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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In several respects this book is a companion piece to Thomas Frank's highly influential "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Arguably, it answers one of Frank's conundrums by providing the philosophical glue that sticks together the two halves of the GOP's unlikely post-1980 coalition. Affluent big-business conservatives and pro-life "moral values" conservatives (mostly middle class or working class) may have opposing economic interests, as Frank would argue. But they share an urgent desire to undermine public confidence in science, if necessary by manufacturing illegitimate doubt or creating, as Mooney puts it, "a semblance of controversy where it doesn't actually exist."
As he further explains, this campaign has been buttressed by the numerous conservative think tanks created in the past 30 years, by the relentless spinning of the Sean Hannity-Rush Limbaugh wing of the media and by an increasingly powerful congressional oligarchy of pro-business, anti-science Republicans. As Mooney documents extensively, Capitol Hill's worst offenders are probably Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, a self-anointed climate expert who has declared global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and Pennsylvania's pro-creationist Sen. Rick Santorum.
Perhaps most effectively of all, the right's war on science has exploited the mainstream media's fetish for journalistic "balance," regardless of its relevance to reality. Despite the overwhelming consensus of mainstream science on global warming, newspaper articles and TV reports still dutifully call upon the shrinking universe of contrarians like Michaels. (Like most climate change skeptics, Michaels has slowly retreated, along with the polar icecaps. He used to claim that global warming either wasn't happening or wasn't caused by human activity; now he admits to both, but argues that it can't be stopped and that its potential effects have been exaggerated.)
Similarly, the media has passed along reports emanating from the right-wing fringe suggesting a link between abortion and breast cancer, although virtually no mainstream scientists see any evidence to support such a connection. News accounts about the herbicide atrazine, which is widely used by American corn growers and may be connected to the worldwide decline of frogs and other amphibians, have suggested that the issue is muddled and controversial. If that's true, it's only because the chemical industry and its supporters have made it so: Research suggesting that atrazine interferes with the endocrine systems of amphibians has been published in major peer-reviewed scientific journals, while virtually all the conflicting studies have been funded by Syngenta, the company that manufactures atrazine.
If global warming remains the pro-business conservatives' primary front in the science wars, religious conservatives are more interested in two other issues that have received wide attention: embryonic stem cell research and the teaching of evolution. As throughout "The Republican War on Science," Mooney's reporting on these issues is exemplary and his writing admirably clear. But there isn't much surprising new information here; if you've followed these issues, you already know that the Bush administration and its allies have managed to alienate nearly the entire scientific establishment. On one hand, there is the substance of the policies: Bush has sharply restricted federally funded stem cell research and has endorsed the teaching of the pseudo-creationist position called "intelligent design."
Beyond that, the administration has tried to mislead the public about the nature of its decisions, pretending to embrace science while adopting extreme antiscientific positions. George W. Bush's August 2001 announcement that he would freeze the number of stem cell lines eligible for federal research included the claim that there were more than 60 "genetically diverse" lines available. That made the decision seem scientifically palatable, but the number wasn't real then and is less so now. (Again, this is something the mainstream media took months to figure out.) Mooney estimates that 22 stem cell lines qualify for federal funding, and of those only seven or eight may be scientifically useful. Simply put, none of the potential benefits of stem cell research -- therapies for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, transplantable tissues, cutting-edge disease research -- is likely to be realized by drawing on such a small pool of genetic lines.
Bush's recent comment that intelligent design should be taught in schools, alongside or in addition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, came after Mooney had finished his manuscript. Again, he can't have been surprised, since virtually the entire Christian right, a key element of Bush's governing coalition, has lined up behind intelligent design: Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, James Dobson's Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, the Concerned Women for America and so on. For political leaders like Bush and Santorum, that hasn't quite been enough. They have relied on the idea that genuine scientific disagreement exists over the validity of evolutionary theory, and that schools need to "teach the controversy," as intelligent-design supporters put it.
As was recently reported in a New York Times series on the battle over evolution, intelligent design has been vigorously supported by the Discovery Institute, a formerly moderate think tank that has now become the intellectual home of antievolutionism. In 2001, Discovery took out a newspaper ad signed by roughly 70 scientists, who declared that they were "skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life" -- in other words, they rejected Darwinism.
