The stage for Trump's play to stifle the voices of scientists was set before he was even a gleam in the GOP’s eye. For years, journalists have been complaining about press officers' blocking access to government scientists who have something important to say, even - especially - at the CDC. Other agencies, too; the FDA even went so far as to create an internal surveillance operation to silence what it deemed "defamatory" - read: embarrassing - information circulated by some of its scientists.Science is not op-ed ideology or political polemics. It is a body of knowledge and practice of acquiring it that has been part of human civilization for at least a couple of millennia. The institutional framework of academics institutions and publications, professional associations, research institutions, science journalism sets standards for what is considered sound and what is not. Like all human institutions, thewy have problems.
We've now entered a new ballgame. Before, we had desultory attempts to shut dissenters up before they could embarrass the administration; in more normal times, this was an annoyance rather than a major threat to democracy. However, now we must face the fact that we're seeing a serious, terrifying, full-scale government misinformation campaign — the bureaucratic suppression of scientific truth in favor of politically acceptable fiction—in action. And at a moment when our society needs reliable scientific information the most, the most dangerous source of misinformation in the U.S. has become our own president.
But human societies don't run on abstract sophomoric arguments about whether we can trust them thar scientists.
For public universities to function as legitimate universities, they have to have legal and organizational protections from having their detailed teaching being treated as PR operations for whatever politicians are in power at the moment. The same thing is true for other public science and health organizations because they are public institutions with a responsibility to the public, not in the first instance to elected officials or a political party.
And there are also extensive laws to define qualifications and required training for people to be able to represent themselves as various kinds of medical professionals. Otherwise, the practice of medicine and the production of medical devices and products would be a free-market competition between the effective and the fraudulent, between the helpful and the dangerous.
Seife's piece notably indicates that the problem he identifies precedes the Trump Administration and so presumably applies to the Obama-Biden Administration, as well. One might wish he had been a bit more specific on the point. But he does make it clear that the current Administration has taken it to the proverbial next level: "a serious, terrifying, full-scale government misinformation campaign".
One thing that unfortunately even Democrats seem to be forgetting in their momentary collective deep sigh of contentment over the ascendency of Status Quo Joe Biden and his Make America Boring Again program is that the problem of asymmetric polarization between the two major parties in the US is one of aggressive Republican radicalism on the one hand and muted resistance and even collaboration by the Democrats on the other.
"Returning" to the mythical boring state that Biden enthusiasts envision would require breaking the fanaticism of the Republican Party and ending the collaborative passivity of the Democrats.
The Republican Party's bear hug of superstition and anti-science extremism did not begin with Trump's Presidency. Way back in 1980, when St. Reagan was campaigning to defeat President Jimmy Carter, Philip Hilts reported in Creation vs. Evolution: Battle Resumes in Public Schools Washington Post 09/13/1980:
In the hot summer of 1925, when William Jennings Bryan defended the old-time religion in the celebrated Scopes "monkey trial," fundamentalist politics was a powerful force. The "creationists" who believed in the literal accuracy of Genesis swept the teaching of evolution out of America's public schools.But St. Reagan didn't just start promoting creationist pseudoscience during his 1980 Presidential campaign:
Now, 55 years later Ronald Reagan has latched onto the issue again, with his recent endorsement of the modern fundamentalists and their revived creationist movement. ...
GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan raised the issue to the level of presidential politics recently at a meeting of evangelical Christians in Dallas when he claimed to see "great flaws" in the theory of evolution.
If evolution is taught in the public schools, he said, then "the biblical story of creation" should be taught alongside it. "Religious America is awakening," he said. [my emphasis]
The new creationist movement got its first big political boost in California during the administration of Gov. Ronald Reagan. In 1969, a notably religious state board of education, with seven of 10 members appointed by Reagan, voted to accept a statement that creationism is a valid alternative to the theory of evolution.Democrats nostalgic for the soothing balm of Make America Boring Again might want to recall those days more clearly. Reagan's biographer Lou Cannon wrote in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991):
The California board first approved the teaching of creationism side-by-side with evolution. Then, after much pressure from creationist scientists, the board decided instead to revise current biology textbooks to indicate that evolution is only a theory, and is no more verifiable than creationist doctrine.
Since the revision of biology books for California -- and those California texts were used all over the country in their revised form -- publishers, teachers and biologists have been battling the "equal time for creation" position in virtually every state. [my emphasis]
Reagan, running loose [in the 1980 general election campaign], displayed his familiar propensity for unverifiable anecdotes and a willingness to say whatever came into his head. What came into his head were happy thoughts about creationism and Taiwan and confusion about the origins of the Ku Klux Klan. By early September the candidate's gaffes had become so numerous that reporters on the Reagan plane were hard-pressed to keep track of them, and Democratic strategists were optimistic that the election campaign would be turned into a referendum on Reagan rather than on -President Carter.Yes, the Democrats were hoping the fever would break already in 1980!
Cannon elaborates:
At a news conference in Dallas, Reagan tried to please a questioner from a religious publication and agreed that creationism should be taught as an alternative theory to Darwinism in the public schools. On other occasions he made positive references to Taiwan while his running mate George Bush was on a fence-mending mission to the People's Republic of China. The remark that caused the biggest flap occurred on Labor Day, when Jimmy Carter formally opened his fall campaign with a speech in Tuscumbia, Alabama, a center of Ku Klux Klan activity. When Reagan spoke in Detroit that evening, he said, "Now I'm happy to be here while he is opening his campaign down there in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan." The crowd gasped. Reagan knew immediately that he had misspoken. "I blew it," he told his aides afterward. "I should never have said what I said."In similar situations today, Trump would just say, "Fake news! What I said was perfect, just like the phone call was perfect. I handled that situation perfectly." But crackpot anti-science fanaticism backed by organized Christian Right fundamentalism is definitely not new for the Republican Party and did not drop from the skies in 2016.
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