Sagebrush Rebel Reagan: How Reagan Saved Us from Domestic State Socialism

The Reagan Revolution has been properly feted of late as its architect bid a final farewell to the field of battle. Given that one says nothing but good of the dead unless they were President, his critics have been remarkably quiet – largely limiting their contributions to suggestions that the Soviet Union would have collapsed eventually anyway. Reagan hating is, of course, still academic policy on any respectable college campus, but elsewhere around the nation, his revolution has won many hearts and minds.

His admirers have assiduously avoided discussing Reagan’s environmental policy, as if it represents some Achilles heel of his legacy. Indeed, it might be fair to say that Reagan’s environmental approach failed, but not for the reasons popularly conceived. Reagan rent the Iron Curtain but could not untie the Gordian Knot. His legacy inspired opposition to elite environmentalism. Although the greens remain ensconced in the redoubts of Washington, D.C., they are no longer beyond reproach.

Reagan’s approach to the environment was perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of his presidency. Ironically, Reagan and his Interior Secretary James Watt put down the Sagebrush Rebellion. This was possibly the Reagan Administration’s greatest failing on a campaign promise, and represents the former President’s own admission that it was impossible to use the Presidential bully pulpit to reach the American people with any counter-orthodox ideas on the environment. Writing in 1985 on progress in privatization of public lands, Reagan lamented the widespread push for more land acquisition. “…there wasn’t an environmental movement in [Adam Smith’s] day. I get my brains kicked out for reducing the acreage of wilderness land that someone wants to buy.”

In a recent appearance at Colorado University, Jim Watt, who all but defined the administration’s environmental outlook, revealed a decidedly Rooseveltian streak in the Reagan administration. Watt touted putting more land in the lower 48 states into wilderness than Jimmy Carter, and revealed that he foreswore the explicit Sagebrush Rebellion objective of transferring federal lands to state governments because he believed the states needed the continued subsidy of federal management outlays. With no disrespect to a tenure that was inured with profound respect for the integration of grazing, forestry, mining and recreation into conservation policy, Jim Watt was, without question, the Benedict Arnold of the Sagebrush Rebellion. By adopting a good neighbor policy intended to defuse rather than fulfill the goals of the sagebrush rebels, the Reagan administration handed the environmentalists one of their greatest strategic victories in history while never getting the least bit of credit for it. Indeed, to this day, Republicans are criticized for the tenure of Jim Watt. This makes clear that on the subject of partisan environmental politics, Republicans can do no right and Democrats no wrong. Libertarians themselves let down the Sagebrush Revolution by not supporting the grassroots call for state ownership of unappropriated public lands under the “equal footing” doctrine of the Constitution. Libertarian abstractionists favored outright privatization and painted portraits of sagebrush rebels as cranks and kooks. This is epitomized by a quote the CATO Institute’s Carl Hess gave Time Magazine in 1995: “Someone’s going to carry a gun, someone’s going to shoot, someone’s going to bomb a Forest Service office”.