Check out some right-wing evangelical / creationist websites like Rapture Ready and see how much the faith healers and laying-on-of-hands practitioners support modern medical science. 9/11Trutherism is so abundant within some conservative circles that it even came up repeatedly during the televised debates of the GOP ’08 primaries.

That is not in the least bit to say that the Left does not have typical denialisms. It does. Just those aren’t them. You would have a much stronger case in talking about the ideological opponents of animal medical research and GMOs, who in my experience are nearly universally leftists.

Guess what? Ideological Dogmatists on both the Left and Right commit crimes against science, reason, and logic. Both need to be called out when this happens. And when this happens, the focus should be on the antiscientific misstep at hand. Just because Conservatives are wrong on big issues like Climate Change and Evolution, it does not magically make Liberal antiscience somehow OK.

The anti-vaccine crowd exudes the common thread found in most Liberal antiscience: a mixture of anti-business, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism that is more neatly summarized as Anti-Establishment. This thread weaves itself into all kinds of Left-Wing logical fallacies and outright lies about the facts/science of many issues.

Organic agriculture, anti-genetically modified crops, power bracelets, new-age healing, power crystals, and the like all share the common rallying cry that the “evil business establishment” and science are conspiring to lie to us about the truth. “They don’t want you to know”. I doubt the majority of the hippies at health food stores and natural healing seminars are Right-Wing folk.

Speaking of Left-Wing nuts, let’s not also forget about the 9-11 Truthers and their bending of scientific plausibility to fit their “facts”. And you can dig even deeper into far-Left alternative science when it comes to gender (the claim that men and women’s brain chemistry is 100% identical), race (the claim that personality is a function of race), AIDS (genetically engineered artificial virus), or any myriad New Age claims.

Criticism of Liberalism does not automatically mean praise or agreement with Conservatism- and the binary way people look at the world be it political or scientific is absurd. As far as I’m concerned, both sides are full of rubbish and comprised of impractical ideas pushed by unmoving ideological dogmatists that are as bad as any religious zealot. I can’t see how anybody genuinely interested in ethics and reason would ascribe to either “side”.

Nobody, especially self-affirmed Liberals or Conservatives, is above scrutiny. While it is certainly debatable that one side may be wrong more often than the other, that does not by any means allow for either one to be let off the hook. The anti-Vaccine movement was fueled primarily by Liberal-flavored anti-science. Deal with it.

I like Mike Lind’s idea that there are really three parties to consider in the conservative movement machine–a triangular trade as it were. You’ve got the business interests (and there only has to be a few particularly ideological and activist ones to make a difference), the Christian right (to make loud, indignant noises and get out the vote at election time), and you also have the Machiavellian set who knit everything together and help keep the populism going to motivate the base and donor class. Irving Kristol once said:

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.

So you may have people that are educated enough to know that evolution is true, and know enough about science to know that AGW is real. But you have the political imperatives of keeping the base stoked up with populism, which may involve tiptoeing around the blunt truth, perhaps even telling the occasional Noble Lie… That’s the burden of being a modern-era Machiavellian populist in the James Burnham tradition, or a reconstructed aristocrat / philosopher king, etc. in the Straussian sense (or at least in the sense of how Kristol interpreted Strauss).

But as David Frum has claimed, this creates a trap:

I often wonder: Has the need to fund our cause by mobilizing fears actually crippled our cause, made it less convincing and less valid than it should have been? Most people cannot sustain cynicism for very long. If your fundraising imperatives require you to SAY that Obama is a Marxist, most of those who repeat the slogan will come to believe it. If your fundraising requires you to pretend that Obama caused the economic crisis he actually inherited, over time you will genuinely forget how the crisis started and why it has lasted so long.

…An enraged base will entrap the party. If Obama really is demoniacally determined to impose socialism on the United States, there’s no working with him. We can only fight him until we defeat and destroy him or he defeats and destroys us. So what happens when Congress and president must work together? To balance the budget after the recession ends for example? The party will have positioned itself so that any Republican who tries to do anything constructive will stand accused of selling out. As far as our voters are concerned, nothing can happen unless we control everything – and no deal is possible unless we get entirely our own way. That is not in fact the way the leadership of the GOP thinks. The GOP is better than its material, and its leaders are reasonable people with feasible goals. But a mood is growing in the Republican base that despises the higgling and haggling of real politics – preferring freedom from responsibility and the grim satisfactions of radical alienation.

He’s not talking about science here, but he is talking about realistic policy. And the point is that the right wing populism pioneered by people like Irving Kristol begins to infect the party, so that even the elites forget how to think with clear heads. People who started their careers being inspired by populism, by the kinds of not-quite-truths that Irving Kristol is advocating, maybe those people begin to forget how to actually govern using the truth. And since the political incentives for doing that don’t seem very high (the base doesn’t want to hear you confirm what purported “liberals” think in any way) maybe they don’t learn…

Environmentalists deserve to be wrong. Environmentalists can never be said to have been right. That’s a big chunk of the philosophy.

There’s a subgroup within the “skeptic” camp that will, if really hard-pressed, concede that human emissions of CO2 is causing some warming. But they’ll always bury that lede around paragraph 3, after a prolonged intro of ritualized throat-clearing about alarmism, socialism, general scientific conspiracism, Al Gore’s electric bill, and how our air and water are “getting cleaner” despite the alarmist socialist conspiracy. Something might be happening that matches what an environmentalist said, and they may very well admit that to be the case, but an environmentalist can never, ever be right.

@6
I guess my question is: At what point do you say something is intrinsic to the right or left and when something is extrinsic?

What fraction of party membership buys into which denialism is something that can be measured by survey. Chris has quote a recent survey that finds a clear correlation between climate change denial and party. Same could be done for anti-vax (I wonder if its been done already.

following #23

There’s a real difference, I think, in the underlying motivations of left vs right denial issues.

People that reject vaccinations are concerned about bodily harm to themselves or their children and/or have a poor understanding of the risks of vaccination vs no vaccination. Similarly, opponents of GMOs are worried about bodily harm (eating weird foods) and also environmental harm and I daresay also have a poor grasp of risks vs. benefits. In both cases, the perceived villains are big profit-motivated companies and there’s a lack of faith in the institutions which establish safety standards for and regulate these companies. There might be some philosophical component, such as rejection of “unnatural” biological methods, but I don’t think its the big motivator here.

Evolution and climate change denial are very different. There’s no bodily harm issue. Evolution is rejected because it either conflicts with pre-held religious views of the nature of the world, or the belief that humans are not animals, they are something superior to the animal kingdom. I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around climate change denial. As far as I can tell, a big issue is financial – loss of fossil-fuel-related income and jobs and maybe increased taxes. Chris and others have already documented the corporate parties behind a lot of the movement. But in both cases, the perceived villains are the academic elite, telling them how to think. Its very philosophical, and very tribal.

finally, there’s the correlated problem that the culture of academic science is populated by liberals and has a center-to-Left perspective. so you have a positive feedback loop, where the two cultures, the center-to-Left scientists, and the Right which is falling in love with fundamentalist religion, drift further and further apart. i know many scientists who started out as centrists who are conventional partisan democrats precisely because of a strong cultural aversion to what’s happening on the Right.

as a right-winger i think a great deal of science, especially in human biology and psychology, has been reshaped toward Leftish presuppositions. but my attitude is that there’s no point in rejecting science. it’s the only game, and if you disagree, you need to work within the system, and keep arguing for your position. not walk away and declare the whole enterprise corrupt.

I’m a New York City liberal artist, and I am surrounded by science denial. I see my fight as being right here, with my “political compatriots.” I see vaccine denial, rampant faith in alternative medicine and distrust of “western” medicine, and more or less constant scoffing at “scientific studies” or anything, shiver, that isn’t based in emotion or spirituality. Everyone I know votes the same way I do. That doesn’t mean we see the world (not to mention, uh, reality) in the same way.

There are two aspects to this.

On the harm aspect, anti-vax is more promptly damaging, as TTT pointed out. However, it is also more easily remedied; seeing the harm their children and others suffer, those refusing to vaccinate can change their minds, or can be forced by law to comply. Once inoculations and treatments begin, any epidemic can be reversed in a matter of years. However, climate change will harm a larger population, and a long period of inaction on climate change has permitted the buildup of greenhouses which will continue to warm the Earth for an indefinite period.

Regarding relative influence, the Washington Post is a venerable institution, and George Will is a columnist respected by many due to his long career. The Huffington Post is relatively new, hence less influential; and Jenny McCarthy, as an actress, has a credibility gap to overcome on matters of science or policy. That’s not a show-stopper; Ed Begley, Jr. on environment or Angelina Jolie on human rights have substantially earned their bona fides, IMO. I do not think Jenny McCarthy would be there yet, even if she was right.