I’ve already reviewed Chris’s book at length, and talked there about why I liked it. What I want to do in this contribution is to develop on what I argued back then was missing from the book. Short version: Chris presents latterday Republican science policy as the product of an unholy alliance between big business and the religious right. He laments the powerlessness of traditional moderate Republicans who believed that science and scientific truth was good and important. This allows him to get at an awful lot of what is wrong about the Republican party’s current approach to science. But it misses out on something important. There’s a strand of Republican thinking – represented most prominently by Newt Gingrich and by various Republican-affiliated techno-libertarians – that has a much more complicated attitude to science. Chris more or less admits in the book that he doesn’t get Newt, who on the one hand helped gut OTA (or at the very least stood passively to one side as it was gutted) but on the other hand has been a proponent of more funding for many areas of the sciences. I want to argue that getting Newt is important.
From the category archives:
Chris Mooney seminar
First, I want to thank all the contributors here for launching a very high level discussion. Because the separate commentaries overlap in a number of thematic areas, they almost lend themselves to being read in a particular order for greatest effect—and that’s the sequence in which I will address them. Here’s the game plan:
First I’ll touch upon what I view as the argumentative overview posts. Ted Barlow provides a useful and accurate review of my book’s main thesis, and then