by is Mooney
I want to be clear: I think the work of the Post’s fact checkers is admirable and commendable. Having read their entries, I might dispute a few, but overall it is clear that they are good journalists dedicated to truth and accuracy. There is nothing wrong with them finding more and worse Republican errors—especially if there are more and worse Republican errors. This simply means they are doing their job.
I will concede that someone could still try to use these data to argue that the Post and PolitiFact alike are highly biased against Republicans. That’s what Republicans may do—but to my mind, the consistency across two fact-checking organizations, combined with the fact that these organizations actually seem to go out of their way to criticize Democrats and appear even-handed, points to a much more simple and obvious explanation: Republicans are just more factually wrong.
Democrats, meanwhile, certainly aren’t innocent when it comes to making misleading statements, but their pants are not on fire.
This fact-checking analysis is pretty telling, especially when presented in combination with my analysis of all the misinformation believed by Fox News viewers.
But there are still more ways of mapping the misinformation mountain. You can also survey and ascend Mount Fib genre by genre, examining false conservative claims about science, about economics, about history, and so on.
That will be my next task. I’ll tackle science in the remainder of this chapter, and economics and history in the next two. There, I’ll show that while Republicans have long claimed to own the field of economics, that’s no longer the case (if it ever was). And history is an arena in which religious conservatives in particular have embraced a nationalistic and religious mythology, rather than recognizing and accepting what actually happened in the U.S. past.
Let’s take science first, however.
I’ve already shown convincingly in a prior book (2005’s The Republican War on Science) that Republicans are overwhelmingly in conflict with modern scientific understanding, across a broad array of environmental, reproductive health, and other ideologically tinged issues. And since then, matters have gotten palpably worse, not better. While there is no point in rewriting that book here—although there are a vast number of needed updates—let me begin with two cases that, for different reasons, could be said to matter the “most.”
First, Republicans are vastly more misinformed about the scientific issue that threatens the planet most of all (climate change). If global warming continues unchecked, the consequences will be vast and dramatic, but one consequence, to my mind, rises above all the others: we will eventually cause the melting of land-based ice that is currently sitting atop Greenland and West Antarctica. In fact, there is already some reason to believe we may be drawing close to crossing the atmospheric carbon dioxide threshold that would lead to the destabilizing of Greenland.
Why worry? These two vast ice sheets contain enough water to raise the global sea level by 13 meters (or about 42 feet). If that were to someday occur, pretty much anything that human beings have built very near to the ocean would be impacted, in some case dramatically so. That includes a lot of major cities.
Who denies that global warming is real and human caused? Here the polling data are absolutely clear: Conservatives—and most overwhelmingly, conservatives who are white and male. Here are some statistics: While just 14 percent of the general public is not at all worried about global warming—and as we can see, they have a staggering amount to be worried about—39 percent of conservative white males aren’t worried at all. Or slice it another way: 36 percent of adults deny scientists have reached a consensus on climate change, as opposed to 59 percent of conservative white males. Or slice it yet another way: while about 3 in 10 American adults don’t believe humans are primarily causing global temperature increases, you can double it to about 6 in 10 for conservative white males.
These conservative white men, especially if they are Tea Party members, are also more inclined to think they understand the climate issue well. Not only are they vastly wrong in their beliefs, but they’re confident in their wrongness.
Conservative reality denial with respect to climate change has become so severe that it is, as climate researcher Ray Bradley points out, now a “litmus test” issue in the Republican Party. We saw precisely this with Mitt Romney during the run-up to the 2012 election: Romney appeared to back down (some may say flip-flop) after making a statement that seemed to affirm his belief that global warming is real and human caused. “Bye bye nomination,” announced Rush Limbaugh—and before long, Romney seemed to have gotten back into line, later commenting that he “[didn’t] know” whether global warming is mostly human caused.
Conservatives—especially religious ones—are also in denial about the single most important thing that we human beings know about ourselves: Namely, that our species evolved by natural selection and therefore shares a common ancestor with every other living thing on Earth.
You really can’t understand many of the most important things about human beings—their aggression and their empathy; their tribalism and their generosity; their intelligence and their biases; their diversity and their similarities—except in light of evolution. Nor can you understand many of the cognitive and information processing phenomena explained in this book, such as the rapid-fire automaticity of our emotional responses, and the way our brains themselves show the stamp of an evolutionary process. Evolution may also help to account for the psychological and even perhaps the political differences between us. We don’t know yet why all of these differences exist. But it may be the case that evolution had some hand in it, even if our political views are not an evolutionary adaptation, but merely a by-product.
So in some ways, this is the largest and most consequential reality gap of all. Many American conservatives don’t even know who or what we are.
These are by far the two most prominent cases of conservatives resisting scientific reality, but there are many, many others. Indeed, as I was finishing this book, I got into a pitched blog debate with a conservative—Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute—about whether the left or right was more anti-science. I won the debate (at least if you consider getting your opponent to hurl charges of “socialism” a win) in part by showing the egregiousness and the extent of Christian Right attacks on science related to reproductive health, abortion, and sexuality.
There is a vast clustering of scientific falsehoods on the Christian Right, especially when it comes to matters having anything to do with sex. And indeed, this is probably one of the biggest reasons that Republicans and conservatives today are so factually wrong about science: They have a political base composed of conservative religious believers who are convinced that reality and the Bible (read literally, interpreted conservatively) must comport. So it is not just factual errors with these folks—it is entire doctrines that do not align with science, but that are clung to in the face of refutation.
Indeed, Christian conservatives have a strong penchant for fostering counterexpertise to thwart mainstream knowledge. They always have their own expert or experts on hand to make ideologically reinforcing arguments on matters of science, social policy, and much else—usually, experts who are also pro-life, devout Christians. There are conservative Christian PhDs who attack evolution (chiefly housed at Seattle’s Discovery Institute), who downplay the effectiveness of contraception, who call gay and lesbian Americans mentally ill and try to convert them to heterosexuality, and who argue that abortion harms women physically and mentally and causes fetuses pain.
These critiques are all far outside of the scientific mainstream, but that doesn’t stop them. Often, you’ll find just one or two Christian Right scientists who make a speciality out of attacking mainstream knowledge in one tiny area.
I’ve already shown how this works with respect to claims about fetal pain. But let’s take another example of recent relevance—attempts to use Christian Right social “science” to undermine same sex parenting.
As mor
e states and localities allow same-sex marriage, more of these couples will also become partners in raising children, and indeed, many are already doing so outside of marriage. Accordingly, religious conservative “experts” have sought to show—sometimes in court—that social and psychological damage is inflicted on children raised in same sex households, or that they’re indoctrinated into the gay lifestyle.
But the strategy isn’t going very well, because, as the American Psychological Association explains, the relevant research shows that the “development, adjustment, and well-being of children with lesbian and gay parents do not differ markedly from that of children with heterosexual parents.” How do you counter an organization with so much expertise and credibility? Christian conservatives and their allied experts strive to find a “scientific” counterargument, but it’s pretty thin gruel.
One favored strategy is literally citing the wrong studies. There is, after all, a vast amount of research on kids in heterosexual two-parent families, and mostly these kids do quite well—certainly better than kids in single-parent families. Christian conservatives then cite these studies to argue that heterosexual families are best for kids, but there’s just one problem (which happens to be absolutely fundamental). In the studies of heterosexual two-parent families where children fare well, the comparison group is families with one mother or one father—not two mothers or two fathers. So to leap from these studies to conclusions about same sex parenting, explains University of Virginia social scientist Charlotte Patterson, is “what we call in the trade bad sampling techniques.”
One go-to person for the Christian Right on this topic has been psychologist and Baptist minister George Rekers, who has testified in several court cases involving gay adoptions and foster care. Rekers has written that “to search for truth about homosexuality in psychology and psychiatry, while ignoring God, will result in futile and foolish speculations.” Not surprisingly, he contests the research showing that the kids are all right in families with same sex parents and argues that lesbian and gay parents are more likely to have tumultuous relationships, substance-abuse problems, and various psychological conditions.
In Arkansas and in Florida, however, judges have strongly criticized his testimony. “Dr. Rekers’ beliefs are motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with the science,” wrote Judge Cindy Lederman in a 2008 Florida gay adoption case. “It was apparent from both Dr. Rekers’ testimony and attitude on the stand that he was there primarily to promote his own personal ideology,” wrote another judge, Arkansas’ Timothy Davis Fox, in a 2004 case involving gay foster care.
Thus, on the well-being of children raised by same-sex partners—as in many other areas—conservative Christian “counterexpertise” forays are often easily spotted. They haven’t fared well in court (whether in cases involving evolution or same-sex parenting) or gained purchase within the scientific community.
But no matter—they never stop coming.
Fetal pain and same-sex parenting are classic examples of the Christian Right coming up with dubious scientific claims. So is pretty much everything said in the unending attempt to “scientifically” undermine evolution. But what’s striking is just how many other perfectly parallel examples there are. Here’s a quick staccato summary:
Homosexuality. Religious conservatives don’t just attack same-sex parenting. This is just one of a large corpus of false claims used to denigrate homosexuality—all of which have been refuted by the American Psychological Association. These include the assertion that people can “choose” whether to be gay, that homosexuality is a type of disorder, and that it can be cured through “reparative” therapy.
Health Risks of Abortion. To try to dissuade women from having abortions, Christian conservatives often incorrectly assert that undergoing the procedure increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer or mental disorders. Both of these claims have been refuted through epidemiological research.
Stem Cells. Many religious conservatives—most recently supported by GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich—have asserted that adult stem cells can supplant embryonic ones for research purposes. To the contrary, and despite many insights involving adult stem cells, the scientific consensus remains that the best research strategy is to pursue both avenues of study simultaneously, because we do not know where research will lead.
Contraception and Sex Education. Conservative Christians are notorious for exaggerating the failure rates of condoms, for attacking successful comprehensive sex education programs (which teach about both abstinence and birth control), and for exaggerating the effectiveness of abstinence only education programs (which generally have failed to show success in research evaluations).
Confronted with such sweeping evidence of conservative error, there remains the counterargument: What about cases where liberals and Democrats are also doggedly wrong about something important? Such cases certainly exist—though as I will show, they’re rarer and of far less political significance.
Still, they cannot be ignored. Chapter 12 will consider several such cases, explicitly related to science. But let me acknowledge, up front, the single most egregious left-wing delusion that is currently relevant and of which I’m aware. In a 2006 Scripps Howard survey, Democrats were found to be significantly more likely than Republicans to endorse the wild “Truther” conspiracy theory about the Bush government either directly assisting in the September 11 attacks, or letting them happen because Bush wanted a war in the Middle East.
That’s a pretty clear instance of grave liberal delusion. But even here, there remains a key distinction between left- and right-wing misinformation. And that is that you don’t find Democratic elites, intellectuals, or elected representatives endorsing 9/11 Trutherism. They know it’s embarrassing, and they stay away from it. But that is not the case with right-wing equivalents, ranging from global warming denial (which essentially postulates a global scientific conspiracy to deceive us all) to claims that President Obama was not born in the United States.
Although this is less directly relevant to national public policy, let me also concede that certain types of paranoid conspiracy thinking, and also certain kinds of woolly-headed pop health and medical thinking, are either bipartisan or perhaps even left-clustered in some cases. When it comes to believing in poorly supported (and in some cases unsupportable) alternative health remedies and diets, and shunning mainstream medicine, this is also known to be a phenomenon of bicoastal liberal elite cities and lefty college towns.
I certainly do not contend, then, that those on the left are incapable of delusion, motivated reasoning, or the rest. That would be foolish. However, I do strongly contend that there is a vastly disproportionate distribution of political falsehoods in mainstream American politics. Not only are the bulk of them coming from the right, but the left is more willing to weigh counterarguments and modify its stance when proven wrong—or at least, liberals are more than happy to attack their own for being in error. And liberal elites usually do not lend credence to these claims. The right behaves differently.
To show this, I now want to focus on two more areas where the U.S. political right is exceedingly wrong and engaged in a dramatic amount of biased and motivated reasoning: economics and U.S. history.
Notes
171 two scientists appeared The hearing occurred on February 25, 2010. The transcript is available online at http://www.legislature.ne.gov/FloorDocs/101/PDF/Transcripts/Judiciary/2010–02–25.pdf.
171 “that does not put me at odds with my maker” Transcript, Nebraska State Legislature, February 25, 2010.
172 Scientific reviews . . . Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, “Fetal Awareness: Review of Research and Recommendations for Practice,” March 2010. Available online at http://www.rcog.org.uk/files/rcog-corp/RCOGFetalAwarenessWPR0610.pdf.
172 . . . concur in this conclusion Susan J. Lee et al, “Fetal Pain: A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence,” Journal of the Ame
rican Medical Association, 2005, Vol. 294, No. 8, pp. 947–954.
173 consilience William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History, London: John W. Parker, 1840.
174 2010 election study Program on International Policy Attitudes, “Misinformation and the 2010 Election,” December 2010. Available online at http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf.
175 mistaken beliefs about the newly passed healthcare law Kaiser Family Foundation, “Pop Quiz: Assessing Americans’ Familiarity With the New Health Care Law,” February 2011. Available online at http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8148.pdf.
176 analyzed PolitiFact’s work “Selection Bias? PolitiFact Rates Republican Statements as False at 3 Times the Rate of Democrats.” February 10, 2011, Smart Politics blog, Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Available online at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2011/02/selection_bias_PolitiFact_rate.php.
177 Pinocchios For the Washington Post Fact-Checker’s explanation of its methodology, see here http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2011/01/welcome_to_the_new_fact_checke.html.
177 our analysis (This note is by Aviva Meyer.) There is an inherent selection bias in the work of fact checking organizations, as the statements they choose to analyze tend to be chosen because of their egregiousness. They aren’t going to examine a politician saying George Washington was the first president of the United States. PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact-checker both use reader interest (determined by the outlet, and from reader feedback) to influence their editorial choices of what to analyze; the Fact-checker says it aims for statements that “cry out for fact-checking.” Also unlike PolitiFact, the Fact-checker doesn’t hand out ratings of truthful statements (although it does have a very rarely awarded Gepetto rating). So one should hesitate at interpreting the data as providing some exact indicator of an individual’s honesty. However, it seems fair game to point out not just Republicans’ more frequent dishonesty, but the clear pattern of their lies being (statistically) worse lies.