The Left wields its Science Club

When Michael Dukakis ran for president in 1988, he presented himself as a technocrat rather than a politician. Good government, he suggested, was about implementing what science and its derivatives, social science and the dismal science of economics, had shown to work. Technocratic solutions founded on science should, he implied, trump less tangible and more emotional phenomena such as optimism, the entrepreneurial spirit, and patriotism.

His was an unappealing and chilly candidacy, and he lost heavily to George H.W. Bush, who, despite not being adept at “the vision thing,” nevertheless rode into the White House on the unspent tide of Reaganism.

But 32 years later, appeals to science are more insistent and much more successful — dangerously so. Legions of politically vociferous people on the Left and in the Democratic Party invoke it as though it rendered any other consideration null and void.

Immediately after the inauguration of President Trump, who had called climate change a hoax in 2012, demonstrators, wearing comically mournful expressions to suggest seriousness of purpose in bad times, traipsed through American cities declaring their allegiance to science.

So, are the Democratic Party and the broader Left really “the party of science”? During the pandemic, they have wielded the claim like a club to bludgeon those who demur at the idea that governments need only defer to epidemiologists and healthcare professionals to get policy right. Counterclaims for economic vitality and the exercise of human nature should not, they imply, weigh heavily on political scales.

Yet, left-wingers’ claims on a wide variety of policies show that they hew to “science” no more than does the Right. On GMO foods and abortion, for example, they dismiss science entirely. Even on climate change, they treat science as a settled matter rather than as a process of constant questioning and verification in which conclusions must change with empirical data.

“Because science …” is an odious and arrogant justification in politics to silence opponents, as Timothy Carney argues. Looking at the extraordinary shutdown of the past three months, he finds that (to adapt Churchillian rhetoric) never in the field of human endeavor have so many people been hobbled so completely by so few.

In this week’s cover story, “Exposing the Hoax,” Andrew McCarthy offers a welcome alternative to coronavirus news by laying out the excellent work done by Attorney General Bill Barr and Ambassador Richard Grenell in unearthing the suspect origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. It’s a breath of fresh air to dip back into pre-pandemic politics, which rumble along even during the shutdown.

James Copland looks at the conflict of interest of Democrats, who monopolize donations from plaintiffs’ lawyers, opposing liability protection for businesses that open to the public and follow the rules. Karol Markowicz excoriates the disaster of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic response, Cory DeAngelis similarly blasts the authoritarian elite’s opposition to school choice, and Brooke Rogers shares the secret to keeping anxiety at bay during the pandemic.