In keeping with the GOP’s apparent need to meet a weekly quota, today’s public exercise in humiliating stupidity comes courtesy of Mo Brooks, Congressman from Alabama. As a member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, he was present yesterday at a hearing on technology and climate change. He suggested to Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and former senior adviser to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, that land subsidence and erosion are partly to blame for rising sea levels.
"Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up," Brooks said.
Duffy responded: "I'm pretty sure that on human time scales, those are minuscule effects."
This sort of brainless petit-four delights connoisseurs of Republican foolishness, but anyone who takes pleasure in cataloguing and appreciating Right Wing idiocy missed the points.
- Republicans don’t object to being called stupid. In fact, they like it. It gives them evidence that they are victimized and ridiculed. They respond with anger and resolve.
- They use these public displays of inanity to stiffen the GOP voter base’s pride.
- As long as they stay publicly and proudly stupid they are roadblocks to the changes and reforms they oppose. Stupidity is a weapon for them, not a liability. It helps keep them in office. What do you call the dumbest Conservative in Congress? Congressman.
The Left keeps believing that logic and reason will prevail in the fight against climate change. What they need to see is that the Republicans aren’t fighting about climate change in the first place. They’re fighting against logic and reason. They’re fighting the very idea that empirical evidence outweighs their beliefs. That their beliefs are demonstrably false is irrelevant. They insist that belief alone is enough to validate a position, and that in any question, belief merits respect to any respect that evidence gets.
This is why the Left loses to the Right.
The Republicans must stay in a realm of pure fantasy to hold these rabbit-hole debates. Only in two arenas, politics and religion, can this kind of craziness be given a hearing at all. The nullification of evidence in any realistic setting—law, medicine, business, the investment markets, etc., etc.—would instantly and of necessity expunge this sort of stupidity because under any real test, stupidity loses, and those losses are costly. In Congress they can hold debates over whether climate change is real, or whether evolution is proven, or whether a race of people is the Children of Ham, just as they could hold pointless inquisitions into Benghazi. Hearings like this go nowhere, by design. They just waste time.
That’s what the Republicans want.
The Left wants the Republicans to admit they are wrong regarding the science of climate change. That will never happen. They can invite testimony from every climatologist in the country, to no effect. The GOP declines to believe in science, so they won’t believe scientists.
What should Democrats do instead?
Invite public officials, property owners, and the military, for starters, to discuss the effects that rising seas are having on some of the world’s more prized and important real estate. A Woods Hole scientist won’t talk Mo Brooks into changing his mind, but a homeowner on the Atlantic Coast might. A lender for residential and commercials real estate holding thirty-year mortgages on property in Gulf Coast Alabama has an interest in knowing that its assets won’t be destroyed by storm surges. Buyers who are lied to by sellers of Outer Banks houses are going to look for redress when they see they’ve been had. And the Pentagon ought to have had someone in uniform there to explain to the obtuse GOP what its obtuseness is going to cost the American military when—not if—rising seas compromise installations.
In Congressional hearings, this kind of game playing is good politics for the Republicans. It gives them the stalemate they want. The real world, stupidity like that demonstrated so arrogantly by the Republicans in Congress costs real people real money.
Time is the prize here, not political consensus. This stops being a game the moment it leaves the rabbit hole of these Congressional hearings. The simple fact is that the issue of climate change doesn’t need the Republicans to understand it or endorse the science behind it, because it’s real. It’s a reality for the people whose real concerns interests aren’t just political abstractions and partisan gamesmanship. The Democrats need to bring witnesses from those constituencies into the hearing rooms. They need to pass laws that protect the rights of property owners to get accurate information about their investments. The need to de-politicize the question of whether a fact is a fact and re-connect capitalism with the dollar value of empiricism. And the Democrats need to campaign in those districts, with that message, to those voters, until they get rid of the costly ignorance that has become the GOP’s policy.