The Republican War on Science

Chris Mooney is everywhere. The Daily Show, Fresh Air, the papers, the internet...and everywhere he goes, his hosts say the same thing:

Buy his book.

And guess what I'm going to say?

Buy his book.

Bunches of other bloggers have reviewed it, so I'm not going to spend too much time recapping the basics, but in short, The Republican War on Science is about the right's multipronged effort to devalue, contradict, and drown out scientific evidence that discredits their agenda. And since their agenda has become wholly business-oriented and/or religiously motivated, Republicans have had too start waging war against empiricism a lot.

That bit about business is important because one neat coup the GOP has achieved is getting the Christian Right to yell so loud that the demands Business are often near-inaudible. Thus, we're focused on religious abuses and socially conservative policies when the really damaging stuff is being perpetrated by industry. A good example is the Supreme Court bait-and-switch, where we all sat anxiously awaiting a caveman like Luttig, only to get a smiling, genial, tool of corporations in Roberts. And its repeated across the board -- theocrats make the noise, plutocrats get the action. So while a thorough education based on Biblical principles should be fought tooth-and-nail, creationism's inclusion in certain classrooms is no more, and maybe quite a bit less, damaging than the toxins being belched into the air, the funds being poured into Star Wars and the global warming evidence being suppressed. What's worse, or at least more galling, is that so much of these abuses are in the name of "Sound Science", a term which, as Chris documents, was invented by Big Tobacco. Science, generally speaking, is sound, otherwise it isn't science.

But the overriding point that the book settles into is probably the most important. Republicans, on every front and at every opportunity, have worked to destroy the prestige of experts and assault the legitimacy of evidence. And no group can do that over a long period of time, on a multitude of issues, and remain personally unaffected. They can't fight experts in the electoral arena and then respect them when its time to govern. And they haven't.

One place it came out, I think, is Katrina. If your attitude is that expertise is secondary to politics, appointing a campaign crony to head FEMA is a perfectly reasonable expression of that worldview. And if you tend to ignore most career professionals, paying little attention to the Army Corps. of Engineers and the disaster-prediction specialists in the government is business-as-usual. So those hapless agencies saw their requests and warnings subordinated to the overall political goals of the Administration, and, now sitting low on the Administration's ideological agenda, their funding was cut and their urgency unheeded.

That's not to say many folks were catching fire over the prospect of a New Orleans hurricane. But some, both within FEMA and in the journalistic community (Chris Mooney included), were. And if the Bush administration had a real respect for expertise and a serious commitment to at least checking into the alarms set off by specialists, we could've been better prepared. But they don't and we weren't. And if we don't take Chris's book seriously, global warming, peak oil, pollution, and a host of others are going to punish us for the oversight.

Again.