Chris Mooney, the adept chronicler of the Republican brain and fierce avenger of science denialism wherever he finds it, is unhappy. The reason? A persistent "bad idea that circulates and recirculates with such frequency that once in a while, you just have to dust off your mallet" and give it a whack.
"I'm talking about the idea that when it comes to misusing or abusing science, both sides do it—a pox on both their houses—and the left is really just as bad as the right," he writes at Mother Jones. The idea's latest incarnation, the one that caught Mooney's eye, is a piece by Michael Shermer that appeared in Scientific American recently under the headline, "The Liberals' War on Science."
Shermer begins by recapping the scientific misconceptions and distortions of Republicans, referring to Mooney's 2006 book on the subject. He then goes on to note that a significant minority of Democrats are creationists and 19 percent "doubt that the Earth is getting warmer." I don't get that last one; if that means 81 percent of Democrats accept the facts on global warming, that's quite a difference from Republicans, among whom, Shermer writes, only 49 percent think the Earth is getting warmer.
But I'm interested in Mooney's critique here, not mine. "Considerably fewer Democrats than Republicans get the facts wrong on these issues," Mooney writes. Further, he writes, conservatives, not liberals, "are going around trying to force these wrongheaded views on children in schools." Mooney agrees with Shermer that childhood vaccines don't cause autism and that genetically modified foods are not dangerous, but it's not entirely clear to me that these are views that belong exclusively to Democrats. Misconceptions about autism and vaccines are spread across the political spectrum, I would think (no data here, just a hunch).
Mooney's original is more articulate than my recap, and I suggest you check it out. It's a short piece, but it makes some important points. Declaring that both sides equally make a mess of science has the whiff or objectivity or fairness about it. As Mooney argues, however, it happens to be wrong.
-Paul Raeburn
There are many problems of analysis. Not all Democrats are liberals or equally liberal. Nor are all Republicans conservative or equally conservative. But it’s true that the parties have become largely polarized. Still, the Democratic Party, in particular, has long been diverse. A significant number of working class and minority Democrats are fairly conservative on some issues. Consider that blacks are mostly Democratic voting while being far more religious than whites, and that religiosity goes hand in hand with social conservatism.
We can’t assume that partisan voting indicates liberalism or conservatism. This is further complicated by symbolic politics where most Americans, when given a forced choice, will identify as conservative; and yet most of these same people state having views that an outside observer would identify as liberal. If we wanted to know what are the actual politics of science denialism, we’d have to be more careful about the data we’re using. There is good scientific research that does dig deeper into these issues.
Another problem is conflating issues of scientific disagreement with issues of science denialism, while also conflating issues of morality with issues of science. There are many factual and moral reasons to oppose nuclear power, GMOs, etc that are not anti-scientific. Nuclear power does cost more and is potentially more dangerous. Likewise the unknown potential long-term problems of GMOs is not anti-scientific (e.g., modified genes escaping into the wild, as has been proven true). Those are scientific facts that aren’t debatable, if our assessment of the threat differs.