Few scientists are Republican, and so we are doomed.

[elfs]

This has to be one of the weirdest things I've read in awhile. Daniel Sarewitz at Slate has an article today about how in a survey of scientists associated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (I think that's an important caveat missing from other discussions), only 6% identify as Republican, and 55% identify as Democratic.

Sarewitz then gets weird:

As a first step, leaders of the scientific community should be willing to investigate and discuss the issue. They will, of course, be loath to do so because it threatens their most cherished myths of a pure science insulated from dirty partisanship. ... The issue here is legitimacy, not literacy. A democratic society needs Republican scientists.

Weird because becoming a scientist isn't the same as being a specific race or gender; you don't get to choose those, and there is no difference in performance between individual black, or Latino, or Asian, or white scientists, or male or female scientists.

But being "Republican" is an identity; it's a choice. Even more to the point, it's a choice that embraces an entire slew of identifying beliefs. I have no wonder at all that scientists reject the "Republican" label; Republicans are explicitly anti-science. I don't know why the party of Lincoln has decided to become the party of the Luddites. Quiggan's reasoning that they'd like science to keep putting out nifty new toys but cannot reconcile their need to constrain the discourse with science's need for free and accurate exchange sounds nice but doesn't quite fit the vehement stupidity of someone like Cantor or Bethell.

Over the past 16 years, Republicans have become more and more opposed to the scientific endeavor. Global warming, intelligent design, cosmology, even nutrition this week, have all become part of a partisan divide.

And it's not just the hard sciences. In the political sciences, too, there is a dearth of graduates who identify as Republican or Conservative. As much as we may mock the discipline, we need people with those degrees to go into public service and manage policy-driven offices throughout the executive. The Republican Party has no standing with the people who find and make the inventions that make America great, and as time goes on they'll find it harder and harder to staff their offices with qualified personnel.

Maybe Sarewitz should acknowledge that the legitimacy problem he describes is exactly backwards: It ought not to be that scientists risk losing their legitimacy with the American people because they're overwhelmingly not-Republican, but that Republicans ought to lose their legitimacy with the American people because they are overwhelmingly opposed to reality.

An article going around the web this week, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, puts the blame exactly where I've been putting it for the past eight years: at the feet of the Bush Administration and the ongoing, overwhelming paranoia that the whole world, and not just a few hundred bad-tempered men with beards, are out to get us. As author Alfred McCoy puts it, "Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation."

Unfortunately, I think Charlie Stross has it right when he writes:

I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. ...It's no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate. ...

Deep craziness: we're in it, and there's probably not going to be any reduction in the prevalence of authoritarian escapism until we collectively become accustomed to the pace of change. Which will, at a minimum, not happen until the older generations have died of old age — and maybe not even then.

At which point, sadly, the US won't even be a fading superpower, the way Britain is; we'll be more like Italy, with bare memories of having once been the center of the world but now just another batshit crazy country barely able to manage its own affairs.

Comments

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering just how bad it's going to get over there when the decline becomes obvious to all.

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

The part I find crazy in all of this is that you would think that with the near sexual lust Republicans have for expensive, high-tech weapons systems, and the military-industrial complex that make them, that Republicans would at least be big fans of engineering. I could see them dismissing more abstract research, in favor of funding their toy makers. Yet as you said, they are anti-science across the board. Perhaps they recognize deep down that facts having a liberal bias is not just a platitude of the left.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Nutrition? Can you link to the details (I believe you, just curious what they could have against it).

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

I believe you get a lot more Engineers who are Republican than you do Scientists. I was browsing through comments on a similar story yesterday, ran across a point somebody made, it stuck in my mind:

Engineers deal with static laws, things that don't change, and they build great things upon them like bedrock. Bridges, Skyscrapers, Missiles, gunships, etc. Scientists are often poking and prodding at the basic laws of the universe, as we understand them, trying to prove them wrong, and come up with new theories to explain what happened when current theories don't match up with the evidence.

The armed forces do fund rather a lot of the applied engineering research for weapon systems, my (very, very Republican) uncle worked for them designing missile guidance systems.

It's just my opinion, but i think that part of the problem stems from Fundamentalism, which became a habit after too long being in bed with the hardcore religious right. It's a very comforting thing to take a stance of "I'm 100% right, and if i'm wrong, so is the whole universe!" regardless if it's about god, taxes, or immigration. Proper science kind of requires a mindset that is not just willing to accept that our explanations of the universe might be wrong, but actively seeks them out.

[ben-raccoon.livejournal.com]

My dad is an engineer who works as a defense contractor. While he isn't a republican, he's come to the same conclusion as you, for much the same reason.

[ben-raccoon.livejournal.com]

At this stage in the game, it's entirely likely that they're against it because Michelle Obama is doing a childrens' nutrition campaign, and that's all the reason they need.

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

I don't know why the party of Lincoln has decided to become the party of the Luddites.

Climbing into bed with the hardcore fundamentalist religious right wing will do that to you.

Many of the comments on the Slate article (and a lot of the comments on Salon's article that pointed to it) were quite explicit in pointing out that the problem is perhaps that there would be more Republicans in the sciences if the Republican platform was not fundamentally hostile to both the results of scientific endeavor, like, say, the theory of evolution, and to scientists themselves, in the GOP's constant drumbeat against "elites".

An article going around the web this week, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, puts the blame exactly where I've been putting it for the past eight years: at the feet of the Bush Administration and the ongoing, overwhelming paranoia that the whole world, and not just a few hundred bad-tempered men with beards, are out to get us.

That wasn't my takeaway from that article at all, but it hardly matters. The US' relative decline is irreversible simply because the apex of American power came at a point in history at which most other nations in the world were economically on their knees. HIR makes an interesting point that we've already fallen quite a ways - "The United States currently produces just over 30 percent of total gross domestic product (GDP) when measured at market exchange rates, or 21 percent at purchasing power parity (PPP) rates. This is down from 46 percent just after World War II,"

[elfs.livejournal.com]

You didn't see last week Newsweek? Here's a summary: Food and the Culture Wars (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/26/AR2010112603494.html). Part of it is all about how the educated want people to think about their food, and how America's less educated don't want to be told what to eat and want acceptance of their desire to pile it on high, continuously, and for those snooty elite to not be so disdainful of The Lord's Abundance and whatever the fuck.

[jenk]

Well, that and poor people don't need to eat, so cutting food stamps is a-OK!

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Our local library does stocks Newsweek and other foreign magazines, but I must admit I don't read it very often.

It's kind of the opposite here; left-wingers loudly support locally-grown healthy food for environmental reasons, while right-wingers loudly support locally-grown healthy food because "c'est notre patrimonie gormandaise!". Both sides will then dive into poutine, a pile of lard-fried potatoes and cheese curds drenched in thick gravy and served with Pepsi.

http://www2.lactualite.com/plaisirs-gourmands/2010-12-03/a-vos-fourneaux-pour-le-menu-de-noel-de-guillaume-cantin/

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Poutine

[tagryn]

I do have to wonder if there's something about the AAAS which makes it more likely to draw Democrats than Republicans, so that there's a sampling effect going on: if their membership draws disproportionally from academics, for example. I don't know enough about the AAAS to say. I'd also be concerned that people become AAAS members for the subscription to Science rather than because they actually hold a position as a scientist. Most professional (and alumni) societies don't have litmus tests for membership; if you're willing to pay the membership dues, you can become a member.

The study itself has some interesting results, some bad but some good, beyond what Sarewitz chose to focus in on in his article. Worth a look.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

I think the converse is going on: people in the sciences are fleeing from and disavowing all relationship with the Republican Party because the Party has gone off the deep end and is now hostile to reality. They have malfunctioned, believing that they are always right, so if their views do not fit with the Universe, then the Universe is wrong.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

I'd say that it's the distinction between 'the US needs Republican scientists' and 'the US needs a Republican party that attracts people trained to think methodically, carefully, and rationally'. The former may be true, but the latter is more true.