Climate Change is Real and the Welfare State is Crippling the US Economy

“Support the EPA and 2nd Amendment rights”. “I am pro-science and pro-life”. “Climate change is real, and the welfare state is crippling the US economy”.

These are all simple and non-contradictory statements. They were also, as could be guessed, not the sentiments on display during last week’s March for Science.

A few examples of what we got instead were “Chemistry Made Trump’s Spray Tan”, “More Newton Less Putin”, and signs with an image of planet Earth which stated “I’m with Her”.

On a day that was ostensibly meant to celebrate deductive reasoning, you would think the participants might have been able to look around and recognize why it is that people feel scientists skew to the political left. But, of course, they didn’t. It probably didn’t even occur to them.

The perception that scientists are liberals who think Republicans are stupid is rooted in the fact that scientists are liberals who think Republicans are stupid. For any who don’t think this way, their ignorance of how public relations works is just about as bad. Saturday’s march did virtually nothing other than to demonstrate this reality. And that’s a shame, because it very easily could have.

Science is a dry, evidence-based discipline. It is largely staffed by reclusive and awkward loners with an aptitude for data analysis and an allergy to public speaking. There is no reason why it ought to have been politicized, but politicized it has been. The small subset of members in scientific community who are attracted to the spotlight have managed to take a neutral subject and paint it a very bright shade of blue.

There are any number of examples of prominent scientists who double as darlings of the left. Carl Sagan, the creator of the original Cosmos series, was one. These days we have big brains such as Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson fitting the bill.

This should not be surprising on some issues. Scientists are more secular by nature, and tend to go around telling everyone that the Bible is a fairy tale and anyone who isn’t an atheist is an idiot. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead member of the team that created the first nuclear bomb, became a pacifist in large part because he understood the levels of destruction humanity had become capable of inflicting on itself.

Some of these positions may just be occupational hazards, but not every issue on the Democratic platform falls into this category. And if scientists are interested in appealing to anyone other than the left, they ought to start recognizing this.

Surely there are some scientists who are gun owners. Quite a few would probably prefer to see lower taxes, and it’s a good bet that a lot of them have ethical qualms about abortion. Why aren’t these people coming out and saying so? It would go a long way towards mitigating the belief that they can all be written off as out-of-touch academics pushing a liberal agenda.

Even the comparatively low-hanging fruit of advocating against actual scientific errors on the Democratic side would be a step in the right direction. The liberal terror of GMOs and, in some circles, vaccinations, is a based in a comical level of ignorance. Protests against this type of nonsense would have made Saturday’s march a less polarized affair. But then anyone at that event who was interested in proclaiming that vaccines don’t cause autism would have been going very much against the stream, and likely decided it was better to just stay mum.

If a respectable fraction of attendees at the March for Science had shown up with signs that showed they were both scientists and conservatives, then the march might have been worth something. As it happened, the march was worth zero. Zilch. Bupkis. In fact, it probably hurt the cause because it just came off as more leftist grandstanding.

Science may not be political in nature, but the policy decisions that are based on scientists’ conclusions most certainly are. Conservatives will never be on the side of scientists if they think that no one from the scientific camp is on theirs.

So the next time that people feel compelled to support science in a meaningful way, here’s a script that would actually work: “The minimum wage is a job killer, borders ought to be enforced, and unchecked carbon emissions present a clear and present danger to the security of the United States – I don’t give a damn about the polar bears.”