How Guns Change People

The latest tragedy in Aurora brought with it a renewed discussion about guns and violence in America, along with some new heights in "stupid shit people say" in the wake of such an event. While there is plenty of meat on that bone to nourish the ranter in me, the truth is that I'm tired of that blue-in-the-face argument.

For me, the question is not about whether guns kill people or people kill people, or that making it harder for law abiding citizens to obtain guns will mean that only criminals will have guns. These are silly and foolish straw men statements and believe the serious question about how and why people are changed by their relationship to a gun. I believe that Evan Selinger is on the right track in this piece from the Atlantic in asking the right question about guns and violence in America.

The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun

By Evan Selinger 

Jul 23 2012, 4:40 PM ET 230 Does the old rallying cry "Guns don't kill people. People kill people" hold up to philosophical scrutiny?

The tragic Colorado Batman shooting has prompted a wave of soul-searching. How do things like this happen? Over at Wired,David Dobbs gave a provocative answer in "Batman Movies Don't Kill. But They're Friendly to the Concept ." I suspect Dobbs's nuanced analysis about causality and responsibility won't sit well with everyone.

Dobbs questions the role of gun culture in steering "certain unhinged or deeply a-moral people toward the sort of violence that has now become so routine that the entire thing seems scripted." But what about "normal" people? Yes, plenty of people carry guns without incident. Yes, proper gun training can go a long way. And, yes, there are significant cultural differences about how guns are used. But, perhaps overly simplistic assumptions about what technology is and who we are when we use it get in the way of us seeing how, to use Dobbs's theatrical metaphor, guns can give "stage directions."

Instrumentalist Conception of Technology
The commonsense view of technology is one that some philosophers call the instrumentalist conception. According to the instrumentalist conception, while the ends that technology can be applied to can be cognitively and morally significant, technology itself is value-neutral. Technology, in other words, is subservient to our beliefs and desires; it does not significantly constrain much less determine them. This view is famously touted in the National Rifle Association's maxim: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."

The NRA maxim "Guns don't kill people. People kill people," captures the widely believed idea that the appropriate source to blame for a murder is the person who pulled the gun's trigger.

To be sure, this statement is more of a slogan than well-formulated argument. But even as a shorthand expression, it captures the widely believed idea that murder is wrong and the appropriate source to blame for committing murder is the person who pulled a gun's trigger. Indeed, the NRA's proposition is not unusual; it aptly expresses the folk psychology that underlies moral and legal norms.

The main idea, here, is that guns are neither animate nor supernatural beings; they cannot use coercion or possession to make a person shoot. By contrast, murderers should be held responsible for their actions because they can resolve conflict without resorting to violence, even during moments of intense passion. Furthermore, it would be absurd to incarcerate a firearm as punishment. Unlike people, guns cannot reflect on wrongdoing or be rehabilitated.

Beyond Instrumentalism: Gun Use
Taking on the instrumentalist conception of technology, Don Ihde , a leading philosopher of technology, claims that "the human-gun relation transforms the situation from any similar situation of a human without a gun." By focusing on what it is like for a flesh-and-blood human to actually be in possession of a gun, Ihde describes "lived experience" in a manner that reveals the NRA position to be but a partial grasp of a more complex situation. By equating firearm responsibility exclusively with human choice, the NRA claim abstracts away relevant considerations about how gun possession can affect one's sense of self and agency. In order to appreciate this point, it helps to consider the fundamental materiality of guns.

In principle, guns, like every technology, can be used in different ways to accomplish different goals. Guns can be tossed around like Frisbees. They can be used to dig through dirt like shovels, or mounted on top of a fireplace mantel, as aesthetic objects. They can even be integrated into cooking practices; gangster pancakes might make a tasty Sunday morning treat. But while all of these options remain physical possibilities, they are not likely to occur, at least not in a widespread manner with regularity. Such options are not practically viable because gun design itself embodies behavior-shaping values; its material composition indicates the preferred ends to which it "should" be used. Put in Ihde's parlance, while a gun's structure is "multistable " with respect to its possible uses across a myriad of contexts, a partially determined trajectory nevertheless constrains which possibilities are easy to pursue and which of the intermediate and difficult options are worth investing time and labor into.

A gun's excellence simply lies in its capacity to quickly fire bullets that can reliably pierce targets.

With respect to the trajectory at issue, guns were designed for the sole purpose of accomplishing radical and life-altering action at a distance with minimal physical exertion on the part of the shooter. Since a gun's mechanisms were built for the purpose of releasing deadly projectiles outwards, it is difficult to imagine how one could realistically find utility in using a gun to pursue ends that do not require shooting bullets. For the most part, a gun's excellence simply lies in its capacity to quickly fire bullets that can reliably pierce targets. Using the butt of a gun to hammer the nail into a "Wanted" post--a common act in the old cowboy movies--is an exceptional use.

What the NRA position fails to convey, therefore, are the perceptual affordances offered by gun possession and the transformative consequences of yielding to these affordances. To someone with a gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets. Furthermore, gun possession makes it easy to be bold, even hotheaded. Physically weak, emotionally passive, and psychologically introverted people will all be inclined to experience shifts in demeanor. Like many other technologies, Ihde argues, guns mediate the human relation to the world through a dialectic in which aspects of experience are both "amplified" and "reduced". In this case, there is a reduction in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as dangerous, and a concomitant amplification in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as calling for the subject to respond with violence.

French philosopher Bruno Latour goes far as to depict the experience of possessing a gun as one that produces a different subject: "You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you." While the idea that a gun-human combination can produce a new subject may seem extreme, it is actually an experience that people (with appropriate background assumptions) typically attest to, when responding to strong architectural configurations. When walking around such prestigious colleges as Harvard and the University of Chicago, it is easy to feel that one has suddenly become smarter. Likewise, museums and sites of religious worship can induce more than a momentary inclination towards reflection; they can allow one to view artistic and spiritual matters as a contemplative being.

The Brave One
The points about guns made by Ihde and Latour are poignantly explored in the 2007 film The Brave One. Unfortunately, many critics examined the film through a humanist lens, and bounded by its conceptual limitations, offered damning reviews. Many depicted the movie as a hyperbolic revenge film. All they saw was a gun blazing Jodie Foster playing a character named Erica Bain who copes with a violent assault (that kills her fiancé and leaves her in a three week coma) by moving through one scene after another of gratuitous vigilante violence, using an illicitly acquired 9mm handgun to settle scores and punish criminals that the law cannot touch. A stir was even caused by the following so-called "liberal" remarks that Foster made during an interview :

I don't believe that any gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being. Americans are by nature filled with rage-slash-fear. And guns are a huge part of our culture. I know I'm crazy because I'm only supposed to say that in Europe. But violence corrupts absolutely.

The critics failed to grasp a point that Foster herself underscored in numerous interviews. Despite its market-driven name, the film is not primarily about human virtues or vices. It does not try to discern whether there is an essential experience of bravery or cowardice, and the extent to which characters in the film personify such ideals. Rather, it is an existential meditation that centers on what Foster calls a "deeper and scarier" theme. Looking beyond the explicit plot and its correlative bursts of visually disturbing depictions of violence, makes it becomes possible to recognize that the film explores the anti-essentialist thesis that people are not unified subjects, but instead are beings with fluid and re-negotiable identities. Especially in the face of trauma, people can abandon old lives and start new ones. In the case at issue, Erica goes from being a woman who lives a relatively disembodied existence -- a radio host who collects the sounds of NY city by blending into its background; a minor celebrity who refuses an offer to appear on television by suggesting that she is more of a voice than a seductive face; and a lover who, at the beginning of the film, is visually contrasted with an athletic looking, long-haired, male-nurse fiancé -- to a someone who can kill in cold blood without experiencing the quintessential physical sign of remorse, shaky hands.
By depicting Erica's metamorphosis as a shift away from disembodiment that is brought by means other than consciousness-raising or personal affirmation, The Brave One challenges the instrumental conception of technology. Erica's transformation is so explicitly and thoroughly dependent upon technological mediation that the audience is led to infer that without the gun, she would be radically debilitated by her beating; her fate would lie in becoming an apartment-bound recluse.
Reflecting on the centrality of technological mediation to the plot, Foster uses phenomenological language and tells the media that the gun "opens up a world" in which Erica is viscerally "materialized" and therein drawn to dangerous situations (e.g., late night trips to a convenience store and subway) where there is an increased likelihood of encountering violence. Since Erica enters these places because of a technologically induced desire, and not because she is deliberately seeking retribution, it may be fitting to consider the gun -as Latour might suggest, through his notion of "symmetry " -- one of the "actors" in the film.

To be sure, The Brave One is just a movie. It isn't a scientific study and it does feature a character who has come undone. But if philosophers like Ihde and Latour are right, we've got more in common with her than most are willing to admit. And this possibility ups Dobbs's already high metaphorical ante.

Citizens United - what was the deal again?

I have found myself decrying the Citizens United decision but feeling a little confused about what, exactly, were the previous SCOTUS decisions that were at stake. In truth, I felt like I didn't really understand the basis of the decision and found Stone's description helpful in understanding the history and philosophies involved.

Wherever you fall on the decision, hopefully this will help explain it in context.

Explaining Citizens United

The Supreme Court's decision yesterday in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has rightly generated a lot of attention. It is, indeed, a profoundly important decision that will have a dramatic impact on American politics. In a five-to-four decision, with the justices voting along familiar lines (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito on one side; Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor on the other), the Court held unconstitutional a key provision of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Act that had placed limits on the amount of money corporations and unions could spend to support or oppose political candidates in the closing days of a campaign. The goal of the Act was to limit the impact corporations and unions could have on American politics. What I want to do in this post is to explain the decision.
After Watergate, Congress enacted legislation that limited both the amount that individuals and organizations could contribute directly to political candidates and the amount they could independently spend in support of or in opposition to particular political candidates. The purpose of the legislation was to create a "fairer" political process, both by reducing the opportunities for corruption and improper influence and by "equalizing" to some degree the influence different individuals and organizations could have on the political process. Just as we have "one person, one vote," the idea was the move towards a system in which we have "one person, one dollar."
In Buckley v. Valeo, decided in 1976, the Supreme Court held that the contribution limits were constitutional, but that the expenditure limits violated the First Amendment. In reaching this result, the Court acknowledged that political contributions and expenditures are "speech" within the meaning of the First Amendment, that the most serious infringements of First Amendment rights are laws that discriminate against particular points of view (for example, "No person may criticize the war"), and that the contribution and expenditure limits did not discriminate against particular points of view, but applied across the boards, without regard to whether the "speaker" was supporting a Republican or a Democrat. It therefore analogized these limits to laws regulating the size of billboards or the hours in which one may use a loudspeaker in residential neighborhoods. That is, like those laws, the contribution and expenditure limits regulated speech without regard to the speaker's particular views. In such circumstances, the Court generally applies of form of "balancing" to determine whether the law is constitutional. It assesses the severity of the law's impact on free speech, and then asks whether the government's interest is sufficiently weighty to justify the particular restriction at issue.
In Buckley, the Court held that the contribution limits (which limited how much one could give directly to a candidate) were constitutional, because the government has a substantial interest in avoiding the appearance and reality of corruption and undue influence and because the impact on free speech was relatively modest. This was so because individuals who wanted to spend more than the law allowed them to contribute directly to a particular candidate could still spend that money to support the candidate in other ways (for example, by contributing to a PAC). On the other hand, the Court held that the expenditure limits were unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that to tell a person that she can spend $X and not a penny more to support her favored candidate was a severe restriction on her right to free speech. So serious a limitation on the individual's freedom, the Court held, could not be justified by the interest in "equalization" or in avoiding the appearance or reality of undue influence.
After Buckley, the Court began to focus on the issue of corporations and labor unions. The question, in short, was whether such organizations had the same First Amendment rights to spend money in the political process as individuals. In 1978, in a sharply-divided decision in the Bellotti case, the Court held that the speech of corporations is entitled to the same protection under the First Amendment as any other speech. In 1990, however, in the Austin case, the Court tacked in the opposite direction and upheld restrictions on corporate expenditures. It was difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile these two decisions. In recent years, the Court has decided several cases in which the justices have divided quite bitterly over this issue. Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito have consistently found ways to interpret Austin very narrowly, whereas Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter/Sotomayor have consistently followed Austin.
In Citizens United, the dispute finally came to a head, and the five "conservative" justices overruled Austin and held that corporations and labor unions have the same First Amendment rights as individuals. Thus, any restriction of their freedom to spend unlimited amounts in support of their favored candidates violates the Constitution.
So, what are the arguments on each side? Apart from the issue of precedent, the dissenters in Citizens United see the problem this way: (1) Think of a town hall meeting or a presidential debate in which the moderator proposed to sell debate time to the highest bidder. Thus, in this town hall meeting or debate, which would last two hours, the moderator would sell each 15-minute segment to the person willing to bid the most money for it. We would likely see this as a crazy system. That's no way to run a democracy. We want our debates to be more structured and fairer than that. Each side should have more or less equal time to makes its case. Congress, which enacted the legislation at issue in Citizen United, wanted to make political campaigns a bit more like presidential debates and town hall meetings. It wanted to ensure that the side with the most money doesn't automatically dominate the debate for no reason other than the fact that it has deeper pockets. The dissenters in Citizens United accepted Congress' judgment this is a compelling justification for restricting political expenditures.
(2) Moreover, they argue, this argument is especially appropriate with respect to corporations and labor unions. They are, after all, artificial entities created by the government for the purpose of enabling them to amass huge amounts of money in order to operate efficiently in the economic marketplace. But they were not created for the purpose of enabling them to amass huge amounts of money so they can overrun the political process. It is perfectly reasonable, the dissenters argue, for the government to limit the amount such organizations can spend to influence our democracy. Indeed, in other ways we don't treat corporations or labor unions as "people" - they have no constitutional right to hold political office or to vote, for example, so why should they have the same First Amendment speech rights as "real" people?
The five justices in the majority in Citizens United see the problem quite differently: (1) In their view, any restriction on the amount that individuals or organizations can spend in the political process represents a severe limitation on First Amendment rights. Even if the law is neutral with respect to the particular points of view expressed, it is still a profound limitation on individual liberty. Moreover, corporations and unions are just associations of individuals, and there is no good reason why associations of individuals shouldn't have the same First Amendment rights as the individuals themselves. Indeed, the NAACP and the New York Times have First Amendment rights, so why not General Motors and Bank of America?
(2) Moreover, they argue, any legislation that so directly shapes the political process must be highly suspect. One thing we know for sure about politicians is that they will not make laws that disadvantage them. Thus, we should not take this sort of legislation at face value. If one party controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, and it enacts campaign finance legislation, we can be sure that in subtle but important ways the legislation will be designed to promote the partisan political interests of that party. And even if one party doesn't control all these agencies of government, we can be sure that any legislation the government enacts will be designed to serve the interests of incumbents. Thus, not only is such legislation a serious limitation on First Amendment freedoms, but the courts should be highly suspicious of such laws, which are paradigmatic examples of the fox guarding the hen-house.
So, there you have it. My point in writing this is not to persuade, but to explain. My own view is that the dissenters have the better of the argument, particularly with respect to corporations and unions (though I would hold expenditure limitations on individuals unconstitutional). One of the interesting things about Citizens United is that the "conservative" justices, who claim to exercise judicial restraint, are reaching out in this case to assert a very aggressive interpretation of the First Amendment. In this sense, and in the context of many other highly controversial areas of constitutional law -- such as affirmative action and gun rights -- these justices do not live up to their billing that they merely call "balls and strikes." This is a very activist decision that will fundamentally transform American politics in the years to come.

Debt talk from Krugman

Krugman isn't always right (by any stretch of the imagination), but on the underlying themes, I'd put my money on him. This one care of 'me mum'.

In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

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This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.
Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!
And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.
But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.
But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.
It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.
Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.
And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.
Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.
So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 2, 2012, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Nobody Understands Debt.

A view of the GOP from an insider, or "why I stopped drinking the Cool-Aid"

In my most cynical and/or conspiracy minded moments, I have believed most if not all of these things. I'm not exactly comforted learning that I was largely correct... 

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944) 

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate.

I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in 2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.
Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:
 
1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.
And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says , "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
 
2. They worship at the altar of Mars.  While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation , war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than it receives back in local contracts.

And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs argument is ultimately specious.

Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.

The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.
 
3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.

Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.
The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War .

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.
Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock . And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett .

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

Footnotes:
[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts "model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby, which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.
[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president. Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen
[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.
[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years, I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book, "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred ," John Lukacs concludes that the left fears, the right hates.
[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming his kid "Rand."

http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

Why why matters...

"Existentialism started from the premise of meaninglessness, and then executed a brilliant judo move; it declared that precisely because humanity is deserted by God and values are not inscribed in the natural order of things, human beings are responsible for making their own meanings." Todd Gitlin, The Sixties; Years of Hope, Days of Rage

 I always love a good atheism discussion!

Good Minus God

By LOUISE M. ANTONY

I was heartened to learn recently that atheists are no longer the most reviled group in the United States: according to the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, we’ve been overtaken by the Tea Party .  But even as I was high-fiving my fellow apostates (“We’re number two!  We’re number two!”), I was wondering anew: why do so many people dislike atheists?
I gather that many people believe that atheism implies nihilism — that rejecting God means rejecting morality.  A person who denies God, they reason, must be, if not actively evil, at least indifferent to considerations of right and wrong.  After all, doesn’t the dictionary list “wicked” as a synonym for “godless?”  And isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?
Well, actually — no, it’s not.  (And for the record, Dostoevsky never said it was.)   Atheism does not entail that anything goes.

Admittedly, some atheists are nihilists.  (Unfortunately, they’re the ones who get the most press.)  But such atheists’ repudiation of morality stems more from an antecedent cynicism about ethics than from any philosophical view about the divine.  According to these nihilistic atheists, “morality” is just part of a fairy tale we tell each other in order to keep our innate, bestial selfishness (mostly) under control.  Belief in objective “oughts” and “ought nots,” they say, must fall away once we realize that there is no universal enforcer to dish out rewards and punishments in the afterlife.  We’re left with pure self-interest, more or less enlightened.

This is a Hobbesian view: in the state of nature “[t]he notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place.  Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice.”  But no atheist has to agree with this account of morality, and lots of us do not.  We “moralistic atheists” do not see right and wrong as artifacts of a divine protection racket.  Rather, we find moral value to be immanent in the natural world, arising from the vulnerabilities of sentient beings and from the capacities of rational beings to recognize and to respond to those vulnerabilities and capacities in others.

Leif Parsons

This view of the basis of morality is hardly incompatible with religious belief.  Indeed, anyone who believes that God made human beings in His image believes something like this — that there is a moral dimension of things, and that it is in our ability to apprehend it that we resemble the divine.  Accordingly, many theists, like many atheists, believe that moral value is inherent in morally valuable things.  Things don’t become morally valuable because God prefers them; God prefers them because they are morally valuable. At least this is what I was taught as a girl, growing up Catholic: that we could see that God was good because of the things He commands us to do.  If helping the poor were not a good thing on its own, it wouldn’t be much to God’s credit that He makes charity a duty.

It may surprise some people to learn that theists ever take this position, but it shouldn’t.  This position is not only consistent with belief in God, it is, I contend, a more pious position than its opposite.  It is only if morality is independent of God that we can make moral sense out of religious worship.  It is only if morality is independent of God that any person can have a moral basis for adhering to God’s commands.

Let me explain why.  First let’s take a cold hard look at the consequences of pinning morality to the existence of God.  Consider the following moral judgments — judgments that seem to me to be obviously true:

•  It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.
•  It is wrong to enslave people.
•  It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.
• Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required to try to stop it.

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists.  That seems to me to be a remarkable claim.  If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.?  There’d be nothing wrong with torture?  The pain of another human being would mean nothing?

Think now about our personal relations — how we love our parents, our children, our life partners, our friends.  To say that the moral worth of these individuals depends on the existence of God is to say that these people are, in themselves, worth nothing — that the concern we feel for their well being has no more ethical significance than the concern some people feel for their boats or their cars.  It is to say that the historical connections we value, the traits of character and personality that we love — all count for nothing in themselves.  Other people warrant our concern only because they are valued by someone else — in this case, God.  (Imagine telling a child: “You are not inherently lovable.  I love you only because I love your father, and it is my duty to love anything he loves.”)
What could make anyone think such things?  Ironically, I think the answer is: the same picture of morality that lies behind atheistic nihilism.  It’s the view that the only kind of “obligation” there could possibly be is the kind that is disciplined by promise of reward or threat of punishment.  Such a view cannot find or comprehend any value inherent in the nature of things, value that could warrant particular attitudes and behavior on the part of anyone who can apprehend it.  For someone who thinks that another being’s pain is not in itself a reason to give aid, or that the welfare of a loved one is not on its own enough to justify sacrifice, it is only the Divine Sovereign that stands between us and — as Hobbes put it — the war of “all against all.”

This will seem a harsh judgment on the many theists who subscribe to what is called Divine Command Theory — the view that what is morally good is constituted by what God commands.  Defenders of D.C.T. will say that their theory explains a variety of things about morality that non-theistic accounts of moral value cannot, and that it should be preferred for that reason.  For example, they will say that atheists cannot explain the objectivity of morality — how there could be moral truths that are independent of any human being’s attitudes, will or knowledge, and how moral truths could hold universally.  It is true that D.C.T. would explain these things.  If God exists, then He exists independently of human beings and their attitudes, and so His commands do, too.  If we didn’t invent God, then we didn’t invent His commands, and hence didn’t invent morality.  We can be ignorant of God’s will, and hence mistaken about what is morally good.  Because God is omnipresent, His commands apply to all people at all times and in all places.

That’s all fine.  It would follow from D.C.T. that moral facts are objective.  The problem is that it wouldn’t follow that they are moral.  Commands issued by a tyrant would have all the same features.  For D.C.T. to explain morality, it must also explain what makes God good.

The problem I’m pointing to is an ancient one, discussed by Plato.  In his dialogue “Euthyphro,” the eponymous character tries to explain his conception of piety to Socrates: “the pious acts,” Euthyphro says, are those which are loved by the gods.”  But Socrates finds this definition ambiguous, and asks Euthyphro: “are the pious acts pious because they are loved by the gods, or are the pious acts loved by the gods because they are pious?”

What’s the difference?  Well, if the first reading is correct, then it’s the gods’ loving those particular acts that makes them count as pious acts, that grounds their piousness.   “Pious,” on this alternative, is just shorthand for “something the gods love.”  Whatever the gods happen to love — bingo! — that’s pious.  If the gods change their preferences on a whim — and they did, if Homer knew his stuff — then the things that are pious change right along with them.  In contrast, on the second reading, pious acts are presumed to have a distinctive, substantive property in common, a property in virtue of which the gods love them, a property that explains why the gods love them.

Translated into contemporary terms, the question Socrates is asking is this: are morally good actions morally good simply in virtue of God’s favoring them?  Or does God favor them because they are — independently of His favoring them — morally good?  D.C.T. picks the first option; it says that it’s the mere fact that God favors them that makes morally good things morally good.

Theories that endorse the second option — let’s call any such theory a “Divine Independence Theory” (D.I.T.) — contend, on the contrary, that the goodness of an action is a feature that is independent of, and antecedent to God’s willing it.  God could have commanded either this action or its opposite, but in fact, He commands only the good one.

Both D.C.T. and D.I.T. entail a perfect correspondence between the class of actions God commands and the class of actions that are good (or rather, they do so on the assumption that God is perfectly benevolent).  The two theories differ, however, on what accounts for this congruence.  D.C.T. says that it is God’s command that explains why the good acts are “good” — it becomes true merely by definition that God commands “good” actions.  “Goodness,” on this view, becomes an empty honorific, with no independent content.  To say that God chooses the good is like saying that the Prime Meridian is at zero degrees longitude, or that in baseball, three strikes makes an out.  D.I.T., on the other hand, says that it is a substantive property of the acts — their goodness — that explains why God commanded them. Indeed, it says that God’s goodness consists in His choosing all and only the good.  D.I.T. presumes that we have an independent grasp of moral goodness, and that it is because of that that we can properly appreciate the goodness of God.

D.C.T. is arguably even more radical and bizarre than the Hobbesian nihilism I discussed earlier.  On the nihilistic view, there is no pretense that a sovereign’s power would generate moral obligation — the view is rather that “morality” is an illusion.  But D.C.T. insists both that there is such a thing as moral goodness, and that it is defined by what God commands. This makes for really appalling consequences, from an intuitive, moral point of view.  D.C.T. entails that anything at all could be “good” or “right” or “wrong.”  If God were to command you to eat your children, then it would be “right” to eat your children.  The consequences are also appalling from a religious point of view.  If all “moral” means is “commanded by God,” then we cannot have what we would otherwise have thought of as moral reasons for obeying Him.  We might have prudential reasons for doing so, self-interested reasons for doing so.  God is extremely powerful, and so can make us suffer if we disobey Him, but the same can be said of tyrants, and we have no moral obligation (speaking now in ordinary terms) to obey tyrants.  (We might even have a moral obligation to disobey tyrants.)  The same goes for worshipping God.  We might find it in our interest to flatter or placate such a powerful person, but there could be no way in which God was deserving of praise or tribute.

This is the sense in which I think that it is a more pious position to hold that morality is independent of the existence of God. If the term “good” is not just an empty epithet that we attach to the Creator, who or whatever that turns out to be, then it must be that the facts about what is good are independent of the other facts about God.  If “good” is to have normative force, it must be something that we can understand independently of what is commanded by a powerful omnipresent being.
So what about atheism?  What I think all this means is that the capacity to be moved by the moral dimension of things has nothing to do with one’s theological beliefs.  The most reliable allies in any moral struggle will be those who respond to the ethically significant aspects of life, whether or not they conceive these things in religious terms.  You do not lose morality by giving up God; neither do you necessarily find it by finding Him.

I want to close by conceding that there are things one loses in giving up God, and they are not insignificant.  Most importantly, you lose the guarantee of redemption.  Suppose that you do something morally terrible, something for which you cannot make amends, something, perhaps, for which no human being could ever be expected to forgive you.  I imagine that the promise made by many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief.  You cannot have that if you are an atheist.  In consequence, you must live your life, and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can have.
Some people think that if atheism were true, human choices would be insignificant.  I think just the opposite — they would become surpassingly important.

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Louise M. Antony teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes on a variety of philosophical topics, including knowledge gender, the mind and, most recently, the philosophy of religion. She is the editor of the 2007 book “Philosophers Without Gods,” a collection of essays by atheist philosophers.

Can you buy skepticism?

If your the Koch-founded/funded Americans for Prosperity with a spare 240 million, the answer is a resounding YES!

From the National Journal.

Heads in the Sand
As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

by Coral Davenport
Updated: December 2, 2011 | 10:37 a.m.
December 1, 2011 | 3:00 p.m.

Warning: “Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment,” reports the National Academy of Sciences.

Sen. John Barrasso is no stranger to science. The Wyoming Republican is an orthopedic surgeon who earned his medical degree from Georgetown University. His rigorous intellect won him Washingtonian magazine’s designation last year as the “brainiest senator,” based on an anonymous survey of Capitol Hill staffers.

Which is why Barrasso’s reaction when a reporter recently asked his views on climate change was so telling. On his way to the weekly Senate GOP luncheon in the Capitol building, Barrasso paused in an empty hallway to chat. When a reporter said, “Senator, can I ask you a question about climate change?” he fell silent and his eyes narrowed. “I’m busy,” he snapped, before turning sharply and striding away.

Two days later, the reporter tried again. Approached in the Capitol, Barrasso smiled and appeared poised to answer questions, inviting the reporter into an elevator with him. As the door slid shut, the reporter asked, “Do you believe that climate change is causing the Earth to warm?” A long silence ensued. The senator eventually let out a slow laugh and said, “This isn’t the time to have that conversation.” As soon as the elevator opened, he clapped his phone to his ear and walked briskly toward the Capitol subway.

It’s not surprising that Barrasso avoids talking about climate change. He’s smart and has a background in science, but he also represents the country’s top coal-mining state—and scientific studies show that coal pollution is one of the primary causes of climate change. Any policy to curb climate change would likely hurt Wyoming’s economy.

Democrats in the same position, such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, have long been open about this conundrum—the need to address the crisis that climate science says is coming while somehow saving the jobs that could be lost in the fossil-fuel industry. Coal-state Democrats don’t necessarily have a solution; plenty of them clam up when asked about controversial proposals such as cap-and-trade and pollution regulations. But it’s rare to find a Democrat who denies outright the overwhelming scientific consensus that carbon emissions from oil, coal, and gas—also known as greenhouse gases—are causing the world’s climate to warm.

That’s not the case for Republicans. Over the past year, GOP politicians have increasingly questioned or flatly denied the established science of climate change. As the presidential primaries heat up, the leading candidates have either denied the verdict of climate scientists or recanted their former views supporting climate policy. As the tea party grows in influence, and the fossil-fuel industry injects unprecedented levels of spending into the electoral system, challenging climate science has become, in some circles, as much of a conservative litmus test as opposing taxes. Conservatives such as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who notoriously called climate change a hoax, once were marginalized. Now Inhofe tells National Journal he feels that he’s “come in from the cold.”


ON THE TRAIL

In his first week of campaigning for president, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that climate change was a theory that “still has not been proven” and was driven in part by a “substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data” to secure research grants. In his book Fed Up! he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”

Mitt Romney, who as governor tasked the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Division with creating a policy to fight climate change, has now walked back his pronouncements that human activity causes global warming.

Newt Gingrich, who in 2009 recorded an ad with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling on Congress to take action on climate change, recently called that ad “the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.” Jon Huntsman, the one Republican presidential candidate who stands by views that climate change is real and caused by humans, is reaping support from about 1 percent of GOP primary voters.

Despite the rhetoric on the campaign trail, a quiet but significant number of prominent Republican politicians and strategists accept the science of climate change and fear that rejecting it could not only tar the party as “antiscience” but also drive away the independent voters who are key to winning general elections. “There’s a pretty good-sized chunk of the Republican caucus that believes that global warming is happening, and it’s caused at least in part by mankind,” said Mike McKenna, a strategist with close ties to the GOP’s leadership. “You can tell these guys are uncomfortable when you start to talk about science.”

As recently as the last presidential election, the debate in Republican circles was far different. John McCain’s 2008 campaign ads promised that as president, he would tackle climate change. Not only that, but McCain was a lead sponsor of the first major Senate cap-and-trade bill in 2003. In a 2008 interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, Sarah Palin asserted that climate change was affecting Alaska, and in the vice presidential debate she said she would support a cap on carbon emissions. In January 2008, then-Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who was head of the National Governors Association, recorded a radio ad with Democrat Janet Napolitano, then Arizona governor, urging Congress to act. “Come on, Congress: Let’s get moving.… Cap greenhouse-gas pollution now,” Pawlenty urged.

What changed? Not the scientific evidence. In fact, recent reports from the National Academy of Sciences show that the data and consensus on the principles of climate change are stronger than ever. The reports have concluded that increasing levels of carbon dioxide, produced primarily by burning coal and oil, are trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. A November scientific report by the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes those rising temperatures will, over the next century, bring an increase in the frequency and intensity of heat waves, heavy precipitation, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and rising sea levels.

In November, Richard Muller, a prominent physicist at the University of California (Berkeley) who was cited by climate skeptics after he questioned some of the data used in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, released the results of his two-year Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, a new study of global temperatures around the world. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Muller wrote, “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.… Global warming is real.”

Here’s what has changed for Republican politicians: The rise of the tea party, its influence in the Republican Party, its crusade against government regulations, and the influx into electoral politics of vast sums of money from energy companies and sympathetic interest groups.

Republicans have long had close financial ties to the fossil-fuel industry, of course. Between 1998 and 2010, the oil-and-gas industry gave 75 percent of its $284 million in political contributions to Republicans. But the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed unlimited corporate spending on campaign advertisements, opened up a whole new avenue for interest groups to influence campaigns by flooding the airwaves with ads that support a political candidate or position. In the 2010 elections alone, the top five conservative and pro-industry outside groups and political action committees—including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Karl Rove-backed PAC American Crossroads, which have close ties to fossil-fuel interests—spent a combined $105 million to support GOP candidates (compared with a combined $8 million that the top five environmental groups spent to back Democrats). Both sides could double those numbers in 2012.

Among the most influential of the new breed of so-called super PACs is the tea party group Americans for Prosperity, founded by David and Charles Koch, the principal owners of Koch Industries, a major U.S. oil conglomerate. As Koch Industries has lobbied aggressively against climate-change policy, Americans for Prosperity has spearheaded an all-fronts campaign using advertising, social media, and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who will ensure that the oil industry won’t have to worry about any new regulations.

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, says there’s no question that the influence of his group and others like it has been instrumental in the rise of Republican candidates who question or deny climate science. “If you look at where the situation was three years ago and where it is today, there’s been a dramatic turnaround. Most of these candidates have figured out that the science has become political,” he said. “We’ve made great headway. What it means for candidates on the Republican side is, if you … buy into green energy or you play footsie on this issue, you do so at your political peril. The vast majority of people who are involved in the [Republican] nominating process—the conventions and the primaries—are suspect of the science. And that’s our influence. Groups like Americans for Prosperity have done it.”


NO WAY OUT

What makes the climate-change problem so difficult for Republicans is that the menu of solutions boils down to an unpalatable handful. Nearly all economists say that the best way to solve the greenhouse-gas problem is with a tax. Put a tax on what you want to reduce—in this case, emissions caused by burning oil and coal—and consumers will use less of it. Politically, that idea has been a nonstarter.

Reagan administration economists came up with a mechanism to cut carbon emissions in a way that harnesses the free market: cap-and-trade. Cap the number of tons of carbon pollution that can be produced, and allow industry to buy and sell permits to pollute. Direct regulation is another way to achieve that goal: Government agencies simply dictating to businesses what they need to do to cut pollution. Most experts say that any global-warming solution will probably also have to include some government spending to promote the development of non-fossil-fuel forms of energy.

All three of these options are anathema to the tea party. So what’s a Republican who believes in climate science—but also believes in the tea party’s ability to influence elections—to do?

“I think that there is some genuine soul-searching going on,” said a GOP operative who, like most of the party’s staffers and strategists interviewed for this story, spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue. “If you look around at the environment, there’s nobody smart [saying], ‘No, there’s nothing going on.’ But the tea party is a political necessity.”

For much of the Republican Party, the current strategy on climate science is to, literally, run away from the question.


CHASING LAWMAKERS

In an effort to survey Republicans on climate change, National Journal reporters reached out to every GOP senator and representative. Over the course of several weeks, reporters either attempted to interview lawmakers in person, or called or e-mailed their offices.

Most, like Barrasso, rebuffed repeated inquiries. Some flatly refused to answer questions when approached in person, and their offices declined to respond to repeated phone calls and e-mail requests. “It’s not a conversation senators feel comfortable having,” a Republican staffer said.

Several aides initially said that their bosses would be happy to take part in interviews or answer written questions—only to follow up later with clipped refusals.

One GOP House staffer wrote to National Journal to ask if the responses could remain anonymous. Upon learning that the comments would be on the record, the aide said that her boss could not respond. “This issue is too gray and thorny for us to answer in the black-and-white terms you’ve laid out,” wrote the staffer—who agreed to be quoted only anonymously.

Here are the questions NJ asked the Republican members of Congress: Do you think climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer? How much, if any, of global climate change do you think is attributable to human activity? What is the government’s most appropriate response to the issue of climate change?

In the end, 65 GOP lawmakers—40 House members and 25 senators across the ideological spectrum agreed to respond.

Twenty of the 65 Republicans said they think climate change is causing the Earth to warm; 13 said that climate change isn’t causing the Earth to warm; and 21 said they didn’t know, the science isn’t conclusive, or they didn’t want to answer the question definitively. Nineteen said that human activities do contribute to climate change—but of those 19, only five said they believed a “significant amount” of climate change was due to human activity, while 14 said they believed human activity contributes “very little” to climate change. Five said they believed that climate change was not at all attributable to human activity.

The only lawmakers who seemed eager to respond to the questions were the full-throated climate-change skeptics. Inhofe, for example, gladly held forth in an interview off the Senate floor about what he views as the false premise of climate science. Later, when his aide told him the office had received a separate query by e-mail, he called a reporter back on her cell phone to be sure his opinion had fully registered.

Freshman Rep. Allen West of Florida, a leading voice in the House’s Tea Party Caucus, was also unequivocal: “I believe in climate change—winter, spring, summer, or fall,” he said. “Do you believe climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer?” he was asked. “No,” he responded firmly.

Among the offices that refused repeated requests to answer questions was House Speaker John Boehner’s. The speaker’s job is to maintain unity in a caucus constantly on the verge of fracturing and to also try to increase his party’s majority in 2012. His advisers fear that taking a clear position on climate change could crack the caucus in two and stop the cash flow from the biggest campaign money machines.

The problem is that Boehner already has taken a position on climate change. In a July 15, 2008, interview on CNN, he said, “I think that John McCain’s position is not really very different from most Republicans’. The fact is that we have had climate change. Clearly, humans have something to do with it.”

But in November 2010, after the tea party juggernaut swept Republicans into power in the House, Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor formulated a strategy to attack the Obama administration relentlessly on fossil-fuel and climate-change regulations but to keep silent on the issue of climate science. Some tea party Republicans, such as Texan Joe Barton, who is Inhofe’s prominent climate-skeptic counterpart in the House, had looked forward to holding hearings aimed at tearing down the established science. Boehner told Barton to lay off—out of fear, as one staffer put it, that such hearings would get the party branded as “flat-earthers.”

“The speaker’s office made a decision early on not to talk about the science,” said a Republican operative who works closely with House leadership and asked to speak anonymously in order to be candid. “The leadership guys said, ‘We’re not going to talk about it; we’re not going to hold hearings on it; we think the science argument’s a loser.’ ”


REVERSING COURSE

No one exemplifies Republicans’ difficulties on climate better than Fred Upton, the Michigander who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the powerful panel charged with writing (and repealing) laws regulating the oil and coal industry’s fossil-fuel emissions. Like his friend Boehner, Upton used to talk about the need to tackle climate change. But the chairman, who in his last campaign received $20,000 from Koch Industries, has had to awkwardly reposition himself to accommodate the new GOP order.

Upton once called climate change a “serious problem” on his website (a phrase he deleted after the 2010 elections), endorsed reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, and sponsored bipartisan legislation to promote the use of energy-efficient lightbulbs. All of that changed after the midterm elections, when he ran against Barton for the chairmanship of the powerful Energy panel. Barton, who likes to say he was “tea party before tea party was cool,” ran an aggressive campaign, challenging Upton’s conservative bona fides (the lightbulb legislation, in particular). Upton tacked hard to the right.

When pressed repeatedly on his views on climate change during an on-stage February interview with National Journal, Upton said he believes that the planet is warming—but not because of human actions. “If you look, the last year was the warmest year on record, the warmest decade on record. I accept that. I do not say that it’s man-made,” Upton said. He has since introduced legislation with Inhofe to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse pollution threatens public health—a move that surprised some of his constituents.

“I’ve heard Fred Upton say he accepts the science of climate change, at a constituent breakfast two years ago,” said Knute Nadelhoffer, director of the University of Michigan’s Biological Station. “Well, now he appears to be ignoring it or agreeing with the deniers. We want to know why. That’s not a responsible way to craft policy.… We have clear patterns of changing climate in the Great Lakes region—more big storms in spring, more floods that are compromising our coastal cities, and more heat waves and droughts in the summer.”

House Democrats, hoping to spotlight such inconsistencies, insisted that Upton’s committee hold a hearing on climate science. Eventually, in March, he did—but counseled by GOP leadership, almost no Republican members showed up.

More recently, a reporter caught up with Upton in the Speaker’s Lobby off the House floor and asked his views on how much human activity may contribute to climate change. The ever-friendly Upton smiled and said, “I’m not going to go there, thanks,” and headed toward the House floor, where reporters can’t follow.


ISSA AND HALL

Less cheerful than Upton was Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the brash chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He has helped spearhead House Republicans’ attacks on EPA’s new climate-change and coal regulations, bashing them with the “job-killing” stigma. Asked if he believed that climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer, Issa responded, “You mean, the global cooling that’s been going on for the last 10 years, according to scientists? The science has just said we’ve had we’ve had 10 years of no warming.”

In fact, last year NASA reported that January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record since the 1880s. The reporter noted the number of such studies—and asked Issa to clarify his answer. “Are you saying, no, you don’t think climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer?”

Issa snapped back angrily, “Do you realize how silly your question is? Your question, if you were going to ask it, is, ‘Do you think increased CO2 is causing the Earth to become warmer?’ I think it may contribute—I have no question that it may be.” He glared at the reporter and said angrily, “Next time, learn to ask your questions,” turned on his heel, and headed back to the House floor.

One senior House Republican who appears comfortable with his positions on climate science is Texan Ralph Hall, chairman of the House Science Committee. Asked if climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer, the lawmaker charged with shaping national science policy responded, “I don’t think it’s the cause. I don’t think we can control what God controls.” Hall said that on the issue of climate science, he is “pretty close” to the stance of his fellow Texan, Rick Perry—believing that climate science may be a conspiracy theory put forth by scientists who are working in concert to receive funding for research. A reporter pointed out that last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a survey concluding that 97 percent of climate-science researchers are in consensus that human activities have led to global warming. “And they each get $5,000 for every report like that they give out,” Hall scoffed. He added, “I don’t have any proof of that. But I don’t believe ’em.”


GOP DISSENTERS

Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., who sits on the House Science Committee, has a special relationship with scientists—they’re her constituents. Her district includes the Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory, which researches high-energy physics and is developing technology that could enable electric cars to travel twice their current distance before recharging. Biggert worries that candidates like Perry will get the party branded as antiscience. “We seem to be moving ahead in a vein that’s not the scientific way,” she said of Republicans. “And that’s a shame, because there are a lot of us that really believe in the sciences and look to scientists. It’s a concern.”

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., a moderate elder statesman who is deeply respected among his party’s old guard, has long been on the record with his worries about the effects of climate change. He signed up his 604-acre farm to participate in the (now defunct) volunteer Chicago Climate Exchange cap-and-trade program, and he has not changed his views about climate science—even though he is expected to be a tea party target in 2012. Lugar calls the Washington climate-change debate “very ill-informed.”

In part, he blames the scientific community for failing to translate and communicate its findings clearly to policymakers in language they can understand. The complexity and nuance is surely ill-suited to the sound-bite simplicity of the Beltway debate. But Lugar says that the only way science can stand up for itself is by entering the fray—loudly, clearly, and simply.

“Many would argue that a predominant number of scientists have said this or that—but whatever they’ve said has not come clearly through to laypersons or members of Congress.… I have gone to conferences for several years and have pled for indicators … that would make a difference in terms of my being able to argue, “ he said. “This may be impractical, but in Times Square, there’s an indicator of how the public debt is rising. We’re going to have to have, for there to be a good public discussion about this, some metric which is understandable.”

But Lugar, like every other lawmaker in Washington, knows full well that Congress has no chance of taking up climate-change legislation any time in the near future. For now, the only policy action that might be possible is battening down the hatches against the floods and droughts that scientists say are on their way—something Lugar saw firsthand when his state suffered devastating flooding earlier this year. “In terms of public policy, we’ll have to deal with more violent storms in the planning of governance for cities that abut rivers and oceans. Whether you buy climate change or not, as a public servant you had better be prepared for many more climate disasters.”


OVERWHELMING SCIENCE

The data showing that combustion of fossil fuels produces emissions that warm the Earth’s atmosphere are ample and historic, and have been rigorously reviewed.

Over the past 18 years, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has produced more than 40 scientific reports and studies on climate change. The most recent, released in May, concludes, “Climate change is occurring, is very likely caused by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems. Each additional ton of greenhouse gases emitted commits us to further change and greater risks…. The environmental, economic, and humanitarian risks of climate change indicate a pressing need for substantial action to limit the magnitude of climate change and to prepare to adapt to its impacts.”

The world’s largest general-scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has published this official statement: “The scientific evidence is clear: Global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society.… The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse-gas emissions is now.”

The world’s major national scientific institutes, including the official academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, and the United Kingdom have independently published concurring conclusions.

So have the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, the American Society of Agronomy, the American Society for Microbiology, the Crop Science Society of America, the Geological Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, and the World Health Organization—among many other scientific bodies.

In June 2010, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that 97 percent of climate scientists agree on the tenets of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, a level of consensus that the journal called “striking,” given the uncertainty often present in scientific research.

No scientific body of national or international standing has offered a dissenting opinion.

“It’s a very, very strong consensus,” says Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council. The level of certainty within the scientific community that burning fossil fuels warms the global atmosphere is comparable, he said, to the level of scientific certainty that vaccines prevent diseases such as measles and polio.

Perry and some other skeptics say that the scientific consensus on climate change is a fraud perpetrated by scientists working in concert—and that climate scientists falsely manipulate evidence to show that climate change is taking place so they can secure funding or prominence. Scientists say that the rigors of the independent peer-review process effectively make the former claim impossible—and that the latter claim simply doesn’t make sense, because what brings the greatest fame and fortune in science is successfully disproving accepted theories.

“The whole system works on evidence, repeatability, doing the same calculations, testing rigorously to get the same result,” Cicerone says. “If you’re working on a topic the public is interested in, there are more and more people watching what you’re doing. You couldn’t perpetrate a fraud if you wanted to.”

Some skeptics also point to the “climate-gate” controversy as evidence that that the body of climate science, or the peer-review process, has been undermined.

In November 2009, just before a major U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, aimed at forging a world treaty to cut fossil-fuel emissions, hackers breached the server of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and released thousands of e-mail exchanges between the university’s climate scientists. A small number of those messages contained language that Republican politicians, including Inhofe and Palin, said indicated that the scientists were attempting to falsify climate data. Every independent review of the e-mails concluded otherwise.

Despite the exoneration, the e-mail release succeeded in changing the public debate in the U.S., where GOP lawmakers continue to point to the East Anglia e-mails as evidence that climate science is not settled—and as a reason not to act on climate change. Last month, just a week before this year’s U.N. climate summit in Durban, South Africa, hackers released a second batch of East Anglia e-mails, culled from the original batch released in 2009, evidently with the aim of once again reigniting climate-science skepticism. Once again, the scientific community said that the e-mails do not disprove the core underpinnings of climate science—but they do give new fuel to climate skeptics.

“The science at East Anglia was fine,” Cicerone says. “But I think [the East Anglia scientists] were just angry. They were too poorly equipped, scruffy, and informal an outfit to show everyone all their data all the time. On the scientific consensus, there’s no impact at all—although on public opinion there was an impact.”


SPEAKING OUT

Some senior Republicans who have left the battlefield of electoral politics are starting to go vocal with their worries about their party’s stance on climate change—and to take action to stave off its electoral consequences. They fear, in the words of one GOP operative, “that the party is going to drive itself off a cliff with this.”

Conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior adviser on McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign who now heads the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, is working with the climate-policy advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet. The New Hampshire-based group has flown Holtz-Eakin to the state several times over the past few months to talk to voters in small living-room meetings about the economic threats of climate change—and the economic benefits of addressing the problem.

Another prominent Republican, John Warner, the former senator from Virginia and secretary of the Navy, is a senior adviser to the Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate, which focuses on the need to develop alternative energy to combat climate change and lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Warner, who cosponsored a major cap-and-trade bill when he was in the Senate, now travels the country, including stops at military bases, calling attention to the national-security concerns of climate change and fossil-fuel dependence.

Working with Warner on the Pew climate-change project is George Shultz, President Reagan’s secretary of State and an adviser to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Last year, Shultz, who is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University, cochaired the “No on Prop. 23” campaign in California, which successfully defended the state’s pioneering cap-and-trade law against an oil industry-led effort to overturn it.

“My own opinion is that this problem is very real,” Shultz told National Journal. “I recognize there are a lot of people pooh-poohing it. Whether they like the science or not, there’s a huge problem coming at us. There’s a huge melt coming in the Arctic regions. There’s melting taking place.” Of Perry and other Republicans who deny climate science, Shultz said, “They’re entitled to their opinion, but they’re not entitled to the facts.”

Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who lost his primary race last year in part because he acknowledged climate change, gives speeches and lectures across the country about the need for conservatives to do likewise and begin working on solutions to the problem. Otherwise, the Republican Party will be labeled antiscience, he warns. Inglis takes his message directly to conservative strongholds such as Federalist clubs and meetings of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Being branded as antiscience is not a good future for us,” Inglis told National Journal. “How can we say to young people, we’re dismissing science? That’s not a good place for our party to be, and it’s not historically where we’ve been. There are conservative voices that will hopefully show the way back to conservatism and away from a populist rejection of science.”

On November 8, William Reilly, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush, blasted his party’s stance on science in a widely reported speech. “For some of the most prominent leaders of the Republican Party, science has left the building,” he said. “Science doesn’t feature prominently in these debates. Republicans once were the party of science where environmental policy was concerned,” Reilly contended. Of House Republicans’ recent unanimous vote to overturn EPA’s scientific finding that climate change poses a public health threat, he said, “There was no explanation justifying a position at odds with the findings of 11 National Academies of Science, including our own.”

Another longtime GOP ally, Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, is also disturbed by the party’s shift toward science denial. Anderson, who is Tim Pawlenty’s pastor and worked with the former Minnesota governor on his state climate-change initiatives, in 2006 joined with other prominent evangelicals in sending a letter to President George W. Bush arguing that no legitimate scientific debate remained on the merits of climate science and that evangelicals had a moral obligation to solve a problem that threatens the world’s most vulnerable people.

“Most evangelicals in other countries believe that there is climate change and that we need to do something. It seems to be an American position to deny that,” Anderson told National Journal. “It’s curious to me that there are people who have taken strong positions and then changed them. Many of the candidates were expressing concern four or five years ago. Whenever there are sea changes on particular issues and many get on board, you wonder what changed the political or cultural climate.”


POLITICAL CALCULATIONS

So, will climate-science skepticism help or hurt the Republican Party in the long run? It’s clear that GOP candidates who want to win the backing of the conservative base and the financial support of tea party PACs believe that denying climate science will help them win primary races—and polls show that they are probably correct.

In a Pew survey last spring, 75 percent of staunch conservatives, 63 percent of libertarians, and 55 percent of so-called Main Street Republicans said there was no solid evidence of global warming. Those views are far out of step, however, with those of the general public: Overall, Pew found, 59 percent of adults say there is solid evidence that the Earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades. GOP candidates’ climate-science skepticism could win primaries but lose general elections.

An August poll conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that 77 percent of respondents would vote for a candidate who said he or she believed that climate change was happening and caused by fossil fuels; only 48 percent said they would vote for a candidate who said that science hasn’t shown that humans are changing the climate. Perhaps most notably for the many Republicans who are desperately trying to avoid being pinned down on climate change, 65 percent said they would vote for a candidate who was silent on the issue.

In the long term, Reilly and other voices within the GOP fear that the party’s inevitable reckoning with science may come too late. “Somehow, we’re operating on two levels of reality,” he said. “One is ideological reality, which seems to work for some ideologues. But there is also the scientific reality. It was Republicans who traditionally have pushed for more science to underpin regulations. Science has suffered most severely in the current Republican Party. The ideologues will deny it right up to a point where there’s … a crisis—and then they won’t anymore.”

Olga Belogolova, Kevin Brennan, Julia Edwards, Amy Harder, Sarah Mimms, Stephanie Palla, Christopher Peleo-Lazar, Dan Roem, Hana Rouse, Julie Sobel, Kate Stonehill, Sean Sullivan, and Matt Vasilogambros contributed