Nixon _reluctantly_ created the EPA as a response to one of the only periods of sustained popular environmentalism in American history.
I'm unsure why this gets bandied about as a feather in Nixon's cap. Just as a factual matter, as soon as he was politically safe from environmentalist pressure (post-1972), he retreated completely on environmental issues, vetoing the EPA's budget, ordering the EPA to spend less than was apportioned to the agency.
It's an example of the potential for citizen activism, and an example of Nixon's inclination to consolidate power in the executive branch. Certainly not an example of "the post-WWII modern Republican party at one time wanted to expand environmental protections beyond the minimum required to quell citizen activism."
"All politics is a fad. Your fad is going right now. Get what you can, and here's what I can get you." - Nixon, to the Sierra Club, 1970
Not only that, but (according to a former senior adviser, who I got to know in the 90s) he was very close to supporting something like national minimum income. To replace welfare. As I recall, it used the income tax system. Below some minimum income, the tax rate became negative, increasingly so as income dropped.
It has some very interesting properties when you combine it with a removal of the minimum wage, such as getting rid of the welfare trap and allowing jobs to stay on-shore that would have, otherwise, gone off-shore. You do have to be careful or you end up subsidizing low-wage employers in a wholesale manner, but I would argue that we're already doing that now, just in a more targeted manner. I'm sure that someone with more economic clout than myself could weigh in with some other possible issues that may arise.
We have the EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) in the US, but it suffers from not being universal and having too many conditions. Without those conditions, it would be pretty close to a UBI (Universal Basic Income). But, as Milton Friedman pointed out many times, you need to get rid of all of the other welfare programs in order to realize the efficiency gains and tax savings from any negative income tax scheme.
American politics was very centerist in the past. The toxic partisan nature of it, which both sides are currently doubling down on, is largely a modern invention.
The unending increase in size and scope of government has been largely separate from this, and was a feature of both parties despite rhetoric for much of the last century. Not just in the US but in every western country.
Saying that government has been stripped of power by x party simply doesn't hold up to facts. If anything the power has consistently increased, or at most occasionally plateaued or massively increased in other areas. But most importantly only a few well connected individuals and companies are getting exceptions to that rule, in special circumstances.
Which is exactly what this law change is about: it explicitly says it will only be done in special circumstances. Their power to regulate asbestos has not been diminished at all, they've merely further solidified cronyism and legislation-by-special-favour into law.
> American politics was very centerist in the past.
Not for most of its history it wasn't. Between the New Deal and the early 1990s, though, there was a long shift in party alignment that had both major parties being ideologically incoherent big tents in transition between the past (ideological and more so geographic) party alignment and a new ideological, national alignment. This produced something that looked like more centrist politics, but it wasn't really fundamentally so, and in any case it was a manifestation of a transitory, inherently unstable, state.
> The toxic partisan nature of it, which both sides are currently doubling down on, is largely a modern invention.
No, it's not. See, the 1860s for a fairly vivid counterexample.
> I'm talking about the growth of the modern state, largely post WW2. Which has rarely been partisan.
It's been intensely partisan and intensely sharply ideologically-divided, just as today. What was different during the long realignment from the New Deal through approximately the Contract With America (though definitely progressively weakening during the last couple decades of that period) is that the ideological and partisan divides were not in sync, because of the lack of coherence due to the ongoing partisan realignment.
Because political power players had to manage both conflicts, the tension between their interest in one vs. the other often served to moderate conflict.
It was also fundamentally different. What we call the Democratic and Republican parties are not at all the same as the parties in the 20th century that used those names. Democrats were the party of old wealth, but also philanthropy, and favored foreign intervention. Republicans were the party of new wealth, and quite isolationist.
That, I don't know. But we do know that he got preoccupied with the Vietnam War, and paranoid about those who opposed it. Also, he was quite the racist. And toward the end, he had more or less gone off the rails.
So anyway, I'm guessing that it was early in his first term.
