Calling it “political carping”, when it’s mostly expressing despair over the destruction of the American government, world reputation, and international order, seems more like carping than anything anyone else has done.
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I’m certainly no fan of Joe Biden, but he didn’t impact the state of U.S. science funding – which is directly related to the topic of this forum – nearly as much as Trump already has. Hence I think it’s clear why this administration is being discussed so much on this forum, whatever your political views may be. Still, it seems there’s a broad consensus forming (which I agree with) that many recent political topics are far off from this forum’s mission, which is why we’ve moved them to this megathread.
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Since that’s a topic of current concern, I guess you could ask about The Orange Peril’s dementia and find out.
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The past two months have been more damaging to science and the future of science (and democracy) than perhaps any other period of American history. (Yes, that is a grandiose statement—but I’d like to encourage pushback if it is untrue.)
We have a cabinet secretary who thinks vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they counter—and he is obsessed with and a cheerleader for all sorts of junk science.
“Peaceful science” doesn’t have much of a future if there is a war on science—and American “scientific infrastructure” is in jeopardy. So America may have to push back forcefully if we want to avoid disaster.
I’ve done a lot of reading in the past year about the 1930’s in Germany and I’m alarmed that we are duplicating many of the patterns. (I’m particularly concerned at how many Christians in Germany chose to be “polite” and “avoid conflict” and paid a huge price.)
Thus, in the past two months I’ve found myself just a little less “peaceful” and a lot more concerned about the future of science—and democracy itself.
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Have you read about Bonhoeffer? I find his story to be especially pertinent in times like these. Recently I read a biography of him, but later found out that the author (Eric Metaxas) is a devoted Trumpie – rather strange, given the parallels between then and the modern day that are (to me) fairly obvious.
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Got assigned a lot of Bonhoeffer (and Barth) reading in grad school. Kind of tedious—but I respected both.
Both theologians got a lot of hate from the evangelical world back in the 1970’s when Jimmy Carter ran for president and interviews revealed that he was a big fan of both. (In contrast, Metaxas kind of gave Bonhoeffer in new breath of life in American Christian circles—though most people probably forgot about the Carter interviews as related to the German theologians. [Well, Barth was actually Swiss but he had so much influence in the Confession Church in Germany that it almost seems like he was German—and he died in German concentration camp.]
As a pseudo-scholar, Metaxas has developed a reputation almost as bad as pseudo-historian David Barton. Both have probably planted more disinformation among many of my evangelical brethren than anybody else alive.
I remember when Metaxas’ book about Bonhoeffer was published and evangelical history professors at various Christian schools were appalled—but the Bonhoeffer family was (and still is) furious. Last year there were more headlines about the Bonhoeffer family (and perhaps the estate??) suing Metaxas over what they considered misrepresentation which reached the point of libel. They are particularly horried at Metaxas’ allegedly misusing Bonhoeffer to false portray him as championing a “MAGA evangelical” type of agenda. [I certainly agree with the family but my opinion means nothing, obviously, as far as the legal merits or convincing the masses.]
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Yet the book was named the 2010 Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Christian Book of the Year, won the 2011 John C. Pollock Award for Christian Biography awarded by Beeson Divinity School and a 2011 Christopher Award.
It would seem that evangelical history professors have very little influence on evangelicals’ (even many elite evangelicals’) understanding of history.
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Yes, indeed. There is a huge gulf between the ECPA (which rewards best sellers) and evangelical academics (who care about historian rigor.)
Likewise, I won’t bother to list the number of “prestigious awards” from various evangelical schools which were absolutely lamented and face-palmed by their faculty. (Indeed, long ago I was even in the room when that type of award was being discussed by administrators in hopes that some of the book royalties for a best seller would get routed back to the school in the form of an endowed chair. I have too many stories like that.)
I even recall some failed attempts by faculty to “stand up” to the administration about awarding an honorary doctorate to one such very wealth author of popular Christian books and training materials. They got nowhere. But not many years later there was a huge scandal over the author (including “me-to movement” types of issues) and the honorary doctorate was removed from the school’s website and conveniently forgotten.
You are quite correct. Although an exception of sorts happened in a big way over one of David Barton’s books. I think it may have been the Thomas Jefferson biography. There were so many pseudo-quotes in there and so many cries from evangelical scholars that Thomas Nelson publishers actually did a total recall on the book.
I just now looked it up to revive my memory:
By the way, a point worth making is that POLITICAL SCIENCE (the study of politics) is indeed a science—and hopefully it can be peaceful.
At least the political science academy says it is a field of social science. It does use the scientific method (or should) but distinctions are often made about how the parameters of the social science can differ from the natural sciences (often called the “hard” sciences.) Debates do continue about this.
Yes, it was. I remember the incident, because (i) I came across Barton more-or-less simultaneously with becoming aware of American Creationism (so have tended to take especial note of his activities), and (ii) one of the main voices criticising him was Warren Throckmorton, whose blog I used to follow. Throckmorton is, oddly enough an evangelical psychologist, not a historian. And his co-author of Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President was Michael Coulter, a Political Scientist.
Interestingly, Jay Richards, of the DI, seems to have taken the lead in soliciting the opinions of ten conservative Christian professors (including at least one historian and two political scientists) to evaluate Barton’s claims in that book.
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Being constantly faced with the ugly underside of the hairy tarantula that is the Trump administration is a turn-off, I would have to agree.
That said, “carping”? Finding fault with trivial matter?
Complaining about the destruction of science, of governmental agencies like the department of education, the abolishment of due process, and abandoning long-standing military and trade alliances to instigate self-defeating trade wars with neighbors and allies, is “carping”?
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And, really, I am not sure that “politics,” with all of its ordinary connotations, really applies here. To me that usually means things like “should we try to fund road projects through fuel taxes or from the general fund?” or “would environmental regulation be better left to the states, or should it be a federal undertaking?”
But we’re in a place where the “politics” are more about whether we want to continue to be a democratic republic, or whether we need to import more of the Fuhrerprinzip to our system. In all my doings, representing people in civil rights actions who were more or less on the “right,” I never met anyone on my side who thought that the cure to our problems was to have MORE arbitrary authority vested in executives and agencies. Rather, the theme was freedom; and the great debate which raged in America, so often, could be boiled down to a contest as to which side more fully served the western liberal tradition: was it better to have the government, on a particular question, in “hands-off” mode, letting free markets and free individual choice determine outcomes, or was it the case that doing that had the effect of enhancing one party’s freedom by imposing an unfair burden on the freedom of others? Whatever one thought about the merits of any particular question, the debate was always fundamentally about which of these views, as applied to the particular case, better served liberty.
That could be toxic, to be sure, but it was never system-ending. You might think that creating huge federal bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security was a great infringement upon freedom, or you might think that it was necessary to preserve the security and, consequently, freedom of the American people. And if you didn’t get your way on that issue, you always had the judicial process to test the constitutionality of what had been done, and the political process to change course on the issue at some later date. And those processes were sacrosanct. Ever since Marbury v. Madison the power of the federal courts to determine the law, and to hold all to account, was beyond reasonable dispute.
What we have now is an attempt to end that system. When it is asserted that the President can order anyone to be shipped off to a foreign concentration camp, and that judicial review cannot even question such acts, we are in a place which is dangerous both to traditional “left” and “right” views. The right might have a more “libertarian” attitude which says, “get the government out of my face, and keep those federal authorities who want to seize me off my damned land,” while the left might have a more “social justice” attitude which says that those who may be harshly treated by the government have a right to ensure that the process for doing it is not arbitrary, but it adds up to the two sides agreeing: this is wrong.
I don’t know what happened. There is something about people that often fails to see the consequences of acts. If the administration is right that it may, for reasons known only to it, send a person out of the country to a foreign concentration camp, and that judicial review may not even touch such actions, then this principle cannot, by its very nature, be limited in any meaningful way. Why not, for example, do this to federal judges with whose rulings one disagrees? If the reasons for doing so need to be given to nobody, ever, then defenses like “you can’t deport me because I’m a US citizen” vanish in a puff of arbitrariness. Another federal judge cannot even ask who it was that got sent away; national security, y’know.
When we were deep in the cold war, the most terrifying things about the Soviet Union were the tales told by such people as Solzhenitsyn – tales of people who would simply disappear in the night, whose whereabouts could not even be inquired into; their sufferings and even their deaths would be mysteries. One day they might return, but nobody could say whether or when. Yes, there were other things to fear – the tyrannies that can flow from government control of productive resources, and the like, but none of those would have held the same terror if the Soviet Union had been a genuinely law-bound, liberal state which acknowledged, in meaningful ways, the rights of individuals to be free of wrongful and/or arbitrary treatment.
And so while the differences between fascism, communism, dictatorship, oligarchy, and republican democracy are in the broadest sense “political” I feel that we make a kind of basic error when we treat these types of questions as though they are like the question whether the warnings on cigarette packs should be harsher or not. These may be “political” but they threaten the end of “politics” in any sense in which we now recognize it.
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We have gestapo. And we have shipping people off to concentration camps. We have suspension of due process. We have a White House which posts an image of the President wearing a crown as king. (At least Hitler was a little bit more classy than that.)
I think of how the Nazis would give political prisoners tattered and oversized pants to wear for their court appearances—and not give them a belt to hold their pants up. So they looked ridiculous trying to hold their pants up with both hands while walking into the courtroom. Is that next?
If I were Jeffrey Goldberg, I would be watching over my shoulders at all times after the stooges actually suggested that he had HACKED their group chat, which is pretty good for a non-techy type.
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Isn’t it still in fashion?
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Just to make things worse. We knew that RFK jr was launching a study to relitigate the imagined relationship between vaccines and autism. Looks like it’s going to be a sham. An unqualified anti-vaccine activist, David Geier - son of the disgraced Mark Geier - known for medically abusing autistic children - has been put in charge.
I wish the Republicans in Congress had the spine to reject RFK jr. he should never have been allowed to take office. But they didn’t and America’s health will suffer for it.
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Unfortunately, the only remaining principle of today’s Republican Party is the aforementioned Führerprinzip.
Hi Rum
While Denmark is enjoying a positive trade balance and very low debt to GDP ratio (under 30%) the US is not. The current state of US economics may not be sustainable. The debt to GDP ratio is 124% and the trade imbalance is nearly 1 trillion dollars.
And destroying science, the department of education, governmental accountability, and international partnerships is going to fix that, how?
Have you looked into why the US imports more than it exports and how that situation developed over time?
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And the solution for this administration is a tax cut?
I have not.
The government department of education was a Carter initiative. It is simply returning to a pre Carter status. The individual states will handle education.
I don’t think the Government can destroy science only maybe reduce some funding. As far as international partnership being destroyed I think you are taking an extreme pessimistic position here.