I'm not going to say that the Bush administration hasn't made major mistakes regarding science policy, because it has, but Mooney's book is representative of the left's most lethal assault against conservatism yet. We see it whenever the left refers to itself as the "reality-based community" when it is anything but; when Frank Wilczek, on his news conference after it is announced he has won the Nobel prize, slaps on a Kerry-Edwards button and grandstands that the physics award stands against everything the current administration is for; and when Paul Krugman says the reason that there are so few conservatives in academia is not because of discrimination or hostility towards people or ideas, but because conservatives prefer "revelation" over reason. In short, the left, after years of denying the existence of objectivity, is now declaring itself the sole arbitrater of truth and reason, and is trying to position conservatives in general and the Republican party in specific.
What's worse is that there are so many self-declared conservatives who are falling into the left's trap, and allowing themselves to be played for pasties. Going by a "anything my enemy is for, I'm against" philosophy, they will reflexively defend silliness such as creationism, even co-opting the left's language regarding "diversity" and "dissent" in their defense of irrationality. As a result, the left can hold them up as proof that everyone on the right is a fool thorougly detached from reality, and the media gobbles up and perpetuates this meme.
I came across FR when I was worried about whether or not I could still call myself a conservative, giving the seeming identification, if not equivocation, of the word with "creationist" in the MSM, but fortunately, it helped to restore in my hope in the movement. But since the voice of the Rationalist Right has been mute in the mainstream discourse-either due to deliberate exclusion by those controlling the dialog, or by the unwillingess of conservative scientists and rationalists to take political discussions beyond closed doors, conservatism faces a crisis of identity similar to what liberalism faced in the forties and fifties, when the support of communism by some within the movement threatened to delegitimatize it. The anti-communist liberals briefly won out, but the ideological fellow travellers resurged with a veangence in the sixties, and utterly decimated the type of liberalism identified with Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Similarly, the irrationalists within our movement will marginalize conservatism, if not completely wreck it, if the rationalist conservatives don't start speaking out more.
A couple of worthy links related to my rant:
First, an article from The Scientist which should have recieved greater circulation, but was ignored by the major press syndicates, and didn't even get posted on FR. It digs deeps and exposes as fradulent the image that the scientific community was overwhelmingly anti-Bush, and includes interviews from three conservative scientists, all very prominent in their fields: physicists William Happer and David Casper, and biomedical researcher Charles Arntzen. Not mentioned in the article was that Happer was a victim of genuine political abuse of science, dismissed from his DOE position in 1993 after he criticized some of Al Gore's statements regarding ozone depletion before a House Appropriations committee.
Lubos Motl, the Rush Limbaugh of string theory, takes on Krugman's aforementioned moronic statements in a long but very informed and astute post on his blog.
Finally, if you can stand me posting another John Derbyshire article, here's The Derb's ode to the wonders of science, and the understanding it brings to us. He also very wisely cautions against confusing scientific authority with political authority, something which both the left and right do too often.
And oh yes, for all you bloggers-that "reality based community" link is a Google-bomb suggestion. Go off and run with it :-)
For whatever it's worth, conservatism is the only viable home for people with libertarian views.
Libbaugh makes fun of the dems for being a hodgepodge of conflicting interest groups, but so is the Republican Party.
Hope you don't mind me pinging you guys to my post #27.
Great post. If anything could raise my flagging spirits recently about the prospects for science in the GOP, this is it. I'm pinging curiosity, since he and I had a conversation about this recently.
Great post!