Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn’t like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.
Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim – that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves – has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."
"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."
Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.
You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.
The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren’t. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil. Paul Krugman, August 2005.
The basic strategy used by the extremist right that we have seen time and time again is to sow the seeds of doubt. Bill Kristol executes the strategy as smoothly as anyone. He appears so reasonable, so modest. He’s a classic con artist in that respect, a snake oil salesman on the highest level. People like him know that most people don’t really know what’s going on. They know the power-compliant media won’t challenge their falsehoods, and if they do, he’ll scream left-wing bias.
So his task is to develop alternative narratives that serve their poltical ends that have an air of truthiness about them, the trappings of plausibility despite having little connection to the truth. They don’t have to prove anything; they only have to cause people to throw their hands up in confusion–to get them to the point where they don’t know who’s right. This paralyzes any robust opposition because no base can be found to support it.
In this sense it’s fair to say that they are "swiftboating" global warming and any number of other issues where the truth undermines their political agenda. And if there’s enough money and power behind the effort, you can make people wonder whether up is really down.
And lots of Americans and American politicians are like Patty Hearst in this regard. She’s one way with her family, but she adapts to the world of the Symbionese Liberation Army when she’s with them, and then adapts back when she’s with her family again. Hello, anybody at home? She may have been an extreme case, but we recognize the tendency in ourselves and in many of those around us. Insofar as we don’t know what we really think, we adapt to whatever environment we are in. When we are in an environment defined by the liberal tenor of the sixties and seventies, we go with the flow. And now the same is true of going with the right-wing nuttiness of this decade. We all do it to a certain extent; we have to in order to get along, but this is what guys like Kristol understand: He who controls the zeitgeist controls the political agenda. And the so-called "right-wing noise machine" has been one of the most effective definers of the zeitgeist since, well, you know when.
P.S. I agree with Krugman about how fundamentalists are using some intelligent design ideas as a way to undermine evolutionary science. But I think there needs to be a distinction made between science and one’s interpretation of what the science means. I think that many religious believers, and I’m one of them, have no quarrel with science, but we are uncomfortable with the materialist meaning framework that often, even if unconsciously, surrounds the presentation of scientific knowledge.
Intelligent design is nonsense if it presents itself as an alternative to evolutionary science, but it’s valid insofar as it is presented as a valid attempt to grapple with the significance or meaning of what science gives us as knowledge. Science gives us the mechanics, but not the meaning. Meaning comes from philosophical or theological reflection. But any theology or philosophy is constrained by the facts.
Leave a Reply