I’ve been debating political issues with an old lefty buddy of mine for many years, and in his last email he repeated the claim that the Left believes in science much more than conservatives do. What follows is part of my response to that claim.
The idea that “conservatives don’t believe in science and liberals do” is just silly and condescending, IMHO. All people on both sides are prone to errors of all types, especially confirmation bias: we all tend to notice and latch on to examples and anecdotes that confirm our political priors. Hence an anti-ILLEGAL-immigration conservative can cite many cases in which illegals murdered or raped Americans, killed them in reckless traffic crashes, defrauded our welfare system of billions, etc., while an abolish-immigration-law liberal can cite some cases of abuela getting caught up in law enforcement, or a protester killed by ICE. (Even if those protestors brought about their own deaths, through their recklessness and violence during “protests.”)
So “believing in science” is absolutely not the property of one political side or the other. But if I had to make the case of which side is more often motivated by data and what empirically works than the other, you know which side I’d argue. And deep down, you know I’m right. 😊
It’s a cliché for a reason: conservatives are swayed more by data and results (for which their enemies call them hard-hearted and non-empathetic), while liberals are swayed more by feelings and intentions (for which their enemies call them bleeding hearts with luxury beliefs that hurt those they are trying to help).
There are many examples – both involving actual hard sciences, like biology and epidemiology, and of treating with empirical rigor data collected in soft-science fields like demography, sociology or criminology – that I think show that conservatism generally has a much better claim than leftism to believing in science and the empirical method.
The most obvious example is the way the elite left completely turned its back on the most basic aspects of human biology when it adopted the political and unscientific trans ideology, and then tried to ruthlessly enforce it throughout our society. This in spite of the basic concepts that everyone agreed about until 10 minutes ago: homo sapiens is a species that features two sexes (not counting super-rare birth defects producing dysfunctional sexual organs classified as “intersex”); that males have XY chromosomes and females XX; that no humans can change genders, etc.
Serious students of psychiatry have identified one of two conditions that describe all “transgendered people” (excepting those hopefully rare male scammers who pretend to be female in order to win athletic competitions after they had had their asses kicked in competition with other males): they either suffer from the mental disorder of gender dysmorphia, or the sexual fetish of autogynephilia.
I know that some trans activists dispute those terms, but their position that a human can change genders is absolutely without any scientific proof whatsoever. So it’s absurd to express the mutually contradictory ideas that “we believe in science” but also that “trans women are women.”
That doesn’t mean that either gender dysmorphic people or autogynephiles should be treated cruelly; they’re made in God’s image like the rest of us, and deserve compassionate treatment for their disorders. But IMHO it’s evil to affirm them in their self-destructive delusions, or to allow the more aggressive among them to victimize actual women by forcing themselves into women’s sports, women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, and women’s prisons.
But it’s not like the trans issue is the only one which leftists have responded to by closing their eyes and clamping their hands over their ears while they chanted political slogans to drown out the facts.
Over the last half-century or more, we’ve been running huge, longitudinal policy experiments testing various claims about what kinds of outcomes result from implementing various policies, and the elite left has been excessively data-resistant to those results, to put it politely.
For a few quick examples, leftist pols and social scientists have claimed that:
Stricter gun-control laws will result in fewer gun crimes. But the opposite has proven true: the cities and states with the strictest laws have the highest gun crimes per capita (ex: Chicago and DC, and many more).
Spending hundreds of billions on Head Start programs will have long-term, positive effects in the educational achievement of recipients. But countless studies over the last 60 years have shown a small improvement within the first two years, which then disappears completely in the following years.
Rent control will keep the cost of rent down. The opposite has happened: while those being directly subsidized (often the upper-middle class and even the rich) have profited greatly, the cities with the strictest rent controls routinely have the highest average rents in the country.
Compensatory discrimination policies (e.g. affirmative action, DEI, racial quotas) will benefit the targeted minority groups and shrink achievement gaps between those minorities and the non-beneficiary ethnic groups. The opposite has happened everywhere it has been tried. (Thomas Sowell’s 2004 Affirmative Action Around the World: an Empirical Study looks at such programs in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and India, and documents the same unintentionally bad results.)
In none of those cases has the left demonstrated any inclination to accept the empirical data; they continue to push those policies, no matter how often and how comprehensively they have failed, and continue to fail.
And they certainly kept that up when it came to Covid!
Both sides initially listened to the alarming scientific warnings coming from the CDC and Fauci, and locked down and wore masks. But very soon afterwards, conservatives – who generally chafe under restrictions of individual rights and freedoms – began to push for ending mandatory lockdowns and opening back up again, along with the option of not wearing masks. By the end of the summer of 2020 – as more evidence had come out suggesting that healthy people with no comorbidities (obesity, pulmonary conditions, old age, etc.) were at very little risk of serious illness or death, and that healthy children were at EXTREMELY little risk – they were pushing to re-open schools in the fall.
When the Great Barrington Declaration (written primarily by 3 world-renowned epidemiologists, from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford respectively) was published in October of 2020, its findings and recommendations – which have since largely been proven correct – reflected the more libertarian/conservative leanings of its authors, along with their knowledge of diseases. It described the adverse effects on mental and physical health of lockdowns, pointed out that the elderly and infirm were “more than a thousand-fold” more likely to die from covid than were the young, and that the flu was far more dangerous to children than covid was. It advocated for “focused protection,” which would involve isolating and protecting the vulnerable, while allowing society to function more normally, and the young and healthy to develop herd immunity.
The left – who generally value governmental control intended to produce safety over individual freedom – took the opposite tack. They locked down harder and for much longer, enforcing a raft of mandates – six-foot distancing, required mask-wearing, no church attendance or other public gatherings (though they made exceptions for BLM and antifa protests since “racism is a greater threat to health than covid”). When the vaccines came out, they coerced people into taking the shot, making it a condition for keeping your employment; many thousands of government employees (even special forces bad-asses, who were young and in amazing physical shape, and no more in danger from covid than from a meteor strike) were forced to lose their jobs or careers if they wouldn’t take the experimental vaccine.
Now I don’t blame people for their actions in the very early days of the pandemic. There was so much we didn’t know, and at first it was an arguably prudent decision to err on the side of excess caution, and trade some of your liberty for safety, and out of consideration for others.
But as time went on, the data piled up, and the scientific support for Fauci’s continuing yet shifting and sometimes contradictory statements became more obviously mistaken.
Forget that we now know for certain that Fauci was lying like crazy the whole time. He had directed funding of gain of function to the Wuhan lab, even after Obama had ordered that that be stopped. He suspected immediately, and knew very early on, that the origin was almost certainly the lab and not the wet markets. He has since admitted that the six-foot-distance rule “just sort of appeared” – which is NOT how science f’ing works! Notes and transcripts reveal that many scientists were mentioning the dangers of the various vaxes and boosters – to pregnant women, to especially young males who were at no risk from covid, but much increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis from the vax, etc. And yet Fauci continued to blatantly lie about the efficacy of masks, lockdowns and vaccines, and about the real risks to the health from those things.
It’s easy now to attack the proven dishonesty of Fauci and the hypocrisy of the leftist commissars who enforced mandates on their subjects but violated them themselves (as when Newsom went to unmasked fund-raising dinners at fancy restaurants, or when Beetlejuice Lightfoot and Nancy Pelosi both went to hairdressers for private attention after they’d mandated the closing of hairdressers for the hoi polloi).
But my point is that it wasn’t only the political priors of both sides that drove their behavior. Because when more and more data came in, and the science became clearer and clearer – that distancing and masks were ineffective, that the continuing round of vaxes and boosters were not performing as promised, that lockdowns were doing massive economic, physical and psychological damage – the left continued to ignore the science and the data. They doubled down on their errors.
They loved the political power and advantages the lockdowns gave them. Teachers’ unions ruled CA, keeping schools closed for several years, long after the science proved that the children whose safety they pretended to be protecting were at no risk from the virus. The police arrested a young, healthy, completely alone kite-surfer off the coast of California because of the supposed grave threat he posed to public health. They shut down churches and businesses, but kept open convenience stores selling obscenely profitable (for the State) lottery tickets. They pushed through massive use of mail-in ballots and other non-supervised voting practices that clearly helped their own political prospects.
At this point I think it’s clear that both sides are often tempted to go down a path using “The Science™” as a politicized weapon to achieve their political goals. (Remember when Emperor Fauci haughtily proclaimed that, “Questioning me is just questioning The Science™” Just like when Gore insisted that The Science™ is settled, with total and unchanging consensus.)
But again, if you’re going to argue that conservatives are as bad or worse about than the liberals are, I don’t like your chances of winning that one!
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
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Martin Simpson 