Q I guess historically, do you have a sense, like, when did it happen? How did this happen? You know, there was definitely a moment where The Democratic Party did not have this problem, and yet it sort of emerged maybe over the course of 20 years.
A I like to tell this piece of history, and I, and I think it's true, that we've really had two very different regimes of building in this country, um, in the last 100 years. Between, say, the 19 thirties and 19 sixties, we changed the physical environment of this country dramatically. We built so many homes In the 19 fifties, we built so many bridges. We built so many dams and connected so many houses with rural electrification, like the Tennessee Valley Authority. We built so much in this period right after the Great Recession up until the 19 sixties that there was a backlash. There was an enormous backlash, and part of that backlash was earned. The air was disgusting, and the water was disgusting. That's the world of the 19 forties, 19 fifties that was reacted to. And it was reacted to along several dimensions. One, you had this explosion of environmental legislation, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, NEPA, Endangered Species Act, which made it harder to change the physical environment, which imposed strictures on the physical environment. At the same time, you had Ralph Nader, um, who created this revolution of adversarial legalism, where without simplifying it too much, he just made it cool. For liberals of a certain age to sue the government and sue businesses to stop things from happening. In fact, in the 2000, when Jim Lehrer asked Ralph Nader why he deserved to be pres…
AI assessment note: “explosion of environmental legislation, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, NEPA”