Chapter 4

 The broader political story of the Sagebrush Rebellion is less about roads or grazing AUMs; it is about how a regional challenge to federal authority in the West aligned with challenges from both business interests and religious conservatives in the New Right. Like the sagebrush rebels, conservative business and religious leaders were fighting back against the federal government, which had expanded its regulatory footprint dramatically in the rights revolution and environmental movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Together they forged a new coalition aimed at bringing conservatives to office and slashing the federal government’s regulatory power. And together they built a conservative infrastructure that would support future sagebrush rebellions and that eventually made opposition to federal land authority part of the conservative platform.