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 lunaticprophet rated 4 months ago - Why the Right Wing attacks science
From the page: "The challenges were intellectual and ideological as well as political and they called forth a predictable and well financed right wing response in the form of ideologically based professional advocacy groups. Jacques et al. refer to them as CT...
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- lunaticprophet rated 4 months ago
- Why the Right Wing attacks science
From the page: "The challenges were intellectual and ideological as well as political and they called forth a predictable and well financed right wing response in the form of ideologically based professional advocacy groups. Jacques et al. refer to them as CTTs, Conservative Think Tanks, a network of paid consulting groups supported by multinational corporations and foundations bankrolled by wealthy far-right ideologues like Richard Mellon Scaife. These bastard offspring of wealthy elites and Far Right anti-communist crazies have achieved a surprising respectability. All it takes is money.
For their first 20 years the CTTs concentrated on traditional right wing pre-occupations, typically, anti-communism and its phantom variants like "creeping socialism." They linked communism to various threats to the interests of their patrons to produce a typical menu of anti-regulation, anti-corporate liability (aka, "tort reform") and the promotion of an idealized and distorted version of competition and free-markets. The environmental movement figured into the mix in obvious ways, but wasn't the centerpiece until the 1990s.
Two factors in the early 90s pushed the environmental movement to center stage. One was the vacuum produced by the disappearance of a favorite right wing bogeyman, the "international communist menace." The other was the growing global environmental movement, most conspicuously on display at the Earth Summit in Rio, 1992. Globalization was well underway and "free-trade" for the CTTs meant trade free of any constraints -- constraints on how workers were treated and paid, how the environment was treated and paid for, how consumers were treated and how much they paid. You can get a glimpse of the power of the moment by watching the show stopping 5 minute performance of 12 year old Severn Suzuki at the 1992 Rio Summit. If you've never seen it, take a look. It represented the kind of developing political and ideological power the Right feared most.
In 1992 it wasn't yet feasible to destroy the government mechanism of environmental protection by executive fiat. Reagan tried it in the 1980s and it produced a serious public backlash. Reagan did a lot of damage but the experience showed the environmental movement couldn't be attacked head-on. A new method would have to be found. It was time to turn the Red Scare into the Green Scare.
The key was a unique feature of the environmental movement: its reliance on science. The new strategy was to create an environmental skepticism, a contrarian counter-argument, superficially also based on science. This wasn't an easy trick because environmental science was based on a robust scientific consensus, international in scope and as deep as it was wide. The environmental movement held the scientific high ground. So an ingenious and simple attack method was used. Accuse environmental science of environmental skepticism's own defects, reducing environmental science to the CTT's own level. Environmental science, the CTTs would claim, exaggerated, or even fabricated, the seriousness of environmental problems by manipulating data. Its scientists were corrupted by a political agenda.
The sheer audacity of this has to be admired. The strategy was to go directly at the single thing the environmental movement depended upon most, science, and to reject its validity outright. It was a jiu-jitsu move, using the authority and language of science to discredit it while simultaneously giving it an extra push by giving new priority to economic considerations. If you could convince people the benefits were in doubt but the costs were certain, you would have a strategy that fit neatly with anti-regulation and anti-corporate liability objectives. Throw in the claim that environmental regulation would threaten progress and prosperity and the Green Scare would be bearing Right wing fruit."
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