“Job-Killing Regulation”: Anti-environmentalism, Deindustrialization, and Neoliberal Class Politics

This article constructs a new genealogy for one of the central rhetorical tropes of conservative politics in the United States in recent decades: “job-killing regulation.” Explaining how Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan have wielded this slogan so potently in their war against environmental regulation requires us to attend both to the social history of American capitalism and to the history of neoliberal intellectual production. Neoliberal intellectuals, clustered around the Mont Pèlerin Society, began warning in the 1940s that leftist elites sought to sacrifice the livelihoods of the working class for the sake of their anti-industrial aesthetic preferences. But this line of argument gained little cultural or political purchase in the US until the crisis of deindustrialization that erupted in the 1970s, when executives began systematically threatening layoffs in response to new environmental regulations. These threats were mainly pretextual but incompetently handled by regulatory policy makers, creating a political opportunity that Reagan exploited skillfully.