Climate Science and the Republican Soviet-Style Dictatorship

The post title may be a little clickbaity, but the words aren't mine. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks published a column yesterday in which he wrote that on climate change,

the G.O.P. has come to resemble a Soviet dictatorship — a vast majority of Republican politicians can’t publicly say what they know about the truth of climate change because they’re afraid the thought police will knock on their door and drag them off to an AM radio interrogation. [1]

Comparisons to Hitler, the Nazis, Stalin, or other authoritarian regimes of history are a dime a dozen these days. Ordinarily we might expect the charge that Republicans are acting like Soviets to come from someone on the left wing of the U.S. political spectrum, but Brooks comes from the right and seems to be giving voice to a quiet minority (presumably) within his own party [2].

Brooks's column led New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait to muse about the GOP's orientation toward climate change, citing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to rebut a Wall Street Journal columnist's recent assertions. Continuing, Chait wrote,

Of course, refuting climate-science skepticism with NOAA data runs into the problem that Republicans reject NOAA data. House Science Committee chairman Lamar Smith has used his power to accuse federal scientists of falsifying climate data. Smith has no evidence to support his charge, but the accusation is in keeping with the conservative belief that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is the product of a vast conspiracy among thousands of scientists worldwide to enrich themselves. (The chairman of the Senate’s environment committee is a fellow subscriber to this theory.) The theory is just as bonkers as the belief that the government faked the 9/11 attacks or the moon landings, with the main difference being that it informs a first-order public policy question and is also accepted doctrine within one of the two major American political parties.

The current spat between Smith and NOAA is where Brooks's comparison to the Soviets perhaps becomes most relevant. Soviet agriculture and biology were harmed for decades because the ideas of Trofim Lysenko became party doctrine. Thousands of mainstream Russian biologists were disposed of in one way or another and the Russian people suffered the consequences of such wrong-headed biology. It may seem absurd that a political organization would take a stand on the proper way to understand biology, but such is life in the political world, I guess.

This is not to say that the GOP treatment of government scientists in any way rises to that of the Soviets. Nevertheless, the Soviet experience does serve as a historical warning of the foolishness of political parties standing against the scientific mainstream. And it certainly must be demoralizing to many scientists to persistently be held in such contempt by roughly half of the legislative branch of government, and most of their potential executive heads.

It doesn't have to be this way. Just a couple of weeks ago The Atlantic did an article on conservative solutions to climate change. If Republicans would take the issue seriously, they might be able to build a legacy on this issue to be proud of.

Increasingly I have seen political commentators suggest that the GOP is becoming post-truth and post-policy [3]. I hope that they are wrong, but lately my hope finds little encouragement. However, as the saying goes, hope springs eternal.


Notes:
1. Maybe it's just me, but I get the feeling Brooks's statement is true for a number of issues.
2. Senator Lindsay Graham has been outspoken on this, but he seems to be alone among presidential candidates. And anyway he has almost no support in the polls.
3. Post-truth, meaning that party leaders tell blatant lies as a matter of course. Post-policy, meaning that the party has no meaningful policy solutions, but lives only by stoking resentment over current policies and advancing purely symbolic fights.

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