Facts be damned, ain't democracy grand? That's Ross Douthat's response to recent commentary on the fact that the GOP is virtually alone among the world's major political parties in opposing the science of global warming.
Here's the sequence of events. In the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein wrote last Saturday "GOP Gives Climate Science A Cold Shoulder", about the GOP's unique situation. He lead off by noting the position of the British Conservative Party Foreign Secretary:
When British Foreign Secretary William Hague visited the U.S. last week, he placed combating climate change near the very top of the world's To Do list.
"Climate change is perhaps the 21st century's biggest foreign-policy challenge," Hague declared in a New York City speech.
and went on to note:
His strong words make it easier to recognize that Republicans in this country are coalescing around a uniquely dismissive position on climate change. The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones....
Of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers who have taken a position, 19 have declared that the science of climate change is inconclusive or flat-out incorrect. (Kirk is the only exception.) With sentiments among rank-and-file Republicans also trending that way, it's no coincidence that two Republicans who affirmed the science -- Rep. Michael Castle in Delaware and Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska -- were defeated in Senate primaries this year....
Indeed, it is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says that although other parties may contain pockets of climate skepticism, there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of."
Douthat led off by citing Brownstein's piece, then wrote:
What's interesting, though, is that if you look at public opinion on climate change, the U.S. isn't actually that much of an outlier among the wealthier Western nations. In a 2007-2008 Gallup survey on global views of climate change, for instance, just 49 percent of American told pollsters that human beings are responsible for global warming. But the same figure for Britain (where Rush Limbaugh has relatively few listeners, I believe) was 48 percent, and belief in human-caused climate change was only slightly higher across northern Europe....
There's a reasonably large Western European constituency, in other words, for some sort of climate change skepticism.... But the politicians haven't been responding. Instead, Europe's political class, left and right alike, has worked to marginalize a position that it considers intellectually disreputable, even as the American G.O.P. has exploited that same position to win votes.
The debate over climate change isn't unusual in this regard. On issues ranging from the death penalty to (at least until recently) immigration, America's major political parties generally tend to be more responsive to public opinion, and less constrained by elite sentiment, than their counterparts in Europe. Overall, I much prefer the American approach, populist excesses and all. (It helps in this case, of course, that I'm deeply skeptical about the efficacy of climate change legislation anyway.) But there's no denying that its left the G.O.P. on the wrong side - and increasingly so - of a pretty sturdy scientific consensus.
As usual with Douthat, there are problems galore with his reasoning.
Note: Here's one of those "few scattered new diaries" I told you about.
It's Christmas time, and as befits the season, Ross Douthat has seen the enemy, and just can't wait to tell us. Forget Islam, that's soooo Bush/Cheney! Douthat is all revved up for a war on pantheism:
It's fitting that James Cameron's "Avatar" arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It's at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, "Avatar" is Cameron's long apologia for pantheism -- a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
Pantheism! It's the perfect target! There are no pantheist churches, and while some might see this as a problem, what with there being no actual enemy and all, those people just don't know their American history. It didn't take any actual witches in Salem, nor were the Bavarian Illuminati any less disbanded in America circa 1800 than they were in France a few years earlier--not to mention that neither France nor America was Bavaria. And, of course, Joe McCarthy's famous list of communists he waved in Wheeling West Virginia at the start of his anti-communist crusade was a blank piece of paper.
You see, this has always been the right's little secret--when there is no enemy, when no one is the enemy, then everyone is equally liable to be suspect. If there were a pantheist church, then one could point to it and say, "There they are, the enemy!" And everyone who wasn't there, inside that church, could breath a sigh of relief. It's much more effective--for the right's purposes, at least, to have an invisible enemy. An enemy that's nowhere, and therefore could be anywhere. But above all, an enemy that can't fight back! What better enemy could the source of all chickenhawks want?
Two weeks ago, I wrote a diary, "The Recovery Myth", warning about the risks of ignoring longer-term economic prospects for short term upticks. This diary continues that theme (and is fully in tune with Mike's recent diary, "We Need a Jobs Package, Not a Stimulus Package").
A rising tide of voices are warning that optimism over a coming recovery--the promise of "green shoots"--is looking increasingly questionable. Typical of these are Dean Baker's "The Green Shoots Are Dead", hence my diary title. The subhead to his article explains:
The latest jobless figures show America's economy is stuck in the doldrums. The US urgently needs a new stimulus injection
Krugman argues along similar lines in his July 9 column, "The Stimulus Trap"
As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan - this was before Inauguration Day - some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.
Unfortunately, those worries have proved justified. The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration's economic stewardship. There's now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap.
The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed....
In a recession this deep, recovery doesn't depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery....
This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.
Meanwhile, Bonddad is on a counter-contrarian kick at DKos, writing "The Economic Free Fall is Over", which I believe is instructively mistaken. It's true in one sense, but it misses the point in a larger one (after all, FDR reversed the downward plunge of the GDP within his first two years, but unemployment remained crushing until WWII came along). More on all of these viewpoints--and more viewpoints as well--on the flip.
The fallout from the assassination of women's healthcare provider Dr. George Tiller continues. As Zack Roth of Talking Points Memo reports, the Justice Department will investigate whether Tiller's shooter, an anti-choice zealot, violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act or any other federal statutes. But little has been said about investigating the killing as an act of terrorism, a federal crime. The Oklahoma City bombers were investigated by the FBI and tried under a 1994 federal anti-terrorism statute, and that was before the PATRIOT ACT, which presumably makes it even easier to prosecute terrorism as a federal crime today.
The day after the April 15 "Tea Parties", rightwing enabler extraordinaire Ross Douthat wrote:
They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think.
So many lies, so little time. But it's not the lies per se I'm concerned with-it's the misperception that there's really any difference in kind between Douthat and the Tea-Bagging yahoos with their "show me your REAL birth certificate" signs. They weren't out there protesting economic policy policy-as anyone reading their signs could plainly see.
They were out their in an identity politics rage, the bottom line of which was "Don't believe your lyin' eyes! Barack Obama is evil! Evil! Evil! And not a real 'Murican like us!
And Douthout was in there, in The Atlantic's august electronic tower, saying, "Don't believe your lyin' eyes! They're rational, salt-of-the-earth political actors. They're real 'Muricans same as you or me!"
The notion that this pathetic band of yahoos--drummed up by weeks of rants on Fox News and talk radio-had anything in common with the tens of millions who protested against Bush's war is just the sort of ludicrous lie that's intended to distract from the core fraud being perpetrated here-the fraud that Douthout and the mob are anything but the fingers and the opposable thumb of the same bloody fist. It's just like when William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell wrote their book defending Joe McCarthy while he was in full frothing-at-mouth-mode. They exist only to work together as one, and all their pretense to higher learning, critical analysis and sophistication is nothing but a sham.
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