Dana Blankenhorn

The Enemy Within

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 8 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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We tend to think of politics in two dimensions -- left and right.

The Nixon Thesis of Conflict has accustomed us to this. Democrats accommodated themselves to it first through triangulation, the Clinton "Third Way," and later through confrontation, the Dean Netroots.

The President's Thesis is different. I have called it the Obama Thesis of Consensus. What I have learned recently is this thesis adds a third dimension to our politics, one that most have as much trouble seeing as all of us do the dimension of time.

Agreeability.

The right's Achilles Heel

Science.

Science is not a belief system. It is a process, a method. Just like democracy is a process, and markets are a process. (To the right, vaccine scientist Paul Offit.)

No one believes in what scientists say. Even scientists don't. They accept what scientists say, when it is experimentally valid, because it answers good questions, because it can be engineered into things of use.

Over the last decades the political right in this country has forged a dangerous alliance with idiots who reject science, who call it a "belief" system and thus subject to political process.

It's not. Science has nothing to do with politics. Sure, scientists engage in little political games with one another. Good science is held down by authority figures all the time. Good scientists have their work questioned constantly. But in the end, science goes with what works.

Journalists have gone in for this game, because it's an easy "he said, she said" story. This is an incredibly dangerous stance to take.