Science vs. Politics

Much as I try to avoid any mention of Donald Trump anymore, believing that he is a distraction from America's real problem, I think we have no choice but to keep up the effort to prevent him from doing even more harm.

This video aids that effort, and I hope it gets the widest possible distribution.

I believe Trump is a distraction from America's real problem, which is captured by the phrase: "reflexive individualism disconnected from the common good."

That phrase comes from an article by Ross Douthat in the Sunday Review section of last Sunday's The New York Times.

I've described it as an essential feature of American culture - the failure to distinguish between civil rights and truth. We prioritize rights over responsibilities. You never hear "I got my responsibilities!" but you often hear, "I got my rights!"

And then we think our rights to the freedoms written into the Constitution extend to opinions, thus making any one opinion as valid as any other.  What Daniel Patrick Moynihan said about opinions bears repeating as often as possible and as long as it takes to sink in: 

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Until we get out from under the conviction that objective truth is of no consequence, we will never fix what ails us as a nation and as a people. Trump is simply an Enabler of that folly, and not the originator of it.

But, I repeat, he does real harm as an enabler, and the politicization of the Corona pandemic is a clear example of it; he has downplayed the risks of infection because his supporters mistake the stock market as the best sign of American economic health and buy into his argument that he is good for the economy. Even if the stock market did measure the economic health of the nation, instead of the wealth of the richest among us, the willingness of the president to sacrifice the poor, the elderly and the front-line workers who can't afford to shelter in place to cater to his uninformed base is a tragic indicator of individualism gone mad.

And bear in mind, if you are committed to truth as science defines it - the sum total of human knowledge to date, ever subject to change when called for by new, better information - it is entirely possible that these three scientists will turn out in the long run to be wrong about the wisdom of using face masks to fight Covid-19. But it is, at present, the best science-based informed opinion by the medical profession available to us. And since Trump has revealed on countless occasions that he will say or do anything that serves his own personal and political interests, no matter the cost to others, this is a case of science vs. corrupt politics.

I'm on the side of science.