Science and Politics in the US

Not that anyone should read too much meaning into Donald Trump's slapdash appointment process, but I agree with M. Anthony Mills (NY Times) that one theme is a rejection of science:

The leader of the Republican Party and our country’s next president has tapped a pro-choice scion of the country’s most famous Democratic dynasty to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In keeping with the bewildering dynamics of today’s negative partisanship, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have cheered the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while liberals have near categorically denounced him.

Mr. Kennedy’s transformation from left-wing vaccine skeptic to potential Republican cabinet member overseeing America’s vast health apparatus represents a profound shift not only in the character of the American right but also in the politics of science more generally. The emergent MAGA science policy agenda, driven by skepticism and anti-elitism, blends familiar conservative and libertarian ideas with a suspicion of expert power once more associated with the left. The result is a uniquely American brand of populism that has the potential to fundamentally reshape national politics.

Back in 1970 Republicans were much more pro-science than Democrats, and the hippie, whole earth, split wood not atoms, make love not bombs thing was launched mainly from the left. Now things have largely switched, and that strikes me as quite important.

Why did this happen? 

Fights over teaching evolution in the schools.

Fights over climate change. You will never understand America until you grasp the intense devotion of many men to their gasoline-powered machines, and more broadly to the old manly economy of mining, logging, and making things in fire-filled factories.

Environmentalism more generally; some of you probably would not believe me if I explained to you the arcana of wetlands law, bat preservation, and other regulations that genuinely hamstring building in this country. 

Covid-19. As all my readers know, I do not forgive the tergivisations of government pandemic policy – e.g., saying that masking is ineffective, then requiring it, or saying that closing schools was not needed and then closing them – or the attitude of leftists toward all of this, e.g. demanding that churches close but insisting that racial injustice is so important that mass protests had to go ahead. 

One could sum all of this up in a more general point, The alliance of science with bureaucrats who tell people what they can and cannot do.

Others:

Health and diet advice more broadly. This one is complex because in many ways medicine has gotten a lot better over the past 25 years, thanks largely to drugs created by Big Pharma and getting doctors to take actual science more seriously. On the other hand that process involved rejecting a lot of what was established medicine 25 years ago, like heart bypass surgery; the weary cry of many science skeptics these days is "they keep changing their minds about everything."

The end of physics. As I regularly post here, I have been convinced by a group of skeptical scientists that sub-atomic physics is at a complete dead end, and astrophysics also seems radically stuck; spending on these things keeps going up and the number of papers published keeps rising, but fundamental progress seems to have halted. Plus there's the phantasm of fusion power, still 15-25 years away. Don't get me started on string theory. None of this inspires confidence in science.

The instututionalization of science. Lots of cutting-edge science used to be done by smart people in tiny labs. Now science is funded at vast expense by huge government agencies and mega-corporations. The scientists themselves are constantly complaining about the process involved in competing for, administering, and accounting for grants, and you don't have to be anti-science to suspect the agendas of the people involved. It strikes me as possible that absolutely nobody understands either the overall nature of this process or its impact on the world, and certainly the average voter has no clue. So if your biggest complaint about the modern world is excess bureaucracy, you're probably going to be suspicious of modern science.

Speaking only for myself here, I understand the frustrations of many people with our science establishment. I would do a lot of wholesale reform if I could, starting by slashing the budgets of sub-atomic physics and manned space flight. I would also radically reform my own field and drastically reduce the number of archaeological sites dubbed "significant."

But we need science. It is the root of everything good about the modern world, and the only possibly solution to many of our problems. We can't survive without it. 

So the turn of a whole political party against the foundation of our world is a bit concerning. Part of me thinks that science is so fundamental that we can't really do much to get rid of it or even change it, but certainly there could be cases where we cast it aside and a lot of people end up dying as a result.