The Republican Brain

by is Mooney

  And there are many other worthy ways to try to save the world.

  And that, in miniature, helps explain why the left doesn’t cling to misinformation in the way that the right does. Far too many liberals simply don’t need to. They’re flexible: They can move on to other concerns, and they can adjust their arguments in the old areas of concern. Meanwhile, even the most ideological and emotional among them remain allied with scientists, who just aren’t going to put up with any nonsense in their fields of expertise. It is hard, psychologically, for liberals to buck what scientists say, and to withstand the intellectual beating that is sure to follow if they do.

  That is not to say that on such issues, particular individuals or organizations on the left never misstate science or facts, or make wrong claims, or cling to them, for emotional and motivated reasons. This does indeed happen. And it is happening right now on fracking.

  But when this occurs, scientists, journalists, bloggers, and liberal political elites invariably strike back, keeping us honest, defending scientific accuracy and the weight of the evidence. For these folks, it isn’t about obedience, or group solidarity, or sticking up for those on your side of the aisle—it’s about getting it right, dammit. We don’t have Ronald Reagan’s “Eleventh Commandment”: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. We will tear those on our own side to bits if they’re wrong.

  In this, whether we know it or not, we fractious liberals and scientists are also acting on behalf of the core values to which we are deeply and emotionally attached—in this case, the Enlightenment belief that if you can’t get the facts right, you can’t solve the problem and make the world better. And in doing so, we’re satisfying our own psychological needs, which often include the need for cognition and the need for accuracy, as well as the need to distinguish oneself from others and stand out, to be unique rather than part of the herd (a characteristic of the Open personality).

  And how do you do that? Often, it means criticizing one’s own peers, taking them to task.

  On the left, then, you certainly do encounter some who attack science and the facts. But you also see them devastatingly rebutted by their own presumed allies—especially scientists and other academic experts, but also liberal journalists, and science journalists. That makes it very hard for the political mainstreaming of denial and factual intransigence to occur.

  Fracking isn’t the only issue where we see this pattern. Another such case is nuclear power, where the left has long been accused of being dogmatically anti-science, even though many scientists and liberal policymakers today, including President Obama, are pretty solidly pro-nuclear. That’s because they realize that while the risks certainly aren’t nonexistent, in the broader scheme of things they’re not all that terrible, either. When all the information gets integrated together in their heads, liberals and scientists often wind up being nuclear power supporters—especially if they are more mathematically and scientifically attuned.

  Yet another such issue is vaccination, where liberals and celebrities who overstated the science—like Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—have been absolutely pilloried by scientists, science journalists, science bloggers, and now just liberals in general. In this last case, precisely because anti-vaccine claims are so incredibly weak, and also because the greater harm to children and society comes not from vaccines but from the failure to use them to protect against deadly diseases, we’re now at the point where these claims are anathema to any thinker who wants to be taken seriously—much like claims that humans don’t cause global warming. Childhood vaccines do not cause autism. And while some highly emotional parent autism activists refuse to give up on this claim—and hotbeds of Internet denial and wagon-circling around the issue remain—the notion that they do has, at this point, been all but vanquished from the realm of polite discourse.

  I won’t spend as long on the nuclear and vaccine case studies as I did on fracking—in part because they’re simpler to explain. But let’s dive in.

  Even more than fracking, nuclear power is scary. The alleged risk is invisible and one you simply can’t protect yourself against: ionizing radiation, sometimes traveling over very long distances. It can pose a risk of cancer later in life, even though you’ll probably never even know you were exposed to it.

  Nuclear power is also another corporate story—private utility companies like Exelon and Entergy reap large profits off it—which makes the egalitarian-communitarian left inherently distrustful. In two separate ways, then, nuclear power pushes liberal buttons.

  No wonder there is a long history of left-wing anti-nuclear activism, going back to the very early days of the industry, and closely tied to the left’s wartime and draft-time fight against the “military-industrial complex” during the 1960s and 1970s. No wonder public opinion surveys suggest that liberals, more than conservatives, tend to oppose the building of more nuclear reactors. We would therefore expect the left, more than the right, to react strongly and emotionally on the nuclear issue, especially in the wake of a disaster like the one seen at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in March of 2011.

  But here’s the thing—worrying a lot about nuclear power puts liberals at odds with scientists, who tend to think the risks have been overblown, especially in comparison to other risks that inevitably arise from the need to power our societies (like the greenhouse gas emissions that result from burning fossil fuels). “Amongst nuclear experts, you get a distinct sense that society has overestimated these risks, overplayed them, wasted in some cases resources in pursuing reductions in risk where money would be better spent elsewhere,” says Hank Jenkins-Smith, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma who studies scientists’ views on the nuclear issue, and why they diverge from those of the public.

  Which is not to say that scientists see zero risks from people being exposed to ionizing radiation. As usual, they’re much more nuanced than that. (Warning: explaining that nuance will require getting a bit wonky for a moment.)

  Obviously, radiation at high doses is dangerous. But when it comes to radiation risks at very low doses, the experts are largely divided between two interpretations: The so-called “Threshold Model” and the “Linear No-Threshold” model. The Threshold position, the view subscribed to by the majority of scientists, means that there is a degree of radiation exposure below which damaging health effects aren’t very likely to occur. The Linear No-Threshold position, more of a minority view but certainly not one that can be ruled out at this time, posits that there is no truly safe dose of radiation, and harms will be proportional to the dose, even at very minimal doses.

  The difference between the two views really matters in the case of a nuclear accident, like the one at Fukushima Daiichi—for in such accidents there is radiation traveling considerable distances, but in very low amounts. It also matters in setting safety standards for nuclear waste disposal and in many other areas.

  The debate between scientists on these two interpretations—the Threshold Model and the Linear No-Threshold Model—currently remains unresolved. But here’s the thing. Surveys by Jenkins-Smith and his colleagues have also shown that among scientists, even if you accept one model of radiation risk, you also tend to think that public policymakers should adopt a more stringent standard, just in case. Thus, scientists who think that the Threshold view is correct nevertheless tend to think that policy—for nuclear power plants, for nuclear waste disposal and sequestration, and so on—should be set based on the Linear No-Threshold standard. In other words, precisely because they understand the nature of scientific uncertainty and know that they might be wrong (and tend toward being integratively complex), scientists generally default to the “precautionary principle.” They want to build in an added margin of safety around nuclear power plants and nuclear waste disposal plans.

  So in this context, to hear that scientists who are prone to the precautionary principle, and to want to build in a strong margin of safety, still think nuclear risks are overblown is really very te
lling.

  Why do scientists end up feeling this way? By far the most powerful consideration is that while they would never argue that radiation exposure carries no risk—and while they continue to argue among themselves about precisely how much risk it carries—they can see plainly that in the real world, it carries nothing like the kind of risks that other forms of energy use do.

  The most compelling counterargument to nuclear concerns? It’s all about coal—a rival energy source that, on top of its vast greenhouse gas emissions (nuclear power does not directly produce such emissions, though there is surely a greenhouse gas “footprint” from the industry as a whole), also happens to be much more deadly to humans. It is estimated that in the year 2010 alone, particulate air pollution from coal fired power plants killed 13 thousand people in the U.S. (alone).

  If you then compare this to nuclear power, it is pretty hard to make the case that it’s anywhere near as deadly or dangerous. Nuclear radiation risks chiefly arise in the case of accidents, which are very scary but also relatively rare. And even when they occur, there are reasons to think they take a considerably lower toll.

  The 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown in the Soviet Union is far and away the most extreme case, and surely caused a substantial present (and future) cancer death toll. In 2005, the International Atomic Energy Agency and a group of other organizations, including the World Health Organization, estimated that toll at about four thousand cancer deaths. With Fukushima-Daiichi, where the radiation release was lower, a recent estimate of future cancer deaths is in the neighborhood of 1,000. And with the U.S.’s worst domestic nuclear crisis—Three Mile Island in 1979—the death toll is likely the lowest of all. According to Dr. David Brenner of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University, there were probably some health hazards but “they were small enough that you couldn’t detect them” in epidemiological studies.

  Add together this track record from the worst nuclear disasters with the fact that all energy sources have their risks and drawbacks, and frankly, it gets pretty hard to be very anti-nuclear.

  And correspondingly, despite liberals’ negative predisposition towards nuclear power, you certainly see no monolithic resistance to it today. President Obama has even called for a nuclear power expansion, as did Democratic Senator John Kerry in the context of trying to find a compromise on cap and trade legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions (though this gambit ultimately failed). Many other liberals still remain opposed to expanding nuclear power, but have shifted away from making questionable scientific or health arguments to focus on the economic cost of building new power plants.

  And most importantly: Liberals themselves have doggedly fought left wing misinformation on this issue. In the wake of Fukushima, liberal environmentalists and climate policy mavens like Guardian columnist George Monbiot and Mark Lynas (author of the book High Tide) absolutely eviscerated left-wing Green Party nuclear opponents for exaggerating nuclear risks, and directly likened them to climate change deniers.

  Does such exaggeration happen on the nuclear issue? Absolutely. In the wake of any nuclear disaster, there is a radical left old guard that goes around trying to find a dramatic body count. Possibly the leading transgressor is Helen Caldicott, the Australian anti-nuclear activist. For instance, in a 2011 New York Times op-ed that drew numerous high-level scientific rebukes, she suggested that a million people may have already died as a result of the radiation spread by the Chernobyl meltdown. In a radio debate with Monbiot on “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman, meanwhile, Caldicott described an international conspiracy theory to cover up the real consequences of Chernobyl, calling it—to Monbiot’s astonishment—“the biggest medical conspiracy and cover-up in the history of medicine,” and implicating the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

  But as soon as such extreme claims are made, liberals and scientists lash back. A conflict erupts between those who follow egalitarian and communitarian impulses emotionally—and engage in motivated reasoning and confirmation bias on this basis—and those whose Enlightenment values require them to set the record straight, and demand that we not overhype problems when we lack evidence that they actually exist (and where hyping risks will scare people, thus bringing about other harms). Therefore, individual anti-nuclear leftists may make mistakes, air false claims, and even cling to them—but the disobedient and fractious left as a whole doesn’t follow their lead.

  Indeed, we even have evidence suggesting that unlike intellectually sophisticated climate change deniers, better educated liberals do not become more convinced that nuclear power is dangerous. In Dan Kahan’s research (previously discussed in chapter 2), they behave just the opposite: With more mathematical and scientific literacy, those who have egalitarian and communitarian value systems tend to become less skeptical of nuclear power, not more. In other words, they move in the opposite direction from where you would expect their initial impulses to push them—and more into line with what scientists actually think.

  Far from being smart idiots, they’re just . . . smart. They’re apportioning their beliefs to the weight of the evidence, which is what we’re all supposed to strive to do—even if we so often fail at it.

  But if you wanted to find a case where the left has literally eaten alive those within its own ranks who misstated and exaggerated science, nuclear power isn’t the best example. No: look instead to the vaccine-autism issue.

  Once again, here is a case where you might think that liberal values and subconscious moral intuitions—spurred by egalitarianism and communitarianism—would fuel anti-science behavior and the denial of reality. After all, vaccine makers are large pharmaceutical companies with deep pockets, while the alleged victims are innocent children, damaged shortly after birth by the needles meant to protect them. And once again, some Hollywood celebrities and environmentalists (Jenny McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) have indeed lined up behind the claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. What’s more, one key liberal constituency, the plaintiff’s bar, had a strong incentive in this case to try to reap big profits by suing companies that were alleged to have poisoned children and wrecked families, hopes, and dreams.

  But alas, there was this pesky little problem called scientists—including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine. These experts looked into the allegations, pushed by Kennedy Jr., McCarthy, and many others, that childhood vaccines were causing autism and, in particular, that the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal is the trigger for the explosion of autism cases that we’re seeing today.

  And they found the case to be astonishingly weak—now, in fact, completely discredited.

  The scientists’ most powerful tool was epidemiological studies, surveying large populations in multiple countries to try to detect a relationship between thimerosal and the incidence of autism. Again and again, these studies—appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, Pediatrics, and many other leading medical publications—refuted the idea of a causal connection.

  Another tool was logic: In the early 2000s, as the vaccine scare gained momentum, thimerosal was phased out of most childhood vaccines as a safety precaution—just in case. But autism cases continued to increase; the “epidemic” raged unabated. Clearly, whatever the cause or causes, it wasn’t thimerosal.

  Do vaccine deniers persist in the face of all this evidence? Absolutely—and they’re a threat to us all. Their emotional and motivated reasoning patterns are particularly intense, too. They circle the wagons every time a new research result comes out vindicating vaccines, or undermining their few sympathetic scientific experts. They tighten ranks and attack the inconvenient information.

  What’s more, although polling data at the national level show no clear political leaning among vaccine skeptics—they pop up across the political spectrum, though surveys on the question aren’t very good—they do seem to be most concentrated in traditional left-wing “
granola” cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Ashland, Oregon. And concentration is what makes them most dangerous. It is in such places, we must fear, that so-called “herd immunity” will break down because there are too many unvaccinated children running around, allowing once vanquished diseases to get a foothold again—devastating and vaccine-preventable ones like pertussis (whooping cough) and measles. In fact, it’s already happening.

  So in the vaccine case, egalitarian and communitarian values did play a key role in generating a baseless scare that has, in turn, led to a major public health threat—as well as a network of science deniers who are intransigent and will not change their minds. But at the same time, it is scientists and liberals who have denounced these ideologues. And for good reason: They’re endangering us all.

  The vaccine case, therefore, yet again shows the power of liberal self-correction, evidence-following, and belief-updating.

  There are other cases, similar to these, that we might also probe: left-wing exaggerations of the risks of genetically modified organisms, for instance; or the bizarre case of some Northern California liberals claiming that “smart meters” pose health risks. In these instances, too, false claims by some on the left can be traced to egalitarian and communitarian values.

  Misinformation isn’t going to prevail in these realms, however, any more than it will on fracking, nuclear power, or vaccines. That’s because while individuals and small groups may go astray, there’s a deliberative structure set up on the left that ensures they will be debunked if they’re wrong. And there’s a psychology of disobedience and anti-authoritarianism on the left that ensures that those making these claims will be challenged, sometimes quite vigorously or even viciously.

  Does such infighting and boat-rocking ever happen on the right? Sure it does. A great example would be the group of intellectually honest (and moderate) conservatives who have formed around former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, and who are constantly trying to keep conservatives accurate on global warming, the debt ceiling, and much more. Another example would be Bruce Bartlett. I’m making statements about general tendencies here, not about absolutes.