Scientific American endorses Harris
“Conservatism never fails, it is only failed.”
TONIGHT (October 23) at 7PM, I’ll be in Decatur, Georgia, presenting my novel The Bezzle at Eagle Eye Books.
If Trump’s norm-breaking is a threat to democracy (and it is), what should Democrats do? Will breaking norms to defeat norms only accelerate the collapse of norms, or do we fight fire with fire, breaking norms to resist the slide into tyranny?
Writing for The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein writes how “every time the forces of democracy broke a reactionary deadlock, they did it by breaking some norm that stood in the way”:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-23-science-is-political/
Take the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and the Reconstruction period that followed it. As Jefferson Cowie discusses, the 13th only passed because the slave states were excluded from its ratification, and even then, it barely squeaked over the line. The Congress that passed reconstruction laws that “radically reconstructed [slave states] via military subjugation” first ejected all the representatives of those states:
https://newrepublic.com/article/182383/defend-liberalism-lets-fight-democracy-first
The New Deal only exists because FDR was on the verge of packing the Supreme Court, and, under this threat, SCOTUS stopped ruling against FDR’s plans:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court
The passage of progressive laws — “the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid” — are all thanks to JFK’s gambit of packing the House Rules Committee, ending the obstructionist GOP members’ use of the committee to kill anything that would protect or expand America’s already fragile social safety net.
As Perlstein writes, “A willingness to judiciously break norms in a civic emergency can be a sign of a healthy and valorous democratic resistance.”
And yet…the Democratic establishment remains violently allergic to norm-breaking. Perlstein recalls the 2018 book How Democracies Die, much beloved of party elites and Obama himself, which argued that norms are the bedrock of democracy, and so the pro-democratic forces undermine their own causes when they fight reactionary norm-breaking with their own.
The tactic of bringing a norm to a gun-fight has been a disaster for democracy. Trump wasn’t the first norm-shattering Republican — think of GWB and his pals stealing the 2000 election, or Mitch McConnell stealing a Supreme Court seat for Gorsuch — but Trump’s assault on norms is constant, brazen and unapologetic. Progressives need to do more than weep on the sidelines and demand that Republicans play fair.
The Democratic establishment’s response is to toe every line, seeking to attract “moderate conservatives” who love institutions more than they love tax giveaways to billionaires. This is a very small constituency, nowhere near big enough to deliver the legislative majorities, let alone the White House. As Perlstein says, Obama very publicly rejected calls to be “too liberal” and tiptoed around anti-racist policy, in a bid to prevent a “racist backlash” (Obama discussed race in public less than any other president since the 1950s). This was a hopeless, ridiculous own-goal: Perlstein points out that even before Obama was inaugurated, there were more than 100 Facebook groups calling for his impeachment. The racist backlash was inevitable had nothing to do with Obama’s policies. The racist backlash was driven by Obama’s race.
Luckily, some institutions are getting over their discomfort with norm-breaking and standing up for democracy. Scientific American the 179 year-old bedrock of American scientific publication, has endorsed Harris for President, only the second such endorsement in its long history:
Predictably, this has provoked howls of outrage from Republicans and a debate within the scientific community. Science is supposed to be apolitical, right?
Wrong. The conservative viewpoint, grounded in discomfort with ambiguity (“there are only two genders,” etc) is antithetical to the scientific viewpoint. Remember the early stages of the covid pandemic, when science’s understanding of the virus changed from moment to moment? Major, urgent recommendations (not masking, disinfecting groceries) were swiftly overturned. This is how science is supposed to work: a hypothesis can only be grounded in the evidence you have in hand, and as new evidence comes in that changes the picture, you should also change your mind.
Conservatives hated this. They claimed that scientists were “flip-flopping” and therefore “didn’t know anything.” Many concluded that the whole covid thing was a stitch-up, a bid to control us by keeping us off-balance with ever-changing advice and therefore afraid and vulnerable. This never ended: just look at all the weirdos in the comments of this video of my talk at last summer’s Def Con who are absolutely freaking out about the fact that I wore a mask in an enclosed space with 5,000 people from all over the world in it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
This intolerance for following the evidence is a fixture in conservative science denialism. How many times have you heard your racist Facebook uncle grouse about how “scientists used to say the world was getting colder, now they say it’s getting hotter, what the hell do they know?”
Perlstein points to other examples of this. For example, in the 1980s, conservatives insisted that the answer to the AIDS crisis was to “just stop having ‘illicit sex,’” a prescription that was grounded in a denial of AIDS science, because scientists used to say that it was a gay disease, then they said you could get it from IV drug use, or tainted blood, or from straight sex. How could you trust scientists when they can’t even make up their minds?
https://www.newspapers.com/image/379364219/?terms=babies&match=1
There certainly are conservative scientists. But the right has a “fundamentally therapeutic discourse…conservatism never fails, it is only failed.” That puts science and conservativism in a very awkward dance with one another.
Sometimes, science wins. Continuing in his history of the AIDS crisis, Perlstein talks about the transformation of Reagan’s Surgeon General, C Everett Koop. Koop was an arch-conservative’s arch-conservative. He was a hard-right evangelical who had “once suggested homosexuals were sedulously recruiting boys into their cult to help them take over America once they came of voting age.” He’d also called abortion “the slide to Auschwitz” — which was weird, because he’d also opined that the “Jews had it coming for refusing to accept Jesus Christ.”
You’d expect Koop to have continued the Reagan administration’s de facto AIDS policy (“queers deserve to die”), but that’s not what happened. After considering the evidence, Koop mailed a leaflet to every home in the USA advocating for condom use.
Koop was already getting started. His harm-reduction advocacy made him a national hero, so Reagan couldn’t fire him. A Reagan advisor named Gary Bauer teamed up with Dinesh D’Souza on a mission to get Koop back on track. They got him a new assignment: investigate the supposed psychological harms of abortion, which should be a slam-dunk for old Doc Auschwitz. Instead, Koop published official findings — from the Reagan White House — that there was no evidence for these harms, and which advised women with an AIDS diagnosis to consider abortion.
So sometimes, science can triumph over conservativism. But it’s far more common for conservativism to trump science. The most common form of this is “eisegesis,” where someone looks at a “pile of data in order to find confirmation in it of what they already ‘know’ to be true.” Think of those anti-mask weirdos who cling to three studies that “prove” masks don’t work. Or the climate deniers who have 350 studies “proving” climate change isn’t real. Eisegesis proves ivermectin works, that vaccinations are linked to autism, and that water fluoridation is a Communist plot. So long as you confine yourself to considering evidence that confirms your beliefs, you can prove anything.
Respecting norms is a good rule of thumb, but it’s a lousy rule. The politicization of science starts with the right’s intolerance for ambiguity — not Scientific American’s Harris endorsement.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
