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.
For one, the Gallup Poll wording and results are not sufficient to really support his argument. Large numbers of people remain unsure about global warming, so similar numbers who say they're certain it's caused by human activities does not necessarily translate into similar levels of popular opposition. Moreoever, the GOP's opposition is of a certain conspiracist flavor (also seen here at Open Left recently, displayed by metamars). The views expressed by the GOP are not simply that man-made global warming isn't real, but that it's a liberal fascist hoax, with the scientists in on it, and Gallup simply didn't ask if people believed that. So Douthat actually has no data that even in America--much less Western Europe--there's actually a populist position to drive such views.
There is, however, a fair amount of collaborative evidence to indicate that American "conservatives" are different. Indeed, Bill McKibben, takes a hard look at this in a New Republic article ("Hot Mess: Why are conservatives so radical about the climate?") that Douthat also mentions--but doesn't discuss. After zeroing in on the conspiracist element, McKibben writes:
The odd and troubling thing about this stance is not just that it prevents action. It's also profoundly unconservative. If there was ever a radical project, monkeying with the climate would surely qualify. Had the Soviet Union built secret factories to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and threatened to raise the sea level and subvert the Grain Belt, the prevailing conservative response would have been: Bomb them. Bomb them back to the Holocene-to the 10,000-year period of climatic stability now unraveling, the period that underwrote the rise of human civilization that conservatism has taken as its duty to protect. Conservatism has always stressed stability and continuity; since Burke, the watchwords have been tradition, authority, heritage. The globally averaged temperature of the planet has been 57 degrees, give or take, for most of human history; we know that works, that it allows the world we have enjoyed. Now, the finest minds, using the finest equipment, tell us that it's headed toward 61 or 62 or 63 degrees unless we rapidly leave fossil fuel behind, and that, in the words of NASA scientists, this new world won't be "similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." Conservatives should be leading the desperate fight to preserve the earth we were born on.
This is a very crucial point. Western conservatism has two distinct main branches. The "intellectually respectable" branch derives from Burke, while the gut-wrenching reactionary conspiracist branch derives from de Maistre--or at least was first pioneered by him. American conservatives almost never talk about de Maistre, but it's his mode of thinking that they predominantly follow. While McKibben is quite correct in noting the disconnect between Burkean conservatism and global warming denialism, he's overlooking the role of reactionary conspiracism pioneered by de Maistre.
In Europe, the post-WWII expression of this split has generally been between center-right Christian Democratic parties of government (either ruling, or forming the establishment opposition), and neo-fascist nationalist fringe parties, such as the British National Front, or the much more successful French example of Jean Marie La Pen. But in America, the dynamic has been quite different for a number of reasons, not least is the legacy of Nixon's "Southern Strategy." In America, the fringe forces of Europe have taken over the conservative party of government, and it is the takeover of the party apparatus that we are seeing reflected in the GOP's virtually unanimous hostility to global warming, rather than any sort of democratic responsiveness. The difference between the party-takeover explanation and Douthat's fuzzy-minded populist narrative can easily be seen in the fact that unified party hostility to global warming contrasts sharply with underlying polling data.
We don't have a super-abundance of such data, but what we do have shows a sizeable segment of Republican believers in global warming who are entirely unrepresented by the supposedly representative democratic process that Douthat dotes on. In some polls they are a sizeable minority, in others, a clear majority. For example:
ABC News/Washington Post Poll. June 3-6, 2010. N=1,004 adults nationwide. "Do you think the federal government should or should not regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to reduce global warming?"
Should Should Not Unsure
% % %
6/3-6/10 71 26 4
Democrats 81 16 2
Republicans 55 39 5
Independents 69 27 3
Boy, those GOP senators really know how to represent their base, now don't they? Populism roolz!
Douthat's explanation is further weakened by the obvious role that vast sums of corporate money have played in shaping conservative opposition to global warming. And his "democratic" "populist" thesis is further undermined by the solid Republican rejection of the notion that such money should have such influence. On Thursday, Greg Sargent reported on Plum Line (and Rachel Maddow repeated), an overwhelming majority of Republicans believe voters have a right ot know who's paying for ads. But you don't exactly see GOP Senators lining up to vote for the DISCLOSE Act, now do you? Here's Greg:
It has become an article of faith among certain Beltway inside-game commentators that there's no way the Dem attack on secret money funding elections could ever have a prayer of working. Surely the issue is too esoteric, too process-y, and too removed from voter concerns about the economy to resonate.
But a new poll commissioned by MoveOn, and done by the respected non-partisan firm Survey USA, strongly suggests that the issue may indeed matter a good deal to voters after all.
The poll finds that two thirds of registered voters, or 66 percent, are aware that outside groups are behind some of the ads they're seeing....
What's more, an overwhelming 84 percent say they have a "right to know" who's bankrolling the ads....
Here are other key findings from the poll, which was provided to me by a MoveOn official:
* An overwhelming 84% of voters polled, including 80% of Republicans and 81% of Independents, believe voters have a right to know who is paying for ads for a particular candidate.
What this example shows--beyond the sheer bogosity of yet another Douthat scribble--is the profound degree to which conservative elites in America get to define what counts as "populist sentiment". As Sargent begins, "It has become an article of faith among certain Beltway inside-game commentators that there's no way the Dem attack on secret money funding elections could ever have a prayer of working." And it's almost a dead certainty that no one would ever have thought to even ask the American people, except for a group like MoveOn, which is not just progressive, but was born out of spontaneous disgust with Versailles consensus.
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