If Science Doesn’t Give Us Truth, What Does?

Immediately on writing the title, I feel the need to equivocate. 

• Well, yes, occasionally science misinterprets the data … but it quickly catches itself.
• Well, no, science can’t prove anything; it’s all theory … that’s the nature of science. 
• Well, yes, some scientists are in the pay of big corporations … but it’s a minority and they are concentrated in a few industries, like pharmaceuticals, and their conclusions are still subject to peer-review.

The mere fact of my defensiveness around science tells us something scary about the decline of our country.  Any democracy requires its citizens to accept basic, well-known facts, especially those that impact governance.  If we can’t depend on science to set the basic boundaries of truth, what can we depend on?

And the answer at this time is, “Nothing.  Within today’s American culture there is no standard for truth.”

It’s not unusual for politicians to deny the inconvenient truths of science.  The most obvious and most dangerous example is an entire political party that denies the fact of human-induced climate change.  Another is that politicians still talk about evolution as an “unproven theory” for fear of offending their base.  And politicians still claim that vaccinations can cause autism or other serious illness despite overwhelming evidence against it.

But President Trump has taken science denial to a whole new level.  Most notoriously, he has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Accord, leaving us as the only UN member not signed on.  And that’s not all:

• The Administration has rolled back access to birth control, challenging the scientific consensus that birth control leads to a lower rate of unwanted pregnancies, to fewer teen pregnancies, and no increase in sexual activity among teens.
• Trump’s administration stopped requesting scientific evidence on methane emission from the oil and gas industry and suppressed a scientific report from inside one of his own agencies that was to be delivered to Congress.
• The Department of Treasury removed from their website an economic analysis that provided evidence that a corporate tax cut would not benefit workers more than owners of capital.

President Trump has gone out of his way to appoint as agency administrators precisely the people who’ve previously attacked those agencies for following scientific consensus.  For example, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Scott Pruitt described himself – when serving as Oklahoma’s Attorney General and suing the EPA fourteen times – as the “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” 

As administrator of the agency, he removed from the EPA website critical scientific data about climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and arctic sea loss; in fact, he later eliminated the entire climate change section.  Pruitt also announced that, despite staff recommendations, he would not ban a pesticide that poses a clear risk to children, farm workers, and rural drinking water users.

In an unprecedented move Pruitt has prohibited all scientists who receive grant money from the EPA from serving on its science advisory board, thus barring the most qualified scientists in the country from the board.  While the agency touted this as a way to decrease conflicts of interest, Pruitt has not disqualified any scientists funded by industries the agency is tasked with regulating.   

Another Presidential nomination flying in the face of scientific consensus is that of former Texas governor Rick Perry to head the US Department of Energy.  Perry had previously called for abolishing the agency, which is responsible, among other things, for steering energy policy as it affects the climate.  Just this month, Perry said natural causes are likely the main driver of climate change.

And yet another example: Trump appointed Sam Clovis, a former talk show host and political science professor, as the chief scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  The 2008 farm bill states that the person filling the post be chosen “from among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics.”  Clovis is not a scientist at all, much less distinguished.  After a political uproar, Clovis resigned the position, but the President had already made his opinions clear.

Perhaps most compelling (but not surprising), the President has yet to fill the post of Presidential Science Advisor, which has now remained vacant far longer than in any other administration in the last forty-five years.

The practical consequences of each these particular actions are bad enough.  But perhaps more harmful to our polarized democracy is that the President is encouraging an atmosphere in which science is automatically suspect and has no more claim to truth than a neighbor’s anecdote or a random page on the Internet.  This leaves us with no standard for truth, so meaningful political debate becomes impossible and governing is left to whim.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said: “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”  Apparently, he was naïve.

A president who knowingly encourages such ideas and behavior makes even informed debate a relic of a lost past. 

And American democracy thereby loses one more toehold.

So Far, Democracy's Doing Pretty Well

I’ve been writing this blog to highlight the danger that President Trump presents to our democracy.  While there’s been plenty of bad news, there's good news, too: We have a strong democracy.  

I’ve taken much of the following from a recent opinion piece by Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University.  He argues that the structures of our democracy are holding up pretty well, despite Trump’s demagoguery.  

As I’ve written before, our constitutional system contains a series of important checks and balances that keeps any branch of government from overwhelming the others. 

1. “Federalism puts important legal constraints on what the federal government can impose on the states.
2. “The Bill of Rights puts important legal constraints on what any level of government can do to the American people.”
3. On top of that, the government bureaucracy can frustrate even the president who presides over it.

For example, Congress has several times countered the President by failing to repeal Obamacare, refusing to eliminate the filibuster, refusing to ease sanctions on Russia, and insisting on continuing the congressional investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.

The courts have kept the President from some of his most egregious policies, significantly restricting the Muslim travel ban, striking down the attempted transgender ban in the military, and prohibiting the President from withholding federal funds to “sanctuary cities.”

Even the investigators and prosecutors who technically serve under Trump have largely ignored him, as have military judges and juries.  His own agencies have sometimes rebelled.  The Federal Communications Commission, for instance, didn’t even consider Trump’s threat to shut down broadcast media who criticized him … not only because of First Amendment rights but also because the FCC has no legal authority to do so.

The President did succeed in firing FBI director James Comey, but that backfired when Comey’s deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, appointed a special prosecutor, Robert Mueller.  Trump did appoint outspoken supporter, Senator Jeff Sessions, to be Attorney General, but he can’t even get Sessions to do what he wants.  Just this week, Trump’s unprecedented attempt to get the Department of Justice to investigate his former opponent Hillary Clinton has caused an uproar in the department.  The recent elections—not only the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey but also local campaigns across the country—have sent a strong message to Republicans everywhere.

I don’t mean to downplay the very real challenge to our democratic institutions.  Trump’s successes in changing Obama-era regulations have been pernicious:

1. For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency has rescinded important environmental regulations. 
2. In finance, brokers are no longer legally required to have their clients’ best interest at heart.
3. Universities no longer have to pay attention to federal guidelines on investigating sexual assault.
4. Regulations allowing students some debt relief have been rolled back.

Nevertheless, the good news is that even under this president, democracy is doing pretty well.  The bad news is that he’s only nine months in and there are still three years, two months, and four days to go.

Attacks on the Judiciary

“The decision on Sergeant Bergdahl is a complete and total disgrace to our Country and to our Military,” tweeted President Trump immediately after a military court ruled that Bowe Bergdahl would not receive a prison sentence for desertion.

 In June of 2009 Bergdahl walked off his military base in Afghanistan.  Twenty-four hours later, the Taliban picked him up and held him for five years, during which time he was caged and tortured.  The military tried to rescue him at least once, and a soldier was seriously wounded in the unsuccessful attempt.  Sergeant Bergdahl was ultimately tried and convicted in a military court.  He was dishonorably discharged but received no prison time.  Trump’s tweet was in response to the military ruling. 

Whatever one’s opinion of the court’s ruling, it’s important to focus on the President’s tweet and his later words also condemning the decision.  In the American constitutional system, separation of powers (judicial, legislative, and executive [presidential]) provides an important structure for keeping one branch of government from becoming too powerful.  As I pointed out in my September 24, 2017 post, Toward a Constitutional Crisis, this separation is a bedrock of our democracy.

While not technically an attempt to interfere with the judiciary, Trump’s tweeted critique of the Bergdahl decision is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the judiciary and the structure of our democracy. 

This is not, of course, his first attack on the judiciary.  During Trump’s campaign, Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University, made a ruling favoring the plaintiffs.  Trump tweeted that the judge was a “hater.”  Although Curiel was born in Indiana, Trump called him a “Mexican,” whose heritage meant he could not impartially oversee the case. 

After a another federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order withholding funds from “sanctuary cities,” Trump tweeted that the ruling “undermines faith in our legal system and raises serious questions about circuit shopping,” and he called the decision “egregious overreach by a single, unelected district judge.”  He had similar criticisms against several judges in the decisions against his attempted Muslim immigration bans.

It’s easy enough to think that these tweets are “just words” and, since the President says a lot of outrageous things, we shouldn’t dwell on his outrageous speech.  But much of the power of the presidency lies in the words he speaks.  We call that power the “bully pulpit,” and, especially in a polarized country that so little respects the media, what the president says has an out-sized impact, particularly on his followers. 

It’s also been easy to say that the President doesn’t understand the power of his words.  Almost a year after his inauguration, however, he has no such excuse.  His continual critique of the judiciary is part of the larger attempt to further weaken our trust in government as I described in this previous post. 
We take our democracy for granted, but democracy is fragile.  It depends completely on our faith in it.  Mistrust will destroy this precious gift.