> Again, socialism might not mean what you think it means, especially in other parts of the world. Whether it is "socialism" or progressive or whatever label y

> Again, socialism might not mean what you think it means, especially in other parts of the world. Whether it is "socialism" or progressive or whatever label you want to use, just because a conservative government just happened to have passed some legislation does not mean it was a conservative idea. See also Nixon and the EPA: > Still, Brinkley said, Nixon was one of the nation's four greatest environmental presidents. The historian's short list also included Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Whether or not Nixon cared about the issue, Brinkley said later, is another matter. According to Ruckelshaus, not only did Nixon not care about the environment, "he wasn't [even] curious about it." Even Reagan had more interest in the subject, he remarked. > Nixon's lack of interest notwithstanding, "he had to do something about it," Ruckelshaus says, "because the public demanded it." Nixon took office just in time for the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. An offshore well in the Santa Barbara channel blew out eight days after his inauguration. Pictures of oiled seabirds made TV news and newspaper front pages all over the United States. That June, Cleveland's Cuyahoga River — or at least the oil and debris floating in it — famously caught fire. Clearly the images of those disasters had impact, but were they responsible for the popular uprising that made Nixon an environmental President? * https://www.cascadepbs.org/2011/08/richard-nixon-unlikely-environmentalist https://www.cascadepbs.org/2011/08/richard-nixon-unlikely-en... > That’s not to say that Nixon personally embraced the environmental movement. He did not campaign on environmental issues, and, privately to Henry Ford II, he worried, vividly, that the movement wanted humans to go back to living like “a bunch of damned animals.” But despite his ideological differences with aspects of environmentalism—and unease with it—he presided over the biggest expansion of federal environmental protections ever. > One way to explain this is that Nixon’s presidency coincided with a groundswell of environmentalist fervor, with membership in the Sierra Club tripling between 1965 and 1970, and the share of the American electorate believing that pollution was a serious problem going from one-third to 70 percent during that same period. So, while the tension between businessmen and “tree huggers” existed during Nixon’s time, there was nothing to be gained politically from exploiting it: Environmentalism was popular, and Nixon responded to the moment. * https://newrepublic.com/article/171780/richard-nixon-earth-day-culture-war https://newrepublic.com/article/171780/richard-nixon-earth-d...