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Climate Progress

Study Finds Free-Market Ideologues Doubt Climate Science, Yet Buy Conspiracy Theories

By Ryan Koronowski on Apr 22, 2013 at 3:06 pm

Why do a determined minority — often in positions of power — refuse to accept that climate change is happening despite the overwhelming scientific evidence?

A new study may provide a clue. Researchers at the University of Western Australia found that people who expressed faith in free-market ideology were also likely to reject scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that burning fossil fuels helps to cause it.

Free market philosophy makes the case that the market operates best when the government gets out of the way, but otherwise has no obvious connection to denying climate science. However, this scientific denial is not just limited to climate change:

Our findings parallel those of previous work and show that endorsement of free-market economics predicted rejection of climate science. Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.

HIV and cigarettes do not have anything to do with climate change, yet those who placed their faith in the free market were skeptical of decades of research finding they caused AIDS and lung cancer, respectively. Laissez-faire doctrinarians also were not too sure about the causal role of CFCs in eroding the ozone layer.

The results go beyond scientific consensus. The researchers found that free market adherents tend to give more support to conspiracy theories about: a “world government,” the attacks of September 11 being an “inside job,” SARS being a government plot, the U.S. knowing about Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor, the Apollo moon landings taking place on a soundstage, Area 51 being home to alien bodies, and Lee Harvey Oswald not being a lone gunman, among other things.

Because this only tested correlation, it is impossible to say if free market ideology leads people to deny climate change, or if skepticism about scientific consensus leads to a belief that the government should stay out of the market, or if there is a third factor that leads to both beliefs. However, the third factor — more likely belief in conspiracy theories — lends the results added legitimacy.

The authors go on to state (behind paywall) the problem of climate denial in academic, yet clear terms:

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Election

Are We All Ideologically Confused?

By John Halpin, Guest Blogger on Apr 9, 2013 at 1:35 pm

Towards the end of a backpacking trip in the Smokies last week, I encountered a large SUV plastered with bumper stickers extolling the virtues of private property rights and decrying eminent domain – sitting in a public parking lot next to a public waterway in a national park.

My first somewhat cynical thought was of the infamous Tea Party banner, “Keep government out of my Medicare!”  It seemed incongruous for this person to bumper-lecture others about the abuses of government condemnation while enjoying the beautiful surroundings of more than 500,000 acres in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, land acquired through a mix of private donations and state and federal government use of eminent domain that displaced thousands of people and private businesses  from the area in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in the 1930’s.  A conservative might have a similar reaction, for example, encountering a liberal parent dropping off their kid at a private school with their foreign-made car covered in Obama stickers and end inequality and racism banners.  “Yeah pal, keep up the fight,” they might be thinking.

But thinking through it a bit, the scene made more sense.  I’m no libertarian but I sure would not want the government to take my home even with compensation.  Yet I love hiking the national park system on a regular basis.   Maybe the libertarian driver I encountered recently had a fight with a local government over their own land and needed to unwind away in a peaceful spot by the river, government owned or not.

Understanding that this is just a small anecdote, it’s fair to ask whether people on the whole are ideologically blinded or just plain confused about what they believe.

In highly polarized political times, we often overlook the fact that few Americans are ideologically consistent.  In 2009, we conducted a large-scale study of political ideology that explored reactions to 40 different statements split evenly between progressive and conservative ideas.  The survey asked people to rank their level of agreement or disagreement on a scale of 0-10 with progressive statements such as, “The gap between rich and poor should be reduced even if it means higher taxes for the wealthy,” and conservative ones like, “Government spending is almost always wasteful and inefficient.”  Combining responses to each of the 40 statements, we determined a composite score for various groups (you can determine your own ideological score by taking this quick quiz based on the survey):

As the chart above highlights, American ideological attitudes basically converge in the middle.  “Although there is a substantial range of ideological positions (from conservative Republicans at 160.6 to liberal Democrats at 247.1), no one group approaches the most extreme poles on either the progressive or conservative side of the continuum. Second, this middle convergence implies that Americans are not fully convinced of many ideological positions on their own side are open to ideological positions that may be different than their own.”

We also found that people’s self-described ideological labels (liberal, progressive, moderate, conservative, and libertarian) did not correspond directly to attitudes about government and society and often overlapped with beliefs typically ascribed to different ideological views:

Case in point: Majorities of self-identified conservatives agree with four out of five progressive perspectives on the role of government while majorities of self-identified progressives and liberals agree with conservative economic positions on things like trade and Social Security.

Additionally, self-identified progressives and liberals share many views and beliefs about government and the economy but hold somewhat differing beliefs on cultural and international concerns. Likewise, although conservatives and libertarians are frequently considered to be part of the same tribe, our research finds that self-identified conservatives look rather poorly upon the libertarian approach (only 35 percent of conservatives rate “libertarian” favorably).

This research shows the highly fluid nature of political ideology and suggests that people can hold seemingly contradictory political ideas in their heads without undermining their overall political identity.    The libertarian driver by the river in the national park was being reasonable if not entirely consistent with his bumper sticker views — something that affects most of us based on this data.

Alyssa

Why Newt Gingrich Would Be The Perfect Foil For Leslie Knope On ‘Parks and Recreation’

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 5, 2012 at 12:04 pm

It’s kind of too bad that Newt Gingrich’s appearance on Parks and Recreation is the result of a drive-by coincidence, rather than an extended engagement, which I bet the former Speaker of the House would chow down on with serious relish:

Filming at Indianapolis’s St. Elmo Steak House (Ron Swanson, you ol’ devil), Parks and Recreation ran into the one and only Newt Gingrich. Showrunner Mike Schur “quickly huddled with the episode’s writer and director to incorporate Gingrich into the script,” reports the Indy Star. “It was a completely random chance,” Schur said. “But you can’t pass up on an opportunity like that.” Gingrich will now follow recent appearances by Vice-President Joe Biden and Sens. John McCain, Olympia Snowe, and Barbara Boxer.

The news that this was happening actually helped me put a finger on what’s been bothering me about this season of Parks and Recreation. Ron Swanson long gave in to Leslie’s charms, and made an exception to his general libertarianism when it comes to her efforts to improve Pawnee. On City Council, I thought she might face actual intellectual challenges of the sort that Ron used to face, perhaps in the form of the oft-glimpsed but not-fully-developed Councilman Hauser. Instead, we’ve just gotten Councilman Jam, who is a jackass rather than a representative of an actual philosophy of governance, and an old white supremacist. As a result, Leslie hasn’t forced the kinds of challenges that would require her to test her convictions and level up. Instead, she’s stumbled into unforced errors, and so has the show. I’d like to see someone like Gingrich, who’s a big character, and who represents a worldview that Leslie would actually be forced to test herself against.

NEWS FLASH

North Carolina Libertarian Party Joins Coalition Against Discriminatory Amendment | The North Carolina Libertarian Party has officially declared its formal opposition to Amendment One, joining the broad coalition seeking to Protect All NC Families. In a new video, Party Chair J.J. Summerell described the measure as “badly designed” and “fraught with far-reaching, unintended consequences.” Watch it:

Update

Duke University political science professor and Libertarian candidate for governor Michael Munger has also made a video opposing Amendment One. He points out that “it clearly takes rights away…from gay and lesbian couples” and also “encumbers contractual arrangements between all sorts of other people in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.” Watch it:

Alyssa

‘Parks and Recreation’ Open Thread: Champion of the World

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 24, 2012 at 1:37 pm

This post contains spoilers through the February 23 episode of Parks and Recreation.

I hate to say this, because I adore Parks and Recreation, but increasingly, it feels like it’s showing its seams a bit. While the show’s exploration of how Leslie’s campaign is making her grow up and recognizing her limitations, and it’s finally found a way to turn Chris into a real person beyond his goofy quirks, the depiction of Ann’s become thin and inconsistent to the point that I dread it when she comes on-screen. When this show was hitting its stride last season, it was doing really nice work across the character spectrum. And I’m not sure why it’s lost that touch now.

Let’s take the good stuff first. While I agree with some of you that the way the show exposed Leslie’s insecurities during the campaign earlier in the season could be a bit hit-or-miss, I thought this episode was note-perfect. Leslie’s insanely competent, but it would be unrealistic for her not to have a breaking point at all. And campaign work and agency work use very different parts of your brain. And working through that realization brought out the best in the Leslie-Ron relationship—and for once, let Ron be right. “There’s an old lollipop that’s been stuck to the back since Tuesday,” Ron tells Leslie when she first tries to put off the idea of taking a sabbatical. “Thats the style now, Ron,” Leslie protests lamely (but ever-adorably). But after Leslie’s messed up everything from the maintenance report, to her campaign signs, to Jerry’s birthday, Ron gives her a heart-to-heart. “I used to work in a sheet metal factory,” he explains. “But then, a job came along at the tannery. the hours were better and I would get paid. Also, I have a chance to work with leather before and after the cow, which had always been a dream of mine. I didn’t want to give up my sheet metal job, so I tried to do both jobs and finish middle school.”

I thought there was a wonderful and subtle gender role-reversal at work here. Leslie is normally more professionally ambitious than Ron, a fact that’s generally a factor of her belief in government and his libertarianism, though it could also be explained as an inversion of the ambitious-dude, personal-life-oriented-lady dynamic. But here, Ron is counseling Leslie to find something approaching work-life balance. And he doesn’t let her negotiate up even five hours on maintaining her Parks Department commitments. We normally see Ron getting swept along on the force of Leslie’s enthusiasm, but here, he’s absolutely correct about what Leslie needs to do.

Then, there was Chris’s love affair with Champion. Parks and Recreation has done something wonderful with Chris in heartbreak—it’s rare in romantic comedies, or really any medium, to see a guy who’s been built up to be this handsome and talented be presented as also this vulnerable and slightly weird. And the tiny detail that he took Champion’s obedience class in German is perfect: a completely normal thing to do with one decidedly off-kilter element that makes the whole scenario fresh and funny. Seeing Chris be wildly enthusiastic about something other than fitness or government is also utterly charming. “He is a wonderdog!” Chris declares of the dog that even Andy’s sunny view of the world can never quite elevate. “He’s a mutt. Half amazing, half terrific.” His joy is sort of transformative—Chris has brought April out of her perpetual sulk, and now, he’s turning Champion into a better dog because of his faith in him and willingness to invest time and money in this poor three-legged dog.

Things that are not amazing or terrific? Ann’s relationship with Tom. Whether a couple cares about Ginuwine, or thread counts, or Paul Walker movies is totally irrelevant when there is absolutely no other plausible reason they would like each other as humans, much less date. This subplot is making me hate Ann, and like Leslie less for having her as a best friend. Especially because there are so many other things the show could be having Ann do. She is, after all, working in City Hall, a position that could put her in the way of valuable inside information for Leslie’s campaign. When the show isn’t doing campaign subplots, it could have the parks and public health departments work together. But the show has boxed Ann in, insisting that she’s totally incompetent when it comes to anything related to the campaign, marginalizing her jobs, and making her romantically pathetic. One of those choices could be a coincidence. Taken together, they feel like contempt.

Justice

What To Make Of Ron Paul’s Racist Newsletter

By Ian Millhiser on Dec 21, 2011 at 5:20 pm

With übertenther Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) emerging as the latest frontrunner in the Iowa GOP primary, Ta-Nehisi Coates chronicles many of the most offensive highlights from a series of racist newsletters Paul published in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

  • Needlin’: Paul’s December 1989 newsletter claims that roving bands of African-Americans are trying to give white people HIV. According to the newsletter, “at least 39 white women have been stuck with used hypodermic needles-perhaps infected with AIDS-by gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14. . . . Who can doubt that if the situation had been reversed, if white girls had done this to black women, we would have been subjected to months-long nation-wide propaganda campaign on the evils of white America? The double standard strikes again.”
  • Fantasies of Anti-White Bias: The same newsletter imagined a fantasy world where anti-white racist dominates DC’s culture. “To be white in Washington, however, is to experience a culture that is anti-white and proud of it. Radio stations urge listeners not to shop in white (or Asian) owned stores. Ministers lead anti-white and anti-Asian boycotts. Professors teach that whites are committing genocide against blacks and invented crack and AIDS as part of The Plan.”
  • Instructions on Murdering Black Youth: A 1992 newsletter provided fairly detailed instructions on the best way to shoot and kill an African-American and get away with it. “If you live in a major city, you’ve probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. . . . An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example). I frankly don’t know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.”
  • Beware the “Malicious Gay”: African-Americans are not the only target of the newsletters’ ire. Ron Paul’s publications also feature unusually bad medical advice punctuated with anti-gay fantasies. “Those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get a blood transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay, as was Kimberly Bergalis.”

In a partial defense of Paul, David Weigel offers a perfectly plausible explanation of how these bigoted rants against science and reality came to appear under the name of a medical doctor who now argues that the War on Drugs should end because it is inherently racist. As Weigel explains in a piece he co-authored with Julian Sanchez, the likely author of Paul’s racist rants wasn’t Ron Paul, it was a repulsive libertarian activist named Lew Rockwell.

Rockwell, who now runs a far right think tank that publishes articles with titles like “How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare,” believed in the 1980s and 1990s that libertarians had become a “party of the stoned” that needed to be “de-loused.” His solution, according to Weigel and Sanchez, was to try to expand the libertarian tent to include overt racists who could be attracted to libertarians’ opposition to “State-enforced integration.” It was likely Rockwell, and not the libertarian Congressman Ron Paul, who drafted the racist rants published in Paul’s name.

This explanation for Paul’s behavior hardly excuses it, however. The simplest conclusion that can be drawn when someone publishes a racist rant in their own name is that they truly believe that one race is superior to another. Weigel and Sanchez’ reporting, however, leads to only two possible explanations. Either Paul is so oblivious to what was being done in his name that this obliviousness alone disqualifies him for a job like the presidency — or he knew very well that horrific arguments were being published his name and he lent his name to a cynical racist strategy anyway.

Alyssa

‘Parks & Recreation’ Open Thread: Soulmates

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 30, 2011 at 8:38 am

This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 29 episode of Parks and Recreation.

As someone who has spent a lot of time reporting on things governments do and the people who do them, I am constantly surprised by the way Parks and Recreation manages to find specific functions for the various departments it covers and make them slightly, and delightfully surreal. Also, the way it manages to take on various tropes of female behavior and make them incredibly funny.

In this first category is what Leslie describes as “Budgetary thunderdome!” an annual staredown between the various Pawnee departments. “So make lists of why other departments suck, and I’ll get our secret weapon.” As a perfect example of the marvelous dynamic between Leslie and Ron, Leslie’s looking forward to turning Ron into a weapon by targeting his libertarianism at agencies other than their own. Except the arrival of Tammy One is getting in the way of her careful plans. “You love arguing against government spending!” Leslie wails when she finds Ron tamed and shaved, a plot twist that could only come after the discovery of how funny Nick Offerman looks when some of his facial hair is surprisingly removed. I have to say, though, the fact that Tammy One is conducting a totally fake IRS audit of Ron as a way to get back into his life — and more importantly into his gold stashes — makes them seem like an even more perfect odd couple than Ron and Leslie, who clearly should be his work wife until the end of time.
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Yglesias

Small-Government Egalitarianism

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 24, 2009 at 1:44 pm

Ed Glaeser has an interesting post on what he terms “the case for small-government egalitarianism” which goes off into a stimulus detour, but which is more interesting on more enduring issues. He observes that “Political divisions have not always pitted big-government egalitarians against small-government conservatives” but today things are different, and not necessarily for good reasons:

Current American political discourse labels people as either anti-government or pro-equality, but wanting to help the poor should not require the abandonment of sensible skepticism about expanding the size of the state. Many of my favorite causes, like fighting land use regulations that make it hard to build affordable housing, aid the poor by reducing the size of government. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I also argued that it would be far better to give generous checks to the poor hurt by the storm than to spend billions rebuilding the city, because those rebuilding efforts would inevitably help connected contractors more than ordinary people.

These are well-taken points. And I think it’s both true that people who think of themselves as progressives (the kind of people who think industry shouldn’t just be allowed to pollute willy-nilly, the kind of people who think it would be smart to have a universal health care system) should give more emphasis to these issues and also true that people who think of themselves as conservatives (the kind of people who think income tax rates are too high) should give more emphasis to these issues.

Still, the idea of “small-government egalitarianism” strikes me as a slightly confused concept. The argument seems to go something like this:

  1. Egalitarians often favor government programs that boost equality and regulations to reduce harmful externalities.
  2. Some government programs and regulations are actually just the rich and powerful further enriching themselves.
  3. Underpants gnomes.
  4. Egalitarians should really be libertarians!

cns_front1_1.jpg

There’s something fishy happening in step three. Contrast “small-government egalitarianism” with ordinary modern American liberalism. When a modern American liberal thinks a government regulation or public spending endeavor would accomplish an important public purpose, he’s for it. But not otherwise! Dean Baker, for example, is one of our foremost defenders of Social Security but also the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer which you both can and should read for free online.

Baker’s book is full of ideas that a “small-government egalitarian” ought to be able to embrace—it’s all about policy proposals to eliminate or reform government interventions in the economy undertaken on behalf of the rich and powerful. He doesn’t happen to tackle the pet issue I share with Glaeser—land use regulations—but it’s very much in that spirit. At the same time, Baker’s just a regular-old liberal. Nothing about his egalitarian dislike of bad government programs forces him into dislike for good government programs. Modern American liberalism isn’t a mirror-image of modern libertarianism and it doesn’t have an a priori commitment to government intervention in the economy on a particular scale. I think it’s completely fair to charge that people who call themselves liberals are sometimes mistaken about the desirability of particular programs or regulations, but that’s a different issue—lots of people are mistaken about all kinds of things.

All that said, with the Cold War over and the conservative movement tending to take most of its emotional succor from a blend of militarism and homophobia these days, I hope that modern liberals and libertarians can find ways to cooperate on some of these economic issues where our interests may overlap.

Yglesias

Small Government

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 13, 2008 at 8:37 am

Some observations from Switzerland that may be relevant to the ongoing talking point from some libertarian institutions that a lack of fealty to small government orthodoxy somehow did the GOP in. They have over here a party of the populist right called the Swiss People’s Party that takes a Euroskeptic, immigration restrictionist line that on economics generally favors low taxes, deregulation and stingier social services. At the same time, their main electoral base of support is among Switzerland’s highly subsidized agricultural communities. So they strongly support those subsidies. This doesn’t really “make sense” as a matter of philosophical consistency, but the political logic is clear enough — it’s a mix of issue positions designed to appeal to the interests and attitudes of rural Switzerland.

At the same time, there’s a party called the Free Democrats who follow the standard European liberal line of being pro-Europe, welcoming to immigrants, and favoring low taxes and deregulation. These guys have strong support from the Swiss business community. As a result, it has been known to “abandon its liberal values at times, e.g. by its support of import protection for medicine or of the expensive 2002 government bailout of the failing national airline, Swissair.”

Again, the philosophical logic is lacking but the political logic is very clear. A party has a basic orientation, that orientation gives it a constituency, and then a successful party is going to need to stand up for the interests of its constituency.

In the US, we have only two political parties and a much larger and more diverse country. Consequently, you don’t see as much of the systemic sectoral biases like that. Instead, what you get is that Democrats and Republicans compete vigorously across the country on a fairly consistent left-right axis, but in the states that benefit from farm subsidies everyone’s for farm subsidies while in Michigan everyone’s for auto bailouts and in Delaware everyone shills for credit card companies and so forth. But the basic principle is the same — politicians have ideologies, but they also have constituents and their constituents have interests, and to succeed in politics you’re going to have to serve those interests and that means you can’t be a really rigid ideologue. You’re never going to have a pure free market politics getting anywhere.

Yglesias

Big Government Conservatism

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 5, 2008 at 12:14 pm

If you hop over to the Cato blog, you can find a bunch of posts stating that the reason Republicans have lost ground in 2006 and 2008 is that they’ve permitted too much spending. What you don’t see is much evidence to support this argument, or any serious consideration of the possibility that the GOP became more spending-tolerant (approving, e.g., the 2003 Medicare bill) and the Democratic Party won elections for the same underlying cause — public opinion that demands more government services.

I see exit poll data showing that 60 percent of the public was worried about rising health care costs and that 66 percent of those people backed Barack Obama. Presumably not because they thought the Republicans had been insufficiently vigilant about blocking pork barrel spending (it was John McCain after all) but because they thought Obama’s big government health plan spoke to their concerns while McCain’s small government alternative didn’t. I see that 50 percent of voters said they’re “very worried” about economic conditions and 59 percent of them voted for Obama. I don’t see in there any data whatsoever to back up the idea that there was an anti-spending backlash against Republicans that provoked people to vote Democratic, nor do I see evidence of a Libertarian Party surge or any such thing. I see people worried about economic conditions and rising health care costs who felt that McCain’s campaign — which made a spending freeze and a porkbusting crusade the center of its efforts — wasn’t speaking to those problems.

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