Larvatus Prodeo

With George W. Bush having a little over a week in office left to go of what has been a very long eight years, it’s timely to turn to the question of the long term implications for the political strength of the right of stances which refuse to engage with reality. In that context, John Quiggin has an interesting post on science and the right. I don’t agree with all he says about the “science wars”, but I think he’s spot on both with his lapidary analysis of the affinities between climate change denialism and right wing politics and in this observation:

The issue is not going to go away, regardless of the short-term success or failure of attempts to reach a global agreement to stabilise the climate. The more clearly the political right is identified with the anti-science side of this debate, the harder it will be to salvage any of its existing institutions.

Kevin Rudd’s rhetoric in 2007 recognised that Australian politics deals particularly badly with long term issues. Our statist political culture means that interest groups of all kinds seek to cut deals for whatever their short term interests require, and the veneer of “ideas” – particularly neo-liberal ones – is particularly thin, hardly sufficing to pave over the cracks of corporate self-interest. Rudd, of course, has hardly fulfilled the hopes he himself aroused. But surely it’s worth wondering what long term costs the right will bear after the time passes when denialism loses any patina of plausibility.