Conservatives are not at all comfortable with modern science. Our last Conservative government, the Harper regime, exemplified this distrust. It eliminated the long-form census, pulled Canada out of the Kyoto protocol, cut science budgets and closed research facilities, curbed scientists speaking to the media and, Soviet-style, sent political minders along with Canadian scientists attending international events.
All this, however, was pacifistic compared to the virtual war that the Trump administration is waging against science. There have been mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency. Many universities are facing huge cuts and NASA has been forced to fire top scientists and close major scientific offices.
Aside from funding cuts, information is being suppressed as well. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention datasets and terms such as “climate crisis,” “climate science,” “clean energy,” “climate change” and “environmental quality” are being removed from government websites and documents.
A scientific study recently published in Nature Human Behavior is guaranteed to attract particular disapproval from conservatives. The study, entitled “Political ideology and trust in scientists in the USA,” carried out by social psychologists at the University of Amsterdam, showed that American conservatives have less trust in science than American liberals.
This may not seem surprising, but the degree of distrust did surprise the scientists. Conservatives had less trust across all 35 scientific professions that were examined, not just areas such as climate change or inclusion, but also in areas that contribute to economic growth and productivity. Conservatives, it seems, have trouble handling the truth.
The researchers asked 7,800 Americans about their views on scientific professions ranging from anthropologists to biologists to atomic physicists, and examined the differences between people who identified as conservative or liberal.
They also tested five different interventions aimed at increasing trust in science. Even though messages were aligned with the subjects’ values, they didn’t work, suggesting “that their distrust is deeply-rooted and not easily changed.”
One of the researchers, Bastiaan Rutjens, said that while part of the explanation is that scientific findings often don’t align with conservatives’ political or economic beliefs, “science is also increasingly dismissed in some circles as a ‘leftist hobby’ and universities as strongholds of the leftist establishment.”
As the Trump administration continues to shift the U.S. from liberal democracy toward authoritarianism, the suppression of American science will likely get worse. This is of concern to all of us. The United States is after all the centre of global science and as science is diminished there it is diminished everywhere.
The distrust of science goes well beyond the U.S. of course, as our own experience illustrates. The Dutch study showed that the gap between conservatives and liberals was particularly large for climate scientists, medical researchers and social scientists and smaller for technical and applied disciplines, something reflected here in Alberta. Geneticist and environmental activist Dr. David Suzuki is persona non grata but technology that improves oil recovery is welcomed with open arms. To our Conservative government, facts are fine if they help make a profit, but if they threaten profits … not so much.
For any voter who believes that good science is essential to sound government policy-making, here is yet another issue to consider in the voting booth.