The self-proclaimed “greenest member” of Congress is a Republican from rural Kentucky. He lives in an off-the-grid home he built himself, using timbers cut and rock quarried from his family cattle farm. He pipes in water from a nearby pond, and powers the home with solar panels and a battery from a wrecked Tesla that he salvaged and retrofitted.
But while he lives on, and even makes part of his living from, the land, very few people would call him an environmentalist. The car he drives back and forth from Washington has a license plate advertising his support for coal. He likes to lean on his experience as a robotics engineer to argue against precipitously switching over to renewable energy, claiming that rapid changes could crash America’s power grids. And he once mocked John Kerry, who has a degree in political science, in a congressional hearing on climate threats: “I think it’s somewhat appropriate that someone with a pseudoscience degree,” he said, “is here pushing pseudoscience.”
Mr. Kerry stumbled, visibly surprised and angry. “Are you serious? I mean, this is really seriously happening here?”
It was hard to say. From the outside, Thomas Massie can look like yet another congressional gadfly courting controversy by, for instance, introducing a one-sentence bill that would abolish the Department of Education, or posing for a Christmas photo with his wife and children, each of them holding a weapon, from an M60 to an Uzi, or speaking at the 60th anniversary celebration of the far-right John Birch Society.
But Mr. Massie is not just another loony G.O.P. backbencher. Outside the public eye, he has been quietly advancing what for a Republican politician is an unusual set of stances: evincing deep opposition to the national security state, resistance to the influence wielded by corporations and interest groups over our policymaking, and a sense that Americans need a better, more sustainable relationship to the land. It is a politics almost always built around the idea of scaling back, making systems smaller, simpler and more local. That’s an odd kind of politics for a Republican, or any major elected official, but it suddenly seems to have appeal even beyond the G.O.P.’s narrow base, and it has already made Mr. Massie the closest thing the party has to a cult hero lawmaker.
“I absolutely love Massie,” Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio told me recently. The conservative talk show host Candace Owens recently called him her “favorite congressman,” a description that I’ve heard a half dozen or so times in the past year or so. “After 30 years of interviewing members of Congress,” Tucker Carlson told me, “I expect them to be conventional bordering on stupid, because most of them are. Massie’s the opposite. He’s thoughtful and interesting as hell. I don’t know why he’s not more famous.”
One of the reasons Mr. Carlson seems to appreciate Mr. Massie so much is that he shares his skepticism of mainstream climate policy. Mr. Massie has emerged as one of the G.O.P.’s most dedicated critics of liberal climate plans. He wants solutions to happen at the local level and often hints that powerful international forces — technocrats, multinational corporations and organizations like the World Economic Forum — are coming together to constrain the American way of life, uproot our national culture in favor of a bland, globalized liberalism and turn us into compliant and pliable consumers, easy to govern and control. It is a view that will do much in the coming years to shape not just fights over climate policy, but also the future of American conservatism.
“Their plans are based on political science” Mr. Massie recently told Mr. Carlson, referring to world leaders pushing mainstream climate policy.
Mr. Carlson agreed. “It seems like an intentional effort to drive down — dramatically drive down the standard of living for average people,” he said. “Why would they want to do that?”
“They want a lower quality of life,” Mr. Massie replied. “You’re gonna have nothing, and you’re gonna be happy about it, you know?” he said. “That’s their motto.”
The Republican Party is in a moment of flux, which in mainstream political media is often simplified as a conflict between the party’s neoconservative “establishment” and Trump-aligned populists. But this factional division obscures a much deeper conversation over the future direction of the party. A debate has emerged over what it means to be a conservative party today. Many on the right have concluded that the Republican Party that embraced corporate-led globalization and wars abroad, without any apparent effort to stop environmental degradation, did not actually conserve anything about the American way of life Republicans claimed to hold dear. This has helped push politicians at the highest level of Republican politics, from Donald Trump to Ron DeSantis, to rail against “globalist” forces and institutions, the same ones Mr. Massie was winking at on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” The true conflict in the G.O.P. today is about whether the party can — or should — reshape itself in response to the antiglobalist ferment.
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But Mr. Massie’s lifestyle and brand of politics, the same brand that once marked him as a quirky outlier, have aligned with the current political moment — when many on the right and left are looking to pull back from the hyper-complex systems that govern the modern world, and move toward a more rooted way of life. Today, many on the right are even growing more boldly critical of the disastrous environmental effects of corporate malfeasance all around them, best seen in the outrage that developed on right-wing media over the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Mr. Massie’s politics are very much at odds with the interests of the Republican Party’s traditional donor class and leadership. But the party, torn between corporatist neoconservatism and inchoate MAGA, has faltered in two national elections in a row, which may explain why Mr. Massie seems to be drawing attention as an idiosyncratic voice for an alternate future of Republican politics. “There’s an energy around Thomas now,” said Jeremy Carl, a former official in Mr. Trump’s Department of the Interior, who has known Mr. Massie for years, “just like there was an energy around Trump.”
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But even if he never rises further than that committee, he could still help shape the future trajectory of his party, grafting his unusual mixture of political stances into its DNA. His politics don’t really have a name. But there’s something a little Jeffersonian about them — as if Mr. Massie is channeling the third president, whom he often invokes and whose desire to build an America of small farmers and producers he shares. If he and his younger fans gain the money, influence and institutional backing to help shift the party in his direction, they may well reveal a conservatism capable of appealing to many now disillusioned by the party. Mr. Massie has already gained many supporters outside traditional Republican circles: neo-homesteaders, hippie back-to-the-landers, cranky libertarians and self-described “marginalized environmentalists.” They are part of a sphere that has grown quickly since 2020 — one of people worried that our economy, environment and government are spinning out of control, and gripped by the fear that our society is becoming an unfree dystopia ruled by bureaucrats and technocrats.
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Once in Washington, he alternately annoyed and endeared himself to members of both parties. He is loudly anti-abortion, despite his libertarianism. But he’s quick to denounce the military-industrial complex, and more than any other Republican in Congress, proved willing to join antiwar Democrats in trying to end American involvement in overseas conflicts. He voted against disaster-relief bills, but also introduced legislation to reduce some federal prison sentences and reform civil asset forfeiture. He fought to repeal the Patriot Act and introduced bills to allow for legalized hemp production and the sale of raw milk across state lines.
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As perhaps the G.O.P.’s most vocal opponent of Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates, he came off as a kook to a national audience that largely knew little else about him. But his dogged vaccine skepticism and anti-lockdown activism endeared him to many young conservatives — like Catharine O’Neill, a 20-something veteran of the Trump State Department, who moved to Wyoming in 2021 to operate a cattle business. Mr. Massie is “the one who really fought the vaccines and the Covid tyranny, for lack of a better term,” she told me. “In some cases against Trump.”
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Mr. Massie has “been very savvy about figuring out how to take his ideological and intellectual commitments and making them relevant for an audience that might not necessarily share all of them,” Mr. Carl said.
That audience, perhaps surprisingly, includes both conservation-minded conservatives and localist-minded environmentalists. “The sphere is basically people who are concerned about the state of society and looking for ways to thrive that don’t require widespread social, economic or political control,” said Ashley Colby, an environmental sociologist and former long-haul trucker who now runs a sustainable agriculture school in Uruguay. Even some environmentalists, who until recently would have considered themselves liberals, have come to distrust large-scale systems of almost every kind — including, for many, the systems we would use to enact global-scale climate policy.
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Food politics is rapidly becoming a new dividing line. People in the localist sphere are now at bitter odds with prominent climate activists like the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who advocates a “#farmfree” future where most of humanity’s food will be grown in labs.
This vision is exactly what many on the antiglobalist right fear to be the endgame of climate policy — a world where people “live in the pods and eat the bugs,” as the oft-repeated shorthand has it, and technocrats and bureaucrats force people to cram into dense cities, ban them from driving cars, and force them to eat food they have no power to produce themselves. “When people who would abort a baby the day it’s born, threw kids under the bus during the pandemic, take kids to drag shows, and saddle our children with crippling debt,” Mr. Massie tweeted in October, “tell you how to live because they’re concerned about sea levels in 100 years, hide your children.”
It’s a debate that cuts to the heart of American politics. Mr. Massie’s version of being the “greenest member of Congress” is an explicit throwback to a Jeffersonian vision — of America as a country of people who live and work close to the land, with minimal government interference and a maximum of personal responsibility for the future of the nation. It is also a vision of rugged self-reliance that has long informed back-to-the-landers on the left, but that many on that side of politics now regard as the most insidious of American political poisons, one that has made collective action on issues like climate change impossible to achieve in this country.
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“Independent, green, sustainable, frugal — those overlap,” he said.
It’s a vision that combines libertarianism, environmentalism and antiglobalism into one lifestyle package. It’s also one with great appeal to conservatives who think that the systems that order modern life present as grave a threat to our future as a warming planet does. And on that warming planet, Americans may need to learn how to fend for themselves.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/o...can-party.html
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