Steve Benen on Maddowblog has a report on the GOP and science:
And the White House reported today that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is nearly empty, and Team Trump hasn’t made much of an effort to fill its vacancies.
Vinton Cerf, a Google vice president and one of the chief architects of the Internet, told the New York Times, “The impression this leaves is that Trump isn’t interested in science and that scientific matters are a low priority at the White House.”
And while that’s dispiriting, I fear Cerf may be understating matters. If the president and other Republican leaders were indifferent towards science, that would be dispiriting. My concern, however, is that GOP leaders are overtly hostile towards science, evidence, and scientific scholarship in general.
Traditionally, the GOP has been the party of business, but I think we’re seeing a split developing. I’m not sure when it started, but we certain have seen evidence of it over the last couple of years when the GOP tried to pass “religious freedoms” legislation (see here for then-Governor Mike Pence’s personal debacle) which basically gave a pass to bigotry so long as the bigots were religious zealots. The strong objections of several businesses and the movement of business activity out of those states appeared to honestly surprise the GOP in those states – as if they spent too much time talking to extremist right wing religious groups and not enough to businesses.
Reports such as the above indicate to me that the GOP no longer deeply communicates with business, because business, love it or hate it, has to deal with reality, and science is the study of reality. In fact, it appears the GOP is no longer made up of solid businessmen. While the business community may be slow to develop a backlash over the antics of Trump and the GOP, partly because not all businesses care about government-funded science – until a natural disaster rolls over them and they realize they should have been warned and/or the government should have fixed it before it happened – other businesses do depend vitally on the government to perform the basic science. The fact that businesses depend on that basic science research doesn’t mean business should do it, for both public policy (we prefer basic knowledge to be freely available) and business (the unpredictability of results makes basic research an undesirable business avenue, if they can at all avoid it) reasons. But if the flow of basic research slows to a crawl, some large companies which have been responsible as driving forces supporting American superiority will begin to sound the alarm bell – and point at the GOP as the responsible entity.
What are we left with? A GOP now fully engulfed in religious psychosis, perhaps. I am not specious; it’s more of a Sherlock Holmes approach – eliminate the impossible and whatever’s left may be the truth. The insistent GOP approach that science is invalid when it doesn’t support GOP ideology and goals clearly indicates a GOP that’s lost its moorings with reality – and therefore with much of business. Much like the Jim Jones cult, they seem more and more irrational – and their old mask of being conservative businessmen is now being ripped off in public as President Trump fails to competently run a government on which business is quite dependent, Rep. Nunes appears to be descending into his private little hell of incompetence and even treason, and many other incidents, past and future.
Or they’re all just petulant children. It fits as well.
