged their leadership’s neglect of the scourge of black lung disease.Footnote 65 Without any legal recourse in the face of corporate extortion, however, workers were too often forced to prioritize the fight to preserve their jobs over the fight to improve their working and living conditions.
Progress and privilege
In short, environmental blackmail worked. “For years, industry has had one ace in the hole in battling Environmental Protection Agency regulations,” Business Week reported in 1978. “It could almost routinely count on the support of labor unions simply by threatening to shut down plants and eliminate jobs if antipollution rules were too onerous.”Footnote 66 While union leaders urged Congress to take legislative action to curtail environmental blackmail—precisely because they recognized, especially early in the 1970s, that the economic claims underpinning most layoff warnings were fraudulent—they were also aware that corporations threatening shutdowns had significantly more leverage than workers did, and they acted accordingly. Even Mazzocchi was ultimately stymied by his own union, the OCAW, in the campaign that was closer to his heart than any that he undertook in the 1970s: his search for justice in the case of the death of Karen Silkwood. Silkwood was Mazzocchi’s protégé and union activist at a Kerr–McGee nuclear-fuel processing plant in Crescent, Oklahoma. She had disclosed to Mazzocchi evidence that Kerr–McGee was falsifying safety records related to the plant’s handling of plutonium rods. Mazzocchi arranged for Silkwood to share what she had uncovered with a New York Times reporter, but she died in a car accident on her way to the meeting in November 1974. Mazzocchi strongly suspected foul play and spent nearly a year stoking media interest in the story and begging federal regulators to intervene: the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and even the FBI. But Mazzocchi was eventually forced to desist—not by the company, but by OCAW leadership. “There was a lot of pressure in the union to get off it,” he later recalled. Unionists at the Kerr–McGee plant warned that the publicity was jeopardizing the very existence of the local; if Mazzocchi kept agitating, they argued, Kerr–McGee might decide to close the facility entirely.Footnote 67
By the end of the 1970s, the labor left was in abeyance nationwide. John Sheehan’s warning in his Congressional testimony was prescient: as long as protections for laid-off workers remained measly and corporations were permitted to threaten plant closures with impunity, a conservative posture of acquiescence to employers’ wishes would remain rational for labor in the short term. This logic helped entrench a pattern of concessionary bargaining on a wide range of issues, but it also fomented the spread of antienvironmentalist attitudes among rank-and-file industrial workers.Footnote 68 “When people are told they’re out of work because of environmental regulations, they’re going to be upset,” one EPA staffer remarked in 1979, after encountering a cartoon of an EPA official being shot in the head displayed at a public hearing on pollution rules in St Clairsville, Ohio.Footnote 69 Many middle-class environmentalists were not nearly as empathetic, responding to skepticism from the labor movement with overt contempt. “I don’t think there’s a defensible reason to keep these people doing what they’re doing and in their state of ignorance,” one environmental activist told sociologist Steven Yaffee during an anti-logging campaign in Oregon in the early 1980s. “Bring them up so that they can spell, talk, and get along like the rest of us.”Footnote 70 By the time Mike Nichols directed a biopic about Karen Silkwood in 1983, starring Meryl Streep, the OCAW reform movement had all but disappeared from the story as Hollywood imagined it. Tony Mazzocchi was excised from the film entirely; Silkwood is depicted meeting only with a coterie of cynical and opportunistic union officials. The real Silkwood’s environmental-health activism was an extension of her work in the labor movement. She was “solely a trade union martyr,” Mazzocchi later insisted. But not even a decade after her death it had become all but impossible to conceive of unionism and environmentalism working in harmony.Footnote 71
Conservative activists, in turn, recognized the electoral possibilities presented by the widening fissure between professionally educated environmentalists and working-class eco-skeptics. “Can Conservatives Successfully Woo Labor?” asked the influential right-wing magazine Human Events in 1978. Its answer, of course, was yes, proposing exactly the strategy that Reagan would adopt two years later with his denunciations of job-killing regulation. “I read various conservative publications, and I have never seen anybody on our side give a more eloquent denunciation of the EPA than those union people did,” Republican Oklahoma congressman Mickey Edwards enthused, reflecting on a recent meeting with union leaders in the devastated steel community of Youngstown, Ohio. “They were talking hard-core. They were talking about jobs lost because of it.” The Illinois representative Philip M. Crane agreed: “We must make jobs the central concern of our candidates, and constantly combat the no-growth mentality of the liberals who seek to freeze the lower middle class and the poor into their current economic strata.”Footnote 72
Reagan’s election seemed to confirm the soundness of this approach, and the analysis of the social composition of the environmental movement it was built upon. In 1982, the libertarian journalist William Tucker (later a board member of the Independent Institute, an important neoliberal think tank) penned a widely reviewed antienvironmental philippic, Progress and Privilege. The core of Tucker’s argument was that “environmentalism” was a kind of code name for a coterie of “aristocratic elites” that “opposes every form of economic growth and progress as a general policy.” Disguising themselves as advocates for the preservation of human health and natural resources, environmentalists in fact sought nothing less than to “let slip the long human quest for material improvement.”Footnote 73 If one swapped out “environmentalists” for “intellectuals” (or perhaps “socialists”) one would be left with more or less exactly the thesis of Capitalism and the Historians—the charge that struck most reviewers of that book as hyperbolic and vaguely paranoid. While committed environmentalists, unsurprisingly, received Tucker’s book with scorn, its mainstream reception was considerably more sympathetic than that of its Hayekian predecessor. In the Washington Post, the Princeton Thoreau scholar William Howarth praised it as “an informed and forceful critique.”Footnote 74 While the New York Times reviewer questioned the timing and balance of the book, “with the forces of environmentalism besieged on many fronts,” he nonetheless praised Tucker’s earlier journalistic interventions on the same theme, and suggested that Tucker’s arguments would come in handy in the future, when “the pendulum will swing again.”Footnote 75 Even Stewart Brand’s Coevolution Quarterly, the successor of the Whole Earth Catalog, felt that the book gave “deserved discomfort to environmentalism’s friends, who have been irresponsibly uncritical of their movement.”Footnote 76
From one perspective—Ben Jackson’s “inside-out” viewpoint—we can witness here the triumph of neoliberal ideas in the age of Reagan. A key claim of the MPS network migrated from the fringes to the center of American political culture: the argument that any criticism of capitalism or the technologies of industrial production amounted to a wholesale rejection of economic “progress,” and thus served the interests of the idle aristocracy rather than struggling workers. Looking through the “neoliberal lens” on this development has value, especially because quasi-populist environmentalism bashing has recently been misconstrued in some circles as a form of resistance to neoliberalism.Footnote 77 Yet what happened had little to do with direct lobbying or propagandizing or efforts to refurbish the credibility of figures like Hayek, the factors most commonly emphasized in “inside-out” narratives of neoliberalism. It depended above all, in “outside-in” fashion, on the demise of labor environmentalism and the left-wing reform movement that incubated it, which was enabled in turn by the timidity of the federal government in the 1970s in confronting corporate power—the inordinate caution of regulators in rebutting the accusations of companies engaged in environmental blackmail, and the failure of the legislature to take action to mitigate the threat of retaliatory plant closures. Capitalism and the Historians met with skepticism upon its release because it was plain to reviewers that the welfare liberalism of the postwar era bore little resemblance to the militant Luddism assailed by Hayek and his collaborators. In the long run, however, it was precisely the attitude of acquiescence to capital at the heart of postwar liberalism that created the social conditions for neoliberal intellectual hegemony.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Troy Vettese and Isabel Oakes for convening the forum and for indispensable edits; to the other conference participants for their feedback and camaraderie; and to Claire Aubin, Austin Clements, Sage Goodwin, Whitney McIntosh, and Lauren Lassabe Shepherd for helping me with my Frankenstein problem.
Open access
