It's Not Your Imagination: Republicans Really Don't Like Science

[swag]

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/its-not-your-imagination-republicans-really-dont-science?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Motherjones%2Fmojoblog+%28MotherJones.com+%7C+MoJoBlog%29

—By Kate Sheppard

The premise of the 2005 book The Republican War on Science (by Mother Jones contributor Chris Mooney) was that conservatives in the US hate science. They don't like evolution, they don't like global warming—none of that stuff. Now a sociologist set out to figure out if that thesis really is true—and concluded that right in the US is indeed growing increasingly distrustful of science.

Gordon Gauchat of the University of North Carolina published these findings in the forthcoming issue of the American Sociological Review. He looked back at date from 1974 through 2010, and found that trust in science as relatively stable over the the 36-year period, except among self-identified conservatives. They actually started 1974 as the group that most-trusted science (compared to self-identified liberals and moderates), but have now dropped to the bottom of the ranking.

Gauchat used data from the General Social Survey, which asked subjects to rate their level of confidence in the scientific community. Here's what he found:



The reason for this, according to Mooney and others, is that the "political neutrality of science began to unravel in the 1970s with the emergence of the new right"—a growing body of conservatives who were distrustful of science and the intellectual establishment, who were often religious and concerned about defending "traditional values" in the face of a modernizing world, and who favored limited government. This has prompted backlash against subjects for which there is broad scientific consensus, like global warming and evolution—backlash that has been apparent in survey data over the past three decades.

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[HockeyMom]

1. Science contradicts the Bible,

and their "base".

[longship]

2. But why are the moderates so low?

That is very puzzling. Who are they listening to? And what are they being told that there is such a gap?

Just wondering.

Show me a postmodernist flying in an airliner and I'll show you a hypocrite.

[kestrel91316]

3. Biblical literalists are flat-earthers. If it contradicts the bible, IT'S A LIE!!!1!!!

[50000feet]

4. Authoritarians like scientism.

Many conservatives pay at least lip service to the belief that Newtonian Physics explains pretty much everything. Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Physics are totally incomprehensible to the authoritarian mind-set since it prefers to perceive the universe as a predictably working machine.

Regressive to the 'nth degree given how far science has come since Newton.