The Infernal Triangle: Science Is Political

For only the second time in its 179-year history, Scientific American has endorsed a candidate for president: Kamala Harris. I’ve heard arguments that this was a bad idea, that it is unlikely to move a single vote while risking aid and comfort to conservatives who want nothing more than to be able to credibly claim the scientific community as just one more in a malign den of elite liberal villainy. They say the endorsement degrades what is most valuable in science’s operative ideal: that its results are ideologically neutral, because scientists follow evidence objectively without reference to who benefits, and that once science becomes “politicized,” it will not truly be science anymore.

I understand and respect those arguments. But I disagree. If anything, I think the Scientific American endorsement doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The debate over whether “science” should take a political stand, in fact, forces one of the deepest possible questions about what liberal politics is for. It opens a much larger discussion about how all sorts of institutions should think about their role in electoral politics: not just scientists but educators, journalists, artists, writers, civil servants, foundation officers, and just about anyone in a healing profession—anyone within the bestiary of what conservatives deride as the “liberal elite.”

My argument will require some subtlety. It will come in two parts. This first one is specifically about science. I’ll write the second, on professions like education, psychology, the arts, and nonprofit work, after the election—unless, that is, this columnist feels obliged to cover some sort of low-grade civil war instead.

But maybe even then. Because the questions it raises are existential: whether anyone working within the sort of institution that seeks to make the world a safer, saner, healthier, and more humane place will be able to continue doing that work in peace if Trump is inaugurated, or even if he is not.

THE IDEA THAT SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTIONS must be apolitical is a norm. Democrats love norms, as much as Republicans love defying them. Such norm-fetishizing found its most systematic theoretical defense in a 2018 volume received favorably by party elites called How Democracies Die. (Barack Obama was spied conspicuously clutching a copy.) It argued that the worst way to fight the degradation of democratic norms is to degrade democratic norms. That, political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steve Levitsky insisted, just sets off an anti-normian arms race, as Republicans ratchet up their norm-breaking in return.

It makes intuitive sense to say that if something is bad, its opposite must be good. But history sometimes provides another lesson. Just about every time the forces of democracy broke a reactionary deadlock, they did it by breaking some norm that stood in the way.

The laws enabling the radical reconstruction of the slavery South were passed by a Congress that didn’t include any members from the rebellious states being radically reconstructed via military subjugation. “Even the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery,” points out Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jefferson Cowie, “barely met the two-thirds majority to pass, and that was without the Southern delegations voting.” The New Deal laws creating the modern safety net would have all been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court had not Roosevelt intimidated “Lochnerism” out of existence with his threat to expand the size of the Court and pack it with allies. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid—maybe even every piece of our meager social safety net since—never could have happened had the Kennedy administration not increased the size of the House Rules Committee, which a bipartisan conservative majority had turned into a graveyard for all liberal legislation.

These were brazen acts of norm-breaking, without which America might have ended up in authoritarianism—sort of like the situation we face now. A willingness to judiciously break norms in a civic emergency can be a sign of a healthy and valorous democratic resistance.

So, what about this norm? If scientists become a self-conscious faction in party politics, will it only further enrage conservatives that the people advising them to wear masks or retire their gas-guzzling F-350 pickups are really just white-coated Soviet commissars?

History debunks this as well. The fear presumes that conservatism’s contempt for liberalism waxes and wanes in response to evidentiary inputs. Remember the argument—or alibi—that Barack Obama, being Black, couldn’t be too liberal, too responsive to Black people’s concerns, lest he unleash a racist backlash? Well, I once counted over a hundred Facebook pages devoted to organizing for Barack Obama’s impeachment … in December of 2008, before he’d even been inaugurated. After he was inaugurated, a scholar determined that Obama mentioned race less in public than any president since the 1950s. A fat lot of good it did in holding off racist backlash. Evidence-based evaluation of facts is not how this game works.

A WILLINGNESS TO REVISE CONCLUSIONS whenever facts change is science’s fundamental DNA. That’s why, come to think of it, we know what DNA is. It is why science and right-wing thought are incompatible, and why this tension is so existentially important to understand. The sudden emergence of a fantastically deadly disease in 2020 provides a case study.

Scientific understanding of the novel coronavirus evolved daily; likewise public-health recommendations to contain it. The dizzying shifts frustrated and confused all of us, but none more so than conservatives. Discomfort with ambiguity is one of the main things that makes them conservative. So it was that an entire elaborate discourse evolved on the right about the malignancy of those public-health interventions, which placed scientists at its center, as villains, for forcing that intolerable ambiguity upon us.

The evidence was how they were always, accursedly, changing their minds. You might call that “acting like scientists.” Within the right’s fundamentally therapeutic discourse, it was evidence of something else: that they were not out to cure us but control us. Perhaps to empower and enrich themselves, or simply to sow the civilizational chaos in which liberalism supposedly revels.

When COVID hit, I was waiting for a book I’d finished to come out, with a lot of time on my hands. I spent it obsessively researching political comparisons with the last time virology collided with conservative ideology: the AIDS crisis. My eureka moment came when I read a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Owensboro, Kentucky, from 1987. (Letters like these are historians’ best evidence of conservatism in the wild before it found representation on Fox News.)

The newspaper had reported on the debate over whether TV networks should run ads for condoms, as a public service to check the spread of AIDS. One Dorothy Wehrung expressed her anguish at length. Along the way, she proposed to “look at some of the supposed facts that we’ve been told about the AIDS epidemic …”

We were first led to believe that only homosexuals had AIDS. Then young hemophiliacs caught the AIDS virus through contaminated blood. Then we learned that drug users transferred the virus by using unsterile needles. Then we learned that heterosexuals also became infected … [Then] that even the blood test used to screen AIDS virus in blood is unreliable because … the virus may not show up for six months or more after becoming infected …

Those accursed scientists, always changing their mind. If you say “duh,” you are not thinking like a conservative.

Conservatism never fails, it is only failed; Mrs. Wehrung’s built-in answers to any question need never be reconsidered, just more fervently applied. In this case, that equaled “abstain[ing] from illicit sex,” while “requir[ing] that textbook publishers once again publish books teaching our young good morals and ethics … that illicit sex is wrong and can result in dreadful consequences.”

This in fact was no different from the presumptions and policy prescriptions of influential officials in the Reagan administration. Domestic policy adviser Gary Bauer called AIDS “the ideal opportunity for us to reestablish with our children some of the forgotten verities.” Education Secretary William Bennett said it was time to end sex education in schools once and for all, as “an abdication of responsibility and moral authority.”

The empirical verdict of the ages—“People are still having sex,” as the Big Brother–like voice boomed in a dance-club thumper from 1991, “this AIDS thing is not working”—was no more acceptable to them than it was to Mrs. Wehrung. A both/and option, to discourage illicit sex while accepting its inevitability and encouraging condom use for those who indulge, was simply intolerable. That was the sort of moral relativism that set us on the road to ruin in the first place.

Bennett and Bauer were responding to the both/and recommendation of Dr. C. Everett Koop. Reagan had appointed the revered neonatologist and pro-life leader as surgeon general, in a sop to the Christian conservatives who helped elect him. Koop was so hard-right that he once suggested homosexuals were sedulously recruiting boys into their cult to help them take over America once they came of voting age. In 1977, he described abortion as “the slide to Auschwitz”; although, regarding the actual Auschwitz, he suspected Jews had it coming for refusing to accept Jesus Christ. The administration turned over the problem of AIDS to him, once the fact that married heterosexuals could get it too become unavoidable, forcing the administration to do something.

You might know the remarkable plot twist that ensued. Dr. Koop chose to act like a scientist.

He gathered and evaluated the evidence, then published a report—and arranged for it to be mailed to every American household—that included lines like “teenage boys … should not have rectal intercourse with other males” and “Do not have sex with prostitutes”; and also blunt instructions like “If you jointly decide to have sex, you must protect your partner by always using a rubber (condom) during (start to finish) sexual intercourse (vagina or rectum).” Page 17 had an illustration: beside its wrinkled contents, a torn package reading “AZTECS/one rolled latex condom.”

The mixed message could not be allowed to stand. To the rest of America, Koop became a national hero, too popular to fire. So Bauer and a fresh-faced colleague named Dinesh D’Souza came up with an idea: have Koop prove his worthiness to serve a conservative president by doing another report, this one on the supposed psychological harms of abortion. Good science, though, proved addictive: Koop’s report, which was suppressed, concluded that there was no evidence of this. He even began advising doctors to tell pregnant women who tested positive for AIDS that abortion was a healthy option.

Having failed the ideological test, Koop was cast by conservatives into the outer darkness for all time as a transcendent villain.

IT’S NOT LIKE CONSERVATIVE SCIENTISTS can’t do science; Koop’s saga just shows that they always do so at a dangerous crossroads, where they sometimes must choose between reality and ideology.

Or, pragmatically, they compartmentalize. Which brings us to the question of COVID.

Donald Trump’s director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, was like Dr. Koop both a conservative Christian and a respected practitioner in his field, which was virology. He’d been a government scientist during the Reagan administration, where he tacked skillfully between administering good science and borderline whack-job interventions on AIDS.

For instance, he was behind a 1985 policy of mandatory HIV testing for military personnel. Those found to be infected were summoned to meet with a chaplain, then sandbagged to find a military policeman in the room as well, who would interrogate them in front of the chaplain about their sex lives. At Fort Hood, they were consigned to a barracks referred to as “the leper colony,” where, a Redfield critic reported upon his appointment, “they were treated like prisoners until they either developed full-blown AIDS or were discharged dishonorably,” with many ending up committing suicide.

The lesson is that Redfield surfed the rightward edge of what was acceptable in the federal public-health bureaucracy, surviving long enough to win confirmation in 2017. He kept that pragmatic balance when COVID hit: lying on Trump’s behalf on the availability of testing, perfecting the art of standing dumbly mute when Trump said the most ridiculous things in press conferences—and never, ever sticking his neck out like poor old Dr. Koop.

It’s not like conservatives can’t use science. Here is one of their niftiest tricks. Given that scientific understanding is always changing, it’s always possible to pick and choose a result—sometimes a respectable one, other times via bad work that slips through the peer-review cracks—that comports with what a conservative already knows as true, then reifying that finding for all time as “the” science. Studying a 1976 referendum in Utah on the fluoridation of water—suspected as a Communist plot, as all fans of Dr. Strangelove know—there was a long-superseded finding that it might cause cancer. There’s an infamous withdrawn study that once concluded vaccines cause mercury poisoning. The entire history of denial of man-made climate change is lousy with the work of scientists who, in some tiny way, at some moment in time, might have concluded something that seemed right, but which later was shown to be obviously wrong.

I have a favorite word when it comes to describing conservative cogitation: “eisegesis.” It is the opposite of exegesis, which means taking a collection of data of any type and logically wrestling a conclusion from it. Eisegesis, conversely, looks at any pile of data in order to find confirmation in it of what they already “know” to be true. Which is to say: the opposite of science.

Once you start looking in any segment of the wingnutosphere, you can’t but notice eisegesis constantly. In, say, the reflections of Dorothy Wehrung of Owensboro, Kentucky: “Anyone interested in learning the truth about AIDS is encouraged to read the AIDS COVERUP by Gene Antonio published by Ignatius Press, San Francisco, Calif. It has 376 footnotes, which were mostly taken from medical journals …”

I can’t tell scientists or anyone else who to vote for in this here publication, organized as it is under Section 501(c)3 of the tax code—an issue we’ll address in Part Two. But when notions like these are not just the province of old ladies’ letters to the editor but rather presidential candidates, and the most-watched “news” programs in the land, don’t fear science becoming “politicized.” It already is.