The GOP has a long history of ignoring science. Trump turned it into policy.

[Zorro]

In some quarters on the far right, liberty and progress are enemies.

By Matthew Dallek

President Trump didn’t seem to mind, or maybe even understand, that his joyride outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last weekend would expose Secret Service agents in the hermetically sealed limo with him to the coronavirus he carried. That’s because he sees science less as a normative value, a thing that enables progress, and more as a political tool — to be used when possible for his advantage (as in his efforts to water down the Food and Drug Administration’s criteria for vaccine approval), ignored (as in his limo ride to wave at his fans) or simply fought outright (as in his bizarre rants that forest management, not climate change, is to blame for West Coast wildfires).

The resulting litany of falsehoods, misdirection and anti-science policies — during the pandemic, for instance, Trump has claimed that the coronavirus would just “disappear,” insisted that it doesn’t harm children, said covid-19 “affects virtually nobody” (1 million deaths worldwide), endorsed sham treatments such as injecting bleach and dismissed the ability of masks to stop the virus’s spread — looks like a product of a singular, addled mind. “I have no explanation for why these briefings and the scientific evidence just doesn’t seem to click” with him, former White House coronavirus task force staffer Olivia Troye, who resigned in protest of Trump’s science denialism, recently said. The wealthiest country in history, armed with arguably the best hospitals and smartest doctors anywhere, has registered the most cases, the most deaths and perhaps the most hostile-to-science response of any nation in the world. Experts say tens of thousands of the 212,000 American deaths might have been averted if Trump had acted differently.

But Trump is not sui generis, and the Republicans who support him aren’t simply aping his talking points. The GOP has for decades made lack of concern for public health a linchpin of its policy agenda. Its conservative leaders have seen federal regulations and efforts to control environmental toxins or contagions as infringements on liberty. Had he won the presidency, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush would have slashed government rules in the name of “freedom,” too. In the pandemic, we are not witnessing just one man’s unhinged actions. We’re seeing the apotheosis of a history of science denialism: a frontal attack on the very idea of scientific legitimacy.

Magical thinking abounds in American politics; science denialists are hardly confined to the right. New-age Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson insisted in 2019 that public health requirements for childhood vaccinations were “draconian”; her comments recalled Republican presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann’s 2011 charge that HPV vaccines may cause “mental retardation.” (Williamson later backtracked on her anti-vaxxer statement.) Robert Kennedy Jr., the late attorney general’s son, is another prominent left-wing anti-vaxxer; like Trump, he holds that childhood shots may cause autism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-gop-has-a-long-history-of-ignoring-science-trump-turned-it-into-policy/2020/10/09/53574602-0917-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html

[ck4829]

1. K&R