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Dec 27, 2003

The Blog is Back



We're finally done with most of our major summer travels, and having received lots of praise from colleagues at the SHEAR (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) last week for this poor languishing blog, it seems time to get it back up and running again. There are so many things that need blogging about, I don't know where to start.

Let me begin by recommending an article in the Washington Monthly on the Bush administration's hostility to science. It has many specifics on something I have commented on before, the conservative aversion to engaging with many of the facts of modern life (and not only where "the facts of life" are concerned). Actually, it's less of an aversion these days than a commitment to the aggressive contradiction of scientific, economic, and sociological facts that threaten the beliefs and interests of the Christian and corporate right or might in any way be construed as casting doubt on the lifestyles and values of McMansion-dwelling, SUV-driving, Shrub-loving white suburban voters. Driven by basically political imperatives, these policies of denial and contradiction are buttressed by the simulated research of a growing conservative counter-intelligentsia eager to provide know-nothing conservative politicians with excuses for acting as though evolution, global warming, pollution, racism, etc., were all merely unproven theories on which "the jury is still out," if not actual "liberal claptrap." Conservatives like to pretend that they are actually pondering these questions seriously, but squirming underneath it all is good old-fashioned reactionary anti-intellectualism. The article reports Karl Rove's answer when asked to define a Democrat: "Bush's chief political strategist replied, 'Somebody with a doctorate.' "

The Washington Monthly article focuses on hard science issues, especially in biology, but the pattern it describes of favoring information and experts politically cooked to order, even or perhaps especially in cases where the favored view contradicts the vast majority of other research on a subject, clearly applies in just about every area, from economics to constitutional law to foreign policy. As the Washington Monthly points out, Condoleeza Rice is one the relatively few Ph.D.s in the current White House, but it's clear that she was in the habit, along with much of the rest of the administration, of giving weight to only the most alarmist evidence regarding the alleged Iraqi threat, even evidence that was widely regarded as baseless or purely speculative. It's all so sad. It's one thing for conservatives to sell tax cuts with cooked economic information, and quite inexcusably different to take the same cynical approach to war. link



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