It’s now official: 2014 was the warmest year on record. You might expect this to be a politically important milestone. After all, climate change deniers have long used the blip of 1998
— an unusually hot year, mainly due to an upwelling of warm water in
the Pacific — to claim that the planet has stopped warming. This claim
involves a complete misunderstanding of how one goes about identifying
underlying trends. (Hint: Don’t cherry-pick your observations.) But now
even that bogus argument has collapsed. So will the deniers now concede
that climate change is real?
Of
course not. Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate
policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the
obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in
any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at
this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts
actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the
real question is why.
Before I get into that, let me remind you of some other news that won’t matter.
First,
consider the Kansas experiment. Back in 2012 Sam Brownback, the state’s
right-wing governor, went all in on supply-side economics: He
drastically cut taxes, assuring everyone that the resulting boom would
make up for the initial loss in revenues. Unfortunately for his
constituents, his experiment has been a resounding failure. The economy of Kansas, far from booming, has lagged the economies of neighboring states, and Kansas is now in fiscal crisis.
So
will we see conservatives scaling back their claims about the magical
efficacy of tax cuts as a form of economic stimulus? Of course not. If
evidence mattered, supply-side economics would have faded into obscurity
decades ago. Instead, it has only strengthened its grip on the
Republican Party.
Meanwhile,
the news on health reform keeps coming in, and it keeps being more
favorable than even the supporters expected. We already knew that the
number of Americans without insurance is dropping fast, even as the
growth in health care costs moderates. Now we have evidence that the
number of Americans experiencing financial distress due to medical expenses is also dropping fast.
All
this is utterly at odds with dire predictions that reform would lead to
declining coverage and soaring costs. So will we see any of the people
claiming that Obamacare is doomed to utter failure revising their
position? You know the answer.
And
the list goes on. On issues that range from monetary policy to the
control of infectious disease, a big chunk of America’s body politic
holds views that are completely at odds with, and completely unmovable
by, actual experience. And no matter the issue, it’s the same chunk. If
you’ve gotten involved in any of these debates, you know that these
people aren’t happy warriors; they’re red-faced angry, with special rage
directed at know-it-alls who snootily point out that the facts don’t
support their position.
The
question, as I said at the beginning, is why. Why the dogmatism? Why
the rage? And why do these issues go together, with the set of people
insisting that climate change is a hoax pretty much the same as the set
of people insisting that any attempt at providing universal health
insurance must lead to disaster and tyranny?
Well,
it strikes me that the immovable position in each of these cases is
bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public
interest. If you don’t want the government to impose controls or fees on
polluters, you want to deny that there is any reason to limit
emissions. If you don’t want the combination of regulation, mandates and
subsidies that is needed to extend coverage to the uninsured, you want
to deny that expanding coverage is even possible. And claims about the
magical powers of tax cuts are often little more than a mask for the
real agenda of crippling government by starving it of revenue.
And
why this hatred of government in the public interest? Well, the
political scientist Corey Robin argues that most self-proclaimed
conservatives are actually reactionaries.
That is, they’re defenders of traditional hierarchy — the kind of
hierarchy that is threatened by any expansion of government, even (or
perhaps especially) when that expansion makes the lives of ordinary
citizens better and more secure. I’m partial to that story, partly
because it helps explain why climate science and health economics
inspire so much rage.
Whether
this is the right explanation or not, the fact is that we’re living in a
political era in which facts don’t matter. This doesn’t mean that those
of us who care about evidence should stop seeking it out. But we should
be realistic in our expectations, and not expect even the most decisive
evidence to make much difference.
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