Stop treating science denial like a disease

Turning the rejection of scientific expertise into a pathology mistakenly presents individual ignorance as the bottleneck in political disagreements

The elevation of science to a central theme in American politics is an extraordinary development in the co-evolution of science and society. Three months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, 40,000 or so people turned out in the rain in Washington, DC for the March for Science, with similar numbers in other cities. Given Trump’s all-out attack on the role and size of government—his proposed 2018 budget slashes almost all programs other than national defence—there could just as easily have been a March for Education or a March for Affordable Housing.

But the high profile of science in national politics has been building since the turn of the millennium, fuelled by controversies around embryonic stem cell research, and of course climate change. Starting with the year 2000 presidential campaign between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Democrats explicitly began positioning themselves as the party of science. During the 2004 campaign, Democratic candidate John Kerry pledged that “I will listen to the advice of our scientists, so I can make the best decisions. . . . This is your future, and I will let science guide us, not ideology.”