MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science

When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength

Source: NBER

With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science.

OK, that’s an exaggeration — but not that much of an exaggeration. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal calls for a gigantic increase in military spending combined with severe cuts to social programs. But as the chart above shows, it also calls for debilitating reductions in research funding.

Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved. Here, for example, is the number of new grants approved by the National Science Foundation:

Source: Nature

Large numbers of existing grants have also been frozen or terminated, especially in the study of infectious diseases.

Add to this a sharp drop in visas issued to foreign students, who often play a direct role in research and who help support academic departments that do research:

Put all of this together, and much U.S. scientific research is set to come to a screeching halt — not a few years from now, but over the course of the next year or two.

This new assault on U.S. science is taking place at a time when the role of American science in the world has already been greatly eroded. The chart below, based on research recently reported by the National Bureau of Economic Research, measures national strength in science by the share of publications in highly ranked journals. In the 1990s the United States had more such publications than the rest of the world combined. Since then we’ve dropped into third place — well behind China and slightly below the European Union. And this was before the Trump administration’s attack on science had time to take its full effect.

Source

Some erosion in U.S. scientific preeminence was inevitable given China’s growing sophistication and wealth. But we’ve also fallen behind Europe, even though everyone says that Europe is lagging economically and technologically. Claims about Europe’s underperformance are, in fact, dubious if one looks hard at the data. But it’s still striking to see America lagging.

What’s going on? There are presumably multiple factors behind America’s scientific lag. But even before Trump II the growing hostility of the U.S. right to science surely had some negative effect. And since the rise of MAGA G.O.P. attitudes toward science in general have become overwhelmingly hostile. This is true even for the Republican rank and file:

And while I haven’t been able to find good survey data, it’s obvious that the anti-science turn has been even more pronounced — and began earlier — among the Republican political elite. Chris Mooney published The Republican War on Science in 2005, and even then was describing a longstanding trend.

Why have Republicans turned so anti-science? Part of the answer is that they believe that scientists don’t support them. And they’re right! A study of who scientists give money to shows that only a small percentage gave money to Republicans even 20 years ago, and that almost none of them donate to Republicans now:

Social scientists have always been strongly pro-Democratic, while there used to be a significant number of physical, “hard” scientists supporting the GOP. But these days physicists are almost as uniformly Democratic, or at least non-Republican, as sociologists.

Why are there almost no Republican scientists? It’s not a mystery. GOP political orthodoxy includes positions that are at odds with the scientific consensus on multiple issues, ranging from the validity of the theory of evolution, to the reality of climate change, to the efficacy and safety of vaccines. In each case the scientific consensus is solidly grounded in evidence. But even before the rise of MAGA the U.S. right was increasingly hostile to evidence-based policymaking — especially, of course, where the evidence is unfavorable to fossil fuel interests or quack medicine, both financial mainstays of right-wing politics.

So scientists don’t support Republicans, and the feeling is mutual. Today’s Republican Party doesn’t like science or scientists. It doesn’t like having its preconceived views challenged by appeals to evidence. It knows that very few scientists are on its side electorally. In general, it sees scientific research as a threat to its grasp on political power.

Add in MAGA’s combination of rabid anti-intellectualism and allergy to any hint of criticism, and one has the makings of a drastic anti-science turn in policy. “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto.

And as I said, we aren’t talking about something that will happen over the course of multiple years: The U.S. scientific enterprise is threatened with severe damage, even collapse, over just the next year.

There are many reasons to find this prospect horrifying: Think of all the beneficial advances, affecting almost every part of life, that won’t happen because U.S. science — still crucial to the world — has been eviscerated.

But think, also, of America’s international standing. Can a nation that has forfeited its role as a leader, or even a contender, in global science, still be a Great Power?

No.

MUSICAL CODA