Bush-League Science

Are Republicans Conducting a “War on Science”?
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The future of science is always a political issue: Society as a whole pays many of the bills, and thus must decide between competing scientific priorities; society as a whole endures the risks of the most dangerous areas of science, and thus needs to set wise limits on perilous (if sometimes necessary) areas of research; and society as a whole should guard against those experimental practices that violate crucial ethical boundaries, such as mistreating vulnerable human subjects in research. Science is a public good, and thus governing science is a public responsibility — one for citizens and their representatives, not just scientific experts. Science policy, of course, needs to be made in light of the best scientific evidence. But values, not facts, determine what to promote, what to prohibit, and what to tolerate in the research realm.

In his new book, The Republican War on Science, journalist Chris Mooney rushes headlong into the bloody crossroads of science and politics. As Mooney tells it, today’s Republican ascendancy was made possible by the merger of business interests and religious conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, on behalf of those two interest groups, the Republican party is attacking modern science — from stem cells to climate change to evolution. According to Mooney, the GOP — and especially the Bush administration — has been distorting scientific facts, gagging scientists, suppressing research, packing scientific advisory committees with ideologues, and in various other ways abusing and politicizing science.

The Left, of course, is guilty of its own long train of abuses of science, on subjects ranging from animal testing to nuclear energy to genetically modified food. Liberals regularly distort science to push their agenda — witness the recent efforts to link Hurricane Katrina to global warming, a totally unsupportable and offensively opportunistic claim. Mooney does mention, in a most cursory way, these abuses by the Left; but he argues that the GOP’s abuses are both more numerous and more pernicious.

In making this claim, he follows the footsteps of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a liberal advocacy group that issued a report in February 2004 accusing the Bush administration of manipulating science. The report was accompanied by a statement signed by a bevy of Nobel laureates. Mooney gushes about the statement’s “distinguished roster” of signatories and portrays the document as an organic expression of outrage. In late 2003, he writes, worried scientists “assembled to compare notes” and tried “to articulate precisely how the Bush administration had crossed a new line.” They “recognized the prevalence of science abuses across a wide variety of fields and disciplines.” And they issued a heartfelt critique.

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The Editors of The New Atlantis, "Bush-League Science," The New Atlantis, Number 10, Fall 2005, pp. 122-126.