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225 I n November 1980, just after Ronald Reagan’s landslide election, Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska took the podium at a convention in Salt Lake City, Utah. With the incoming Reagan administration and the newly elected Republican majority in the Senate, Stevens had come to talk of change. He spoke before the League for the Advancement of States’ Equal Rights (LASER), which included state and local government officials, industry representatives, and citizens who made their living in the natural resource industries—many of whom considered themselves to be “Sagebrush Rebels.” Stevens’s driving concern was the expansion of environmental regulations during the Carter administration. The 1970s had witnessed an explosion in federal environmental programs—such as wilderness reviews, the Alaska lands debate, and endangered species regulations—which disproportionately affected public lands in the West. Some opponents described it as a “War on the West.” Stevens was there to pump up expectations for the new Reagan administration. Anticipating the incoming administration and Congress, he crowed, “The overwhelming change represents, to my point of view, that the emerging philosophy is one of Western thought: less government, wise use of lands, and movement towards the private sectors.”1 Stevens’s boast about the ascendancy of “Western thought” was not an idle claim. In retrospect, the West has played an important supporting role in the consolidation of Republican political power in national politics. Before the mid-1970s, the West was reliable country for the Democrats. In 1964, when the Wilderness Act became law, the West sent seventeen Democrats and seven Republicans to the Senate.2 But the Democrats’ western stronghold in the Senate began to slip in the late 1960s. The turning point came in 1977, when western Republicans first outnumbered Democrats thirteen to eleven. Between 1977 and 2009, the West consistently sent more Republicans to the Senate, peaking in 1982 with nineteen western Republicans (and five western Democrats). Republicans controlled the Senate in nine of fourteen sessions of Congress between 7 / The Public Domain Environmental Politics and the Rise of the New Right The Public Domain 227 1981 and 2009. Often, the South is viewed as the region driving the rise of the Republican Party in the postwar era. But the Republican West helped provide the necessary margin to make Republicans the majority party in the Senate during several crucial periods in modern American political history: the start of the Reagan administration, the Republicans’ “Contract with America” in the mid-1990s, and the start of George W. Bush’s administration. The West’s turn toward the political right did more than mirror the rise of Republican power nationwide; it helped make it possible.3 Why did the West play such an important role in the consolidation of Republican power in the postwar era? As Senator Stevens’s remarks suggest, one way to approach this question is to consider the debates over the public lands. In these years, the mainstream wilderness movement pursued the third major wilderness review initiated in the 1970s, for the deserts, canyons, and sagebrush flats overseen by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). But unlike earlier campaigns for the forests and parks, it was often rural westerners—loggers, ranchers, and off-road vehicle enthusiasts—who knew these wild lands best and organized most effectively to determine their management. The activities of the opposition did not represent a simple response to the threat of wilderness protection, however. The opposition—represented most popularly by the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Wise Use Movement—evolved in ways that shaped and reflected broader shifts in conservative politics, as opponents of environmental reform gravitated toward a political strategy grounded in rights-based claims to property and liberty characteristic of conservatives nationwide. Equally important , however, was the way in which environmental groups like the Wilderness Society responded to this changing opposition. Although wilderness advocates responded confidently to the Sagebrush Rebellion in the early 1980s, casting it as the work of narrow special interests, that was not the case with the Wise Use Movement in the early 1990s, which described itself as a social movement of rural westerners. The evolution of this political relationship between wilderness advocates and their opponents—defined by competing claims over individual rights, the public good, and the role of government in managing the public lands—has been important, not just to environmental politics and the American West, but to the rise of modern conservatism in American politics.4 The Sagebrush Rebellion and States’ Rights From the perspective of many rural westerners, the...

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