Progressives need to highlight Movement Conservatism craziness in short, easy-to-understand terms. One pervasive trait of activist Republicans today is their hostility to professional expertise. In policy areas from tax cuts, to the Iraqi occuption, to global warming, to stem cell research, Republican leaders value ideology over expert opinion.
For several decades Republicans have sought to protray doctors, lawyers, professors, scientists, and scholars as a privileged arrogant elite foisting politicized decisions on an unsuspecting society. Unfortunately most Americans can be persuaded by these attacks because they don't understand how professional associations or universities work. They don't know about that the AMA and the ABA can expel members for violations of professional ethics, they don't understand the process of peer review in scholarship, and they don't understand the process of experiment, publication, and duplication of results in science. Nor do they understand the level of knowledge acquired by area studies scholars who spend years learning the languages of, travelling in, and researching the Middle East, China, Russia, etc. Hence many are willing to listen to Rush Limbaugh compare global warming to ice cubes floating in a glass or Michael Savage calling for use of nuclear weapons against Tehran before they'll pay any attention to a specialist.
Whence the Republican hostility to professional expertise? First, the dominant ethic in American business these days is "screw thy neighbor" and anything goes if it makes a profit. MBA candidates laugh at their business ethics courses. Professionals tend to believe that they work not just to make money and accumulate goodies, but also out of curiousity, or indeed, to improve humanity's lot. But in the US at the moment, any hint of altruism or idealism is greeted with mockery. Helping others is for losers. Everyone's looking out for no. 1.
Second, professional expertise is lethal to ideology, and the Republican party is now dominated by false ideological premises - tax cuts raise tax revenue, biological evolution is fantasy cooked up in the sick imaginations of secular humanists, bombing Arab civilians will somehow stop, rather than spread jihadist sentiment, global warming isn't happening, etc. etc. The sacrosanct nature of such ideological assertions in the Republican Party resembles Bolshevik devotion to Marxism-Leninism, and the Young Republicans resemble members of the Communist Youth League more than anything.
I'd appreciate other examples of ideology trumping professional expertise in the comments.
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