Environmental Backlash in U.S. Congress: A Computational Study of Reactionary and Counterrevolutionary Discourses

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18: The Politics of Social Movements 3

Abstract

This paper examines environmental backlash in U.S. Congressional discourse (1980–2016), distinguishing between reactionary backlash, which resists change by denying climate science, and counterrevolutionary backlash, which reframes environmentalism as a cultural attack on identity, fairness, and tradition. While previous research has analyzed corporate-led climate obstruction and far-right ecological thought, little work has explored their interaction in mainstream legislative discourse.

Using a computational word embedding analysis of 800,000+ Congressional speeches and spatial ideology models (DW-NOMINATE, CFscores), this study investigates two questions: (1) How does reactionary discourse transition into counterrevolutionary discourse in environmental politics? and (2) How are these discourses exchanged between center-right and far-right legislators over time?

Findings show that reactionary discourse, focused on science, data, and research, peaked in the early 1990s, coinciding with debates over climate science. By the early 2000s, counterrevolutionary rhetoric, emphasizing values, tradition, and fairness, became more dominant, shifting the debate from scientific denial to cultural grievance. Far-right legislators (80th+ percentile in ideology scores) disproportionately used counterrevolutionary rhetoric, supporting theories of “reverse contamination”, where radical narratives emerge on the far right before diffusing into mainstream conservatism.

This study contributes a novel methodological approach to political and environmental sociology by showing how discursive radicalization unfolds within democratic institutions. It also highlights how right-wing environmental backlash evolves, offering a comparative perspective to European trends in far-right ecologism.

Author

• Jesse Callahan Bryant, Yale University