Among the ritualized horrors of the Great People’s Cultural Revolution in China were the criticism-self-criticism sessions mandated for those insufficiently committed to the program. These public auto da fé sessions reached the highest level of Chinese governments, up to and including Deng Xiaoping.
I trust I won’t be accused of Godwinization (not that I care, to be sure) if I marvel a little at what amounts to a detectable echo of such formalized self effacement in today’s Republican party. The overt and paralyzing violence of the Red Guards is not there of course, which makes this not a comparison, but a reference. But still, it’s hard not to recall those days watching leading members of what used to be a party capable of actual governance abase themselves before the inquisitors who now dominate the Republican Party’s election process.
Case in point: several of the current candidates for the Republican nomination for President used to be able to hear and process scientific information that led them to the conclusion that human activities are affecting the climate, and that such anthropogenic climate change is a very dangerous thing.
Now, this isn’t new. The know-nothing (and or bought-and-paid-for-by-Big-Oil) wing of the party has spent years trading in bad science to prevent this realization from becoming a true bi-partisan consensus. The success of this effort was manifest last year when every GOP Senate candidate in the midterms declared his or her disbelief in the threat posed by climate change. That’s 37 candidates and 37 who think we should just burn up all that dinosaur wine as fast as we can get our hands on it.*
All of which is to repeat the obvious: climate denialism is dogma for the Republican party.
Which is a problem when one wants to be President, is a Republican, and has a history of some sanity on this issue.
Hence the crit/self-crit fandango now shaking out over on the GOP side of the Presidential campaign:
WASHINGTON (AP) — One thing that Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have in common: These GOP presidential contenders all are running away from their past positions on global warming, driven by their party’s loud doubters who question the science and disdain government solutions.
All four have stepped back from previous stances on the issue, either apologizing outright or softening what they said earlier. And those who haven’t fully recanted are under pressure to do so.
It must hurt, somewhere, to be an intelligent person, with a record of diverse experience and some knowledge of how the world actually works. Remember, all of them, even Newt, were able to make sense of this issue up until very recently
And anyway, whether or not I’m right in crediting this crowd with the capacity for sentience — what’s striking is that they can’t help themselves now. They have nowhere to go if they want to be president. They have to deny what they know to be true.
It didn’t always used to be this way — and not even that long ago:
Over the last few years, Gallup polling has shown a decline in the share of Americans saying that global warming’s effects have already begun – from a high of 61 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in March. The change is driven almost entirely by conservatives.
In 2008, 50 percent of conservatives said they believed global warming already is having effects; that figure dropped to 30 percent this year. By contrast, among liberals and moderates there’s been relatively little movement, and broad majorities say warming is having an impact now.
Now? Well let’s just say that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” lives on as a GOPer fratricidal application:
“Republican presidential hopefuls can believe in man-made global warming as long as they never talk about it, and oppose all the so-called solutions,” said Marc Morano, a former aide to Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, one of the most vocal climate skeptics in Congress.
The political significance of all this? If Palin runs this will be a key line of attack on all of those candidates the party establishment would hope could beat her. Go read the article and see how Pawlenty especially, but also Huntsman and Romney have huge vulnerabilities here. (About Newt, who cares?).
But the politics interest me less here than what the whole miserable farrago tells you about the trouble the country faces. Facts, data, bodies of evidence are all malleable inconveniences to those who control the crucial levers of Republican primaries and party gate-keeping. For all that “science” is an abstraction, or at best a house with many mansions — we live in a world and a time in which the tools of science are all we have to make sense of just about any decision we need to make as a society.
But the Republican Party as an institution has decided that it needs no stinking scientific badges, thank you very much. Climate science has been subjected to the same myth making that harmlessness of tobacco smoke possessed for so long (see the Oreskes and Conway book also linked above); it is succumbing to the same noise machine that tells us over and over again the lie that we have the best health care system in the world; it is falling to the same people who think unobtanium and a perpetual motion machine really could happen in this world, and not merely in Ayn Rand’s fevered brain.
And that’s disastrous in a two party system in which the GOP will always have a share of power, and, every two or four years, has a shot at a most/all of it.
They cannot govern. Or rather, they can govern, but given the accumulation of willed blindnesses in the face of an ever more complicated reality, they cannot do so in a way that serves the interests of the United States (or the world).
I do know there are Republicans who can read and calculate and think — but their party has left them, and I don’t think it’s coming back.
Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est**
*And yes, you pedants, I do know that oil does not derive from dinosaur caucuses. I just recall reading that phrase in Semi-Tough when I was a mere lad, and have always liked it since. So there.
**Just to jog memories from an old thread: that’s the best I could come up with (with help from the commentariat) to get to Cato the Elder’s cry: Carthage The Republican Party Must Be Destroyed.
Images: Francisco de Goya, A Tribunal of the Inquisition, 1812-1814
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun, c. 1766.
BGinCHI
There was a thread right before this one about suggesting interesting blogs, then it disappeared. Hoping Cole didn’t have his laptop in the bathtub or something.
Anyway, sorry Tom, but here was my entry:
Really good music blog is Aquarium Drunkard.
Linky:
http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/
They do a show on Sirius on Fridays that is excellent. Eclectic, smart writing, and great finds.
BD of MN
I wonder what the dinosaur caucuses thought about global cooling back in the day… were the conservative dinos also in denial?
Tom Levenson
@BGinCHI: No problem where I sit. I want more blogs to read so I can
continue to consume my waking hoursimpress my colleagues with my awesome productivity.BGinCHI
@Tom Levenson: It pays off at cocktail parties when you mention that the new Thurston Moore record is really good, especially with Beck at the helm.
Follow that with some obscure R&B references and even MIT faculty will be trying to fist bump you.
Tom Levenson
@BGinCHI: That’s “terrorist fist jab” in my household, pilgrim.
Joel
Tom, do you ever run into Richard Lindzen? He strikes me as somewhat more sensible than Peter Duesberg, but then again, you never know.
Guster
Can’t they become Democrats? I mean, no offense, but say you’re Mitt Romney or T-Paw. Does it make more sense to stay a Republican, and run away from any vestige of intelligence in your past, or to say, ‘I’m now a Republican Democrat, I am Bipartisan Agreement in a single body, I believe in evolution–sparked by God–and I believe in anthropogenic climate change and I believe gay marriage is evil, we should strengthen Medicare by replacing it with Happy Vouchers, and that lowering taxes will inevitably lead to prosperity.”
The Village would go wild.
Tom Levenson
@Joel: Bizarrely, given my politics and having written a book with which Dick violently disagreed, Lindzen and I are friends, after a fashion. We were members of the same synagogue for a long time, and have agreed not to talk climate for years.
S. cerevisiae
Great post Tom. Merchants of Doubt is a book everyone needs to read. It answers the question about how we are losing to these guys – it’s a deliberate plan that goes back decades.
Origuy
Ever since the days of USENet, the surest way to get a Latin lesson has been to post a phrase in Latin. You will get a dozen different translations from pedants disputing the correct declension of the future pluperfect imperative.
BlueDWarrior
@Guster: it strikes me that most of the people who have a national spotlight you’d think would become that living matter/anti-matter being have all the charisma of a discontented housecat and the visage of stereotypical weasel.
S. cerevisiae
@Guster: T-Paw is no moderate, he is a fundamentalist in sheep’s clothing. Watch him pander to the right wing, except that is who he really is. He could only get away with so much because of the Democratic legislature and thank whatever deity you choose he is not in office with the wackos there now.
Mnemosyne
@Guster:
You jest, but that really is one of our problems — rational conservative people who would have been Republicans 30 or 40 years ago have all moved to the Democratic Party, which means that the party is constantly fighting both externally with Republicans and internally with our fellow Democrats. In a rational world, people like Ben Nelson would be Republicans, but the Republican Party has just gone too bonkers for semi-rational business-loving types to stick around, so they become Democrats instead.
ETA: And, in retrospect, primarying Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania was a really bad idea because it sent a message to the Republicans who had some semblance of sanity that Democratic voters would reject them, too, so they may as well stay with the Republicans. Of course, hindsight 20/20 etc.
bleh
The sociopaths who control the money are obsessed with near-term profits and don’t care. The voters who will select the nominee are obsessed with the fact that there is a black Democrat in the White House and don’t care. The politicians — like all politicians — pander to the interests of their constituents in order to gain personal affirmation and political office. They have a common interest, they work for what they want … that’s politics.
There’s no point decrying it. Fight or be conquered.
Davis X. Machina
@Origuy:You’re not a pedant if it feeds your kids, buster…and the present and future are the only tenses found in the Latin imperative
Linnaeus
The Republicans are the new Lysenkoists.
travis
I cant help but to imagine all the great empires following the arc exemplified by the US and the GOP in particular. Our golden age has come and gone with only the slow, ignominious decline remaining.
JPL
An acquaintance doesn’t believe global warming is man made so therefore we can’t do anything about it. I mentioned whether or not that was true, it seemed like her defeatist attitude was against our exceptional quality as a nation.
hmmm..shuts them up real fast imo, also, too.
BTW, in GA we are experiencing late July temperatures.
sloan
Off topic, but GO CANUCKS!
Davis X. Machina
Salvation is through faith, not good works.
Villago Delenda Est
This is the single biggest problem we’re facing today…the short term profit mentality. It totally dominates all business thinking. Even “strategic” moves, like offshoring your labor force, is short term in its scope, as it forgets that in order to prosper, you have to pay your employees enough to buy your products.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Guster: You don’t understand how their tribalism works. They are all heavily invested in the cult of the straight white Christian male. The Democratic party tends to be interested in other groups as well. Easier to deny climate change than to view the others as fully human.
Mnemosyne
@Davis X. Machina:
I actually managed to win an argument against an evangelist one time by asking him how his “literal” reading of the Bible allowed him to ignore the whole “faith without works is dead” part.
He backed away pretty quick after that.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Mnemosyne: I’m going to remember that one. I was not raised with a religion, so I am blissfully ignorant of the contents of that book. However, that doesn’t prevent me from being horribly affected by what others think the content of that book is. And I get really annoyed arguing public policy in the form of a scripture debate. But that’s a good one.
Origuy
See? What did I say?
Seriously, my hat’s off to you for teaching a subject that doesn’t provide an obvious benefit to our corporate overlords. I don’t know Latin, but I love to read about medieval history and there would be a lot less for me to read if someone didn’t know the language. Oh, and I did know that there’s no future pluperfect, in imperative, indicative, or subjunctive mood.
Davis X. Machina
@Mnemosyne: You can come at scripture the same way you come at scoring your Medicare plan, or the cost of your war in Iraq, or anything else.
Work backwards from the answer.
And a lot of us have done it — but we did it in high school, and stopped thereafter. To get the neatest lab reports, and the best grades, you draw all your curves first, and then plot your data points.
Fred Clark is your man on the scandalous use of proof-texts in “Christian” apologetics.
MikeJ
@Davis X. Machina: Oddly enough, I used this as an explanation of republican here just the other day. They really don’t believe in the efficacy of hard work.
JoeK
@BD of MN: I wonder what the dinosaur caucuses thought about global cooling back in the day… were the conservative dinos also in denial?
Yeah, and look where it got them.
ppcli
True. That’s where we collect Republicans. In dinosaur carcass caucuses. Caucasian dinosaur carcass caucuses, in fact.
kdaug
How are they different from those who exiled Galileo? “And yet, it moves”. Or Copernicus? Or Brahe?
Or, dare I say, the neanderthals vs. the cro-magnons?
It strikes me that – in a real sense – this is the mirror image of those among us who disdain religion. To wit: A.) there is a group of people who claim “special” knowledge; B.) the rest of the people first begin to suspect, and then dismiss, (and then, well, we know the rest) the people with “special” knowledge.
Priest or physicist, they both speak gobbledy-gook. Make angry. Smash.
That one happens to be right is a secondary concern.
WereBear
I honestly don’t mind Republicans painting themselves into a corner this way, except it is too slow.
Faster meltdowns, please.
kerFuFFler
Of course it would be nice if the media did a responsible job informing the electorate about the vast body of evidence supporting the notion that humans are changing the climate globally.
But since it seems a given that for the near future corporations will wield the dominant amount of influence over elections perhaps we should look to agribusiness and the insurance industry to have an opposite stance on global warming from the coal and oil industries . Crop yields are demonstrably lower when there are too many hot days and insurers must be getting nervous at the prospect of all the increasingly devastating disasters—-tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires.
Never mind, they’ll just pass their increased costs along to the consumers.
I think it’s time for a new chain store: Pitchforks-R-Us.
kdaug
Oh, and Tom, this one’s particularly for you.
Welcome to academia.
redshirt
It is really sad, and dangerous for our entire world, since, legitimately, some of these nuts are just a couple of moves away from having the Button, and then FSM help us all.
There used to be a time in America – most of the time, in fact – where it was considered worthwhile to educate yourself, to engage in broad interests, to become more worldly. This is of course a very healthy attitude, since it leads to better people and thus, a better society.
For some strange reason – it’s a Reagan onward thing, for no obvious starting cause – a large portion of our American society has rejected this attitude, and embraced its opposite: Dogma good, tribe good, everything else, bad and/or lies. It’s how Dark Ages start, I assume – these regressive forces gain hold over the wheels of power and drive the whole boat into the rocks.
I don’t know how you stop it. Especially when many of the wheels of power (media, business, religion) are already lost.
kdaug
@S. cerevisiae:
Time being subjective, and all that.
Villago Delenda Est
@kerFuFFler:
I’m sorry, but these quaint 18th century notions of “an informed populace” are utterly obsolete. Our media exists for one thing only: profit. If the masses are interested only in entertainment and scandal (see current Palin and Weinter “stories”), that’s what the media will deliver, because the purpose of the media is to attract eyes to the advertising of the other corporate monstrosities, in order to sell those eyes to those monstrosities. Ratings, ratings, ratings. Nothing else matters.
kdaug
@redshirt: Wait for it… wait for it… DING!
The hairless primates have been doing this since, well…
But we get our own Easter Island!
eemom
I’m sorry, but whether you care or not, I have to call shame on any comparison with the Cultural Revolution — based on your agreement with me just the other day about how Holocaust comparisons are inappropriate and offensive with respect to Israel.
The Cultural Revolution was an equally brutal massacre of millions of innocent people. It wasn’t ABOUT a bunch of hot shots making fools of themselves sucking up to the prevailing ignorance of the time, though that might have been a small part of it.
MikeJ
@redshirt:
Go reread the posts on Nixonland. It didn’t start with Reagan.
Tom Levenson
@eemom: I’d say in my own defense that I did not compare the GPCR to the current GOP — merely pointing out the ritual of criticism/self criticism has its echoes today.
If that’s too close to the bone, I’m sorry. But, for calibration: I would not object to someone who, for example, compared a tactic of denying the full humanity of an opponent to the tactics of German anti-Semites whose dehumanization of the Jews helped form the context in which the Holocaust took form.
Thus here, at least in intention:
Linda Featheringill
I didn’t know you were a Bible scholar. :-)
Tom Levenson
@Linda Featheringill: King James left us a literary treasure. We should leave it only to those for whom its attractions are not the beauty of its language?
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
The depressing thing is the fact that, like it or not, these assholes essentially dictate our policy on energy and climate, because not only do they make up a big chunk of the people we rely on to make our policy, but they also end up 1) dictating what our oh-so-stellar media’s CW is on the issue, and 2) we have about 1/3 of the Democratic party who defines itself solely by trying to be the middle point between the rest of the party and the GOP, no matter how far the GOP lurches rightward, further warping what that ‘center’ is. And thus, we have a political body who’s more ‘YAY FRACKING, BOO GREEN FASCISTS!!’ than anything else.
kdaug
@Tom Levenson: A book is a book.
lovable liberal
Not that I was first or anything – sure I’m not – but I wrote this in 2007:
Guess I should’ve gotten off my butt and written a book…
eemom
@Tom Levenson:
fair nuff, and I don’t mean to be a nit picker.
Just that these craven soul-sellers we’re dealing with here don’t have the threat of a brutal, mob-inflicted murder to excuse their actions — nor are they revolutionary war veterans like many of those Party members were.
They’re fat, rich pigs who are afraid of not being reelected. That is all.
iriedc
Thanks for your post Tom.
I can rant about many an issue, but there are a special few that send me into a white hot rage in under a minute. Climate denialism among the scientific, media, and political elite is one of them.
I figure that the “scientists” who claim to be climate deniers do it for the attention or the money (or both).
I figure the media elite fortifying the deniers to be just a bunch of craven jerks.
As for the Republicans you talk about, well, for (too many) years the Republican political elite have counted on others to form the levee to hold back the political crazy from taking over policy. All while they make their shameless grab for power. Levees have been known to give way.
Ugh. I don’t drink on Wednesdays, but thinking about this afterhours is surely making me rethink my position.
pandera
Yes. So sad. But yes. Excellent comparison.
Al Swearengen
Limbaugh. He sits astride the GOP like a malevolent Chairman Mao, his only concern enforcing the purity and perpetuating The ’94 Revolution. He is the one who pioneered and popularized this pull-it-out-of-your-ass mode of rightwing “thinking” that is epitomized by climate change denialism.
Limbaugh will never voluntarily give up his leadership. Not that any of the grey visages running the party would ever think of asking him to leave because the one thing that Limbaugh has spent 20 years convincing them of is that they can never, ever be wrong, at least publicly. About climate change, about taxes, about keeping their noses out of gay folks’ business.
bob h
“Which is a problem when one wants to be President, is a Republican, and has a history of some sanity on this issue.”
Were it not for this denialism, the US would be much farther along in developing alternate, renewable energy sources. The world cannot come to grips without the US.
Thus the Republican know-nothingism is a tragedy for the planet and humanity, not just for us.
DBrown
@eemom: You are either missing the truth because you have not bothered to read about AGW and what will happen to millions of people or you are not seeing the tree’s for the forest- which I can’t say; AGW will kill far more people than the Chinese ever did in their cultural revolution and these people who will most suffer and die will all be innocent of AGW while we burn more fuels creating more deaths – this IS the same thing.