Matters are more nuanced—or just plain favorable to Republicans—when it comes to the business of actually governing. For every cheap shot a Republican member of Congress like Senator Tom Coburn has taken at National Science Foundation grants see the unfairly maligned robo-squirrel , there are areas where Obama has undercut American leadership in basic science by favoring loan guarantees and industrial subsidies to the alternative-energy industry at the expense of science elsewhere.
We've seen this in his proposed cuts to high-energy physics, nuclear physics, planetary science, and other areas of research. It's more important that we collectively recognize that reason and critical thought, the joy and excitement of discovery, the connection between research and economic growth, and the beauty and awe of science are accessible to people of all religious and political stripes—just as people of all stripes are capable of rejecting them.
That's critically important for two reasons. Take the NASA portfolio, for example, where the president unceremoniously cancelled the Constellation plan over the objections of both parties and both chambers of Congress.
Over at the Department of Energy, the president's FY13 budget request made basic research the second-lowest priority of all the department's science spending.
The Office of Science, which focuses on long-term basic research, saw a meager 2. The administration said there wasn't enough money to go around. Yet at the sametime, billions of stimulus dollars were being lost on failed investments in the alternative-energy sector. Just the failed loans to Solyndra and Abound Solar would have kept the Tevatron operating for a decade. This point briefly snuck into the presidential debates.
During the foreign-policy debate, Obama offered a false choice between himself as the pro-science candidate and Mitt Romney as the anti-science candidate, claiming his opponent wouldn't invest in basic research.
I want to invest in research. Research is great. In March the number was still at 33 percent. Moncef Slaoui, head of Operation Warp Speed under Donald Trump, said he was very concerned that people were knowingly putting themselves in harm's way and asked Trump and other Republicans to speak up to encourage vaccination. Would that help? It's not clear. Among Americans in general, the top two reasons for vaccine hesitancy around that time were concerns that vaccines were still too untested 58 percent and that there was a risk of side effects 47 percent.
For these people, facts about vaccine safety may help allay their objections. Republican hesitancy, however, seems to have different and deeper roots. But they were suspicious of the federal government and had a sense that science was often oversold. And most of these people are Republicans. Luntz concluded the best approach would not be for Republican leaders to tout the vaccine but for apolitical messengers—a person's own doctor, say, or spouse—to offer facts in an honest, nonpartisan way.
Faced with an initial shortage of masks, and fears that hoarders would buy up the supply and deny it to the essential workers who needed it most, public-health officials solemnly instructed people not to bother. Public-health officials scolded anti-lockdown protesters for risking new outbreaks with their maskless demonstrations, but when anti-racism demonstrators poured into the streets, they emphasized the paramount importance of the cause. Even though Black Lives Matter demonstrators seemed largely to be wearing masks and attempting to practice social distancing, the contradiction rankled conservatives.
Public-health officials had one standard for marches against their policies and another for marches they agreed with. But if these officials were struggling to communicate clearly, it was in large part because clarity was impossible. Public-health officials found themselves in the terrifying position of simultaneously trying to get a handle on a pandemic and being the targets of a political smear.
Yet public-health officials in almost every economic-peer country managed to overcome scientific uncertainty and missteps. Both here and abroad, they are gazing with a mix of horror and confusion at the helpless, pitiful American scientific giant. One German expert told the Washington Post that Germany had used American studies to design an effective response, which the U.
The limiting factor that has done the most to contort the domestic response to the coronavirus is the pathology of the American right. As of late May, only 40 percent of Republicans believed COVID was deadlier than the flu, and half believed the death count was overstated.
There has always been some question about the depth of sincerity with which conservatives hold their professed convictions. Did they believe that the Clintons murdered witnesses to their crimes and that Barack Obama faked details of his birth?
Or were these statements expressions of partisan enthusiasm not to be taken literally? The coronavirus revealed the deadly earnestness with which the Republican audience accepts the guidance of the conservative alternative-information structure. As early as this spring, tragic stories began to appear of people mourning the deaths of loved ones who had angrily rejected public-health advice as a big-government plot.
The playbook for handling a public-health crisis assumes some baseline level of rationality in the government. The administration is presumed to be working with, not against, its public-health experts; the news media to be informing the public, not actively disinforming it. Trump, of course, will pass from the scene, perhaps by January. And one dilemma it may present quite soon is what happens when a vaccine arrives.
If Trump pulls out of his polling swoon and wins reelection, he will have to persuade Americans to trust the vaccines his administration has produced, even though many of them distrust either vaccines or Trump.
Of course, if Trump wins reelection, vaccine take-up will be the least of our problems. A more likely scenario is that the first vaccine will come along after Trump has lost the election. If it happens afterward, Republicans will be engaged in the paranoid anti-government rage they undertake any time a Democrat holds office. And they will be tapping into a deep vein of paranoia.
Polls have shown somewhere between a quarter and a third of the public already does not intend to take a vaccine when it becomes available. In a country with a cult of self-reliance so ingrained that every new mass shooting propels more panicked arms purchases, is an act of collective, mutual security like public vaccination even workable?
The truly remarkable thing about the right-wing revolt against public health is that it has taken place under a president whom conservatives trust and adore. From the standpoint of running the government, these have been awful conditions for handling a pandemic.
But from the standpoint of persuading citizens to cooperate, they have been almost optimal. When we look back a year from now at the frenzied, angry revolt against science, the spring and summer of may seem like halcyon days.
Subscribe Now! It would be the biggest boost of federal aid to Amtrak since Congress created it half a century ago. Flynn said in an interview Monday. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. Scenes from anti-lockdown protests across the country. Tags: covid coronavirus politics health public health feature cdc face masks new york magazine science the national interest donald trump republicans one great story More.
Most Viewed Stories. Lawmakers are filing a formal resolution to censure Gosar for posting a clip in which his face is imposed on a character who kills Ocasio-Cortez. But people on the left simply point to hard numbers: More than 9 million stricken across the nation with over , deaths and record new infections in recent days. The discrepancy has left many public health experts and political analysts shaking their heads. Naval War College in Newport, R. For years, Republicans have successfully seized upon a larger cultural trend of diminished faith in experts around issues like climate change.
In a recent interview , Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that because science still holds a place of esteem and authority in the wider culture, it has become a proxy for those who want to lash out against authority figures.
The American economy is structured just the way conservatives want. But we all felt really good for a minute. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology. And I think that is exactly what we see here.
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