I never said that RFK Jr. the man was an heir to Roger Scruton’s ideas.
Jumping off a section of my Friday column on RFK Jr.’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Jack Butler takes issue with what he described as my “argument that [RFK Jr.] is an heir to Roger Scruton’s environmentally minded conservatism.”
He points out that RFK Jr. has, in the past, floated all sorts of bizarre, unconstitutional, demagogic, and authoritarian policies that would run against Roger Scruton’s ideas and even some of his occasional patrons. RFK Jr. has, for instance, suggested revoking the operating permissions of conservative think tanks because he believes them to be mere apologists and lobbyists for polluters.
That’s all quite true, which is why I never said that RFK Jr. the man was an heir to Roger Scruton’s ideas, and confined the Scrutonian description only to Riverkeeper, an organization in which RFK Jr. did play an important role for many years. I called it “exactly the type of environmental organization that conservative philosopher Roger Scruton would have approved of,” because its constituency was made up of local people whose lives depended on the river and livestock. As RFK Jr. put it in his own speech, Riverkeeper rejected far-left-activist tactics of illegal corporate sabotage or direct action, and instead set about monitoring the Hudson River and sought to convict criminal polluters in court in order to stop them.
While it’s true for Jack to say that Scruton viewed the state as the likeliest tool for externalizing the environmental costs on future generations, he certainly believed in environmental laws and regulations, even sweeping ones. For instance, in How to Think Seriously About the Planet Scruton advocates banning single-use plastic packaging — the kind found around all sorts of food, drink, toys, and innumerable other consumer goods, along the same lines as national and international bans on CFC gasses.
Scruton’s philosophy is summed up well in one passage:
The distinction between left and right is wrongly described by modern commentators as a distinction between the state and the market. As I earlier suggested, it is in part a distinction between two human types, the one seeing politics as the collective pursuit of an egalitarian goal, the other seeing it as a free association between individuals, in which absent generations and present hierarchies have a place. Hence the two forms of membership: movements with causes, and civil associations that are ends in themselves. My claim is that the first of those is a threat to homeostasis, the second a form of it. If we see environmental questions from that second perspective, then the emphasis shifts from control to incentive. We solve environmental problems not by appointing someone to take charge of them, but by creating the incentives that will lead people to solve them for themselves. The problem with centralized control is not merely that it reduces or extinguishes accountability, but also that it creates incentives that militate against its own success. In every case government has a part to play, but its proper role is not to take charge of the problem, but to create the framework and the constraints that enable people to take charge of it themselves.
I stand by the application of this to Riverkeeper — not that it has always advocated the correct policies, or everywhere been infallible. Certainly, I also take issue with many of its members’ alarmist and heavy-handed ideas about “climate change.” But the bulk of its activity has translated local initiative into protecting a local waterway. As a civic association, it takes on the duties of trusteeship and does things like habituating new residents of the Hudson River Valley on how to safely and responsibly enjoy eating crabs from a waterway that is occasionally filled with water waste from a nuclear-power facility. Its advocacy for updating the watershed infrastructure of New York State is aimed at keeping humans flourishing on the abundant natural resources available to them there.