Winning Progressive

(By NCrissie B)

This week I’ll be looking at Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality.  Today we consider some of the false beliefs held by Republicans, and whether Democrats are equally committed to false beliefs.  In the next post, we’ll explore the research on why the two parties are not mirror-images, each stubbornly clinging to opposing false beliefs.  Finally, we’ll conclude with a brief interview with Mooney, and his proposals for bridging the partisan gap.

Chris Mooney is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a contributing editor for Science Progress. In 2009, he was a visiting associate at Princeton University’s Center for Collaborative History. In 2009–10, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mooney begins with an in depth review of the psychology of motivated reasoning and studies that show the persistence of motivated reasoning correlates to two of the Big Five personality traits: Openness (for which liberals typically score higher than conservatives) and Conscientiousness (for which conservatives typically score higher than liberals). We’ll discuss that more tomorrow, but I’ll start by reviewing Mooney’s argument on the comparative prevalence of false beliefs. I chose to start there for two reasons. First, it’s important to establish a problem exists before exploring possible causes and solutions. Second, Mooney laid much of that groundwork in a previous book – The Republican War on Science – and wrote The Republican Brain after and as part of reviewing research in psychology to better understand the ‘why’ of his previous book. So while I’m taking The Republican Brain book out-of-sequence, doing so follows Mooney’s own path of discovery.

Does the Problem Exist?

Mooney’s review of the research suggests that Republicans are, in fact, more likely to hold false beliefs. For example, a 2010 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes interviewed voters on several factual issues:

• The Track of the Economy – 72% of Republicans (vs. 36% of Democrats) said most economists agreed the economy was getting worse in November 2010. In fact most economists agreed the economy had begun to recover.
• The Affordable Care Act and the Deficit – 73% of Republicans (vs. 31% of Democrats) said the consensus of economists was that that the ACA would increase the federal deficit. In fact the consensus of economists was that the ACA would decrease the deficit.
• The Stimulus and Tax Cuts – 67% of Republicans (vs. 42% of Democrats) said the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act did not include tax cuts. In fact tax cuts comprised 28% of the stimulus package.
• Scientific Consensus on Climate Change – 62% of Republicans (vs. 26% of Democrats) said most scientists have not agreed that climate change is occurring. In fact the scientific consensus supporting climate change is overwhelming.
• President Obama’s Citizenship – 64% of Republicans (vs. 17% of Democrats) said it was not clear that President Obama was born in the U.S. In fact the State of Hawaii had already certified that he was born in that state.
• Chamber of Commerce and Foreign Money – 57% of Democrats (vs. 9% of Republicans) believed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had used contributions from foreign sources to support GOP candidates. In fact the Chamber of Commerce did not use foreign contributions.
• Democrats and TARP – 56% of Democrats (vs. 14% of Republicans) believed that Democrats in Congress mostly did not support the Troubled Asset Relief Program proposal. In fact Democrats in Congress supported TARP.
• Troop Levels in Afghanistan – 51% of Democrats (vs. 39% of Republicans) believed President Obama had not increased troop levels in Afghanistan. In fact he had.

Voters in both parties were misinformed, but Republican voters were more misinformed. Of the ten questions in the PIPA survey, only 18% of Republicans (vs. 32% of Democrats) answered at least seven correctly.

The Fact Checkers

Although Mooney criticized PolitiFact’s conclusion on a claim by Jon Stewart, he concedes that PolitiFact and FactCheck are generally rigorous and reliable. A review by the University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics blog found Republicans drew “False” or “Pants on Fire” ratings in 39% of the statements reviewed, vs. only 12% for Democrats, and statements by Democrats were rated “Half-True,” “Mostly True,” or “True” 75% of the time vs. only 47% for Republicans. Although the Smart Politics writers suggest this reflects selection bias among which statements to review, Mooney argues a simpler explanation: Republicans are more likely make false statements.

That explanation was supported by Mooney’s own review of The Washington Post‘s Fact-Checker, which uses “Pinocchios” to grade false or misleading statements. He and a colleague reviewed the Post‘s Fact-Checker stories over a four-year period, and found that statements by Republicans were given a total of 361 Pinocchios vs. 243 for statements by Democrats. The average rating for statements by Republicans was 2.46 vs. 2.09 for Democrats, a statistically significant difference. In assessing the number of Pinocchios given, he found:

• Four Pinocchios – Republicans 27, Democrats 11
• Three Pinocchios – Republicans 33, Democrats 24
• Two Pinocchios – Republicans 67, Democrats 46
• One Pinocchio – Republicans 20, Democrats 35

From this Mooney concludes:

What this suggests is that the Post was giving Democrats a lot of wrist-slaps for relatively minor sins, even as the most egregious falsehoods were clearly clustered at the Republican end of the distribution.

Again, the conservative response to such data is to suggest that Fact-Checker, like PolitiFact, is biased against Republicans. Again, Mooney suggests the simpler explanation: Republicans are simply more wrong, more often.

Science, Economics, and History

Mooney then presents other evidence of Republican orthodoxy in science, history, and economics which contradict prevailing data. For example, Republicans are less likely to accept scientific evidence on evolution, more likely to believe children raised in LGBT families suffer harm as compared to children raised by heterosexual couples, more likely to believe sexual orientation is a choice, and more likely to believe abstinence-only sex education produces fewer teen pregnancies.

In economics, Mooney quotes at length from an interview with Bruce Bartlett, a former Republican who worked for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Bartlett was fired from the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis after writing How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, and he uses words like “kooks” and “nuts” to describe Republicans’ belief that tax cuts always increase federal revenues and that defaulting on the federal debt would be harmless or even beneficial for the economy. Bartlett calls the latter “the most monumental insanity that I can even imagine.”

Mooney then addresses Republican historical revisionism, beginning with Sarah Palin’s infamous account of Paul Revere’s ride. He also discusses Mike Huckabee’s American history cartoons, Michele Bachmann’s claim that the Founding Fathers ended slavery, and the Wallbuilders headed by David Barton, a Dominionist group who argue the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation despite manifest historical evidence to the contrary.

What About the Fracking Democrats?

Mooney concludes by considering some false claims commonly believed by Democrats, such as that pumping chemicals into natural gas wells – hydraulic fracturing or fracking – pushes toxins into the water supply. In fact, Mooney set out to prove that in an article for Scientific American, and came up dry. While there is evidence of water contamination around fracking sites, the research so far suggests that contamination comes from other parts of the drilling process such as not properly cementing pipes and not properly storing chemicals at the drill sites. There is as yet no evidence that fracking causes the gas or the chemicals to leech up through a mile of rock into the water table. He also addresses false beliefs about the risks of nuclear power plants and the connection between immunization and autism, both of which are more often held by Democrats than by Republicans.

But in all three cases, Mooney points out two key distinctions. First, when presented with the scientific evidence, educated Democrats are more likely to change their minds and accept that fracking and nuclear power are not as risky as first believed, and that there is no reliable scientific correlation between immunization and autism. And second, while some Democrats do cling to one or more of these beliefs, elected Democrats who have reviewed the scientific evidence do not encourage or base policy on those false beliefs.

Conversely, educated Republicans are more likely to cling to false beliefs, and more likely to be confident they already have enough information and don’t need to consider new evidence. As we’ll see in the next post, the reason may lie in the different personality traits of Republicans and Democrats.

(Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com))

(By Joanne Boyer, cross-posted at Wisdom Voices)

Grassroots organizing.  Local communities reinserting themselves into the decision making process that impacts their communities. “We the People” reclaiming our role in democracy.  Those elements serve as the most effective tools at our disposal today to fight the environmental battles of the 21^st century says Thomas Linzey, Executive Director and co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (“CELDF”).

“There cannot be sustainability unless people who are impacted by certain decisions are actually making the decisions about what impacts their communities,” Linzey said in a recent interview with Wisdom Voices.  “We live in a system in which our communities have been systematically divested of almost any governing authority to say ‘no’ to the types of projects such as fracking coming into their communities.

“What that means is that under the system of law that we have, communities are prohibited from banning a ‘legal use’. That means that when the state or federal government legalizes a certain project or use by creating a permitting or regulatory structure for it, then municipalities are prohibited from then banning that use.

“And, if local communities attempt to then ban the use (like a corporate factory farm, or fracking project), then they are sued by the corporation whose project has been affected. And, through that suit, the corporation can demand damages from the municipality for “interfering” with its use. That result is produced by a combination of the doctrines of preemption (by which state law via the permitting process overrides any local control) and through corporate “rights” (by which corporations have certain constitutional “rights” to property that the municipality is then interfering with).”

Sound a bit daunting to those local communities trying to keep corporations from polluting or changing the environmental landscapes around the country?  That’s where Linzey’s organization comes in to help.

Founded in 1995, CELDF provides free legal services to community-based environmental organizations. Through their work, CELDF has become the principal adviser to residents, citizens groups, and municipal governments struggling to transition from merely regulating corporate harms to stopping those harms by asserting local, democratic control directly over corporations.

“The joke here is that we are the law firm of last resort,” Linzey said.  “People usually contact us after they’ve tried everything they’ve been told to do and still find they don’t have a remedy.  We’ve learned to have a lot of patience, because initially people think the system is something that it isn’t.  People don’t understand how the system works until they are in the jaws of it.  So, for example, if a factory farm is moving in next door, someone may say to themselves: ‘This is going to cost me 60 percent of my property value.  Surely, the system compensates me for that.’ And lo and behold, the system doesn’t.

“Communities generally believe that someone is looking out for them and intervenes in an unjust situation for them. And generally that’s just not true.  We have to explain to them that logically it isn’t true.  That in fact there’s a system of law created over the past 200 years that is all about resource extraction and use and not about the rights of nature or of people in communities.  The laws were established to protect production and commerce at all costs. That’s how the Constitution was written and it was a natural thing because the people who wrote the Constitution looked out and saw an endless bounty of natural resources.  Their interest was in building a nation state, not necessarily in advancing rights, especially at the expense of the production and the commerce that was necessary to build a nation-state.

“So what we got was a Constitution that put the rights of production and commerce above communities and nature. The Founders didn’t know anything about deforestation and global warming. They just thought that to become a great nation state you had to exploit your natural resources, and god knows they did a wonderful job with this Constitutional system they put in place.

“We are now in a different time and that means we need to look at what a new structure of governance looks like that wasn’t written in the 1790s.  But rather one that’s written today for the contingencies we are facing.”

And slowly but surely local communities are organizing and fighting back with new laws.  Currently, the Environmental Legal Defense Fund operates in 24 states and is creating an international presence.  “We assisted Equator with the drafting of a new constitution in 2008 that includes a ‘Rights of Nature.’  It’s a concept in which ecosystems in nature have the right to exist and flourish independently of human use of those natural resources.  It makes Equator the first country in the world to move from a property-based system of environmental protection to a rights-based system of protection.

“We now get calls from Nepal, Italy, different locations around the globe from people with a recognition that the existing systems we have that treat ecosystems as property just aren’t working and will eventually guarantee that the ecosystems we have will be extinguished.  This is actually one of the exciting pieces of our work, to see that we are beginning to move away from a corporate created system of protection toward one that is ecosystem centered.”

The work of community organizing and local governance restructuring is also happening within the United States.  Linzey points to the example of the City of Pittsburgh, whose city council in 2010 adopted a local bill of rights banning fracking of natural gas from the city, as one of the best examples.

“I’m inspired by the 140 municipalities in seven states who have said: ‘We’re done with the regulatory route.  We’re going to move to make new laws that actually protect our communities from these types of projects and corporations.’  So every day brings a new success story in terms of communities standing up on their feet and refusing to use the ‘corporate tools’ they’ve been left with to try to slow down environmental destruction.

“What we need now is for those 140 communities to become 10,000 and then those 10,000 communities need to stitch themselves together and push state constitutional change.  That’s when you begin to change the basic DNA of the system.  And then you have to have enough of those states join together for a federal Constitutional change.  A movement needs to be created, one that expands civil, political and environmental rights out at the local level and then drives it upwards against those other systems.  That’s when real change happens.

“What gives us hope is that people are finally pulling their heads out of the regulatory quagmire.  They have given up begging and pleading for regulatory agencies to do the right thing.  They’ve given up asking corporations to do no harm.  They’ve given up asking their elected officials to do something at the state and federal level and instead, they are beginning to take the law into their own hands.”

Find Out More

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund web site provides a full list of resources available and offers a wealth of information including updates from communities around the country in their efforts to fight back against fracking, factory farms, and other environmental issues.

“We’re beginning to awake from our slumber,” Linzey said.  “For decades we’ve ‘left it to the professionals’ to take care of the environment and the think was that that was good enough.  People are now figuring out that the professionals have things to gain from the system they created.  It’s up to us now.  The national government isn’t going to save us.  The state government isn’t going to save us.  It’s up to the communities to create this new system of law.”

For this weekend’s reading list we have articles on contraception and gender equality, how the safety net helps those in need, the lessons we can learn from the success of schools in Finland, the dangers of fracking, and what needs to occur in Afghanistan as our troops start coming home next year.

If you have comments on any of these articles, or would like to recommend an article for next weekend’s reading list, please let us know below or at the Winning Progressive Facebook page.

10 Facts About Contraception (and How It Changed the World) – a good overview of how contraception has helped increase gender equality throughout the world

Contrary to ‘Entitlement Society’ Rhetoric, Over Nine-Tenths of Entitlement Benefits Go to Elderly, Disabled, or Working Households – deconstructing the conservative myth that social safety net programs are somehow destroying the work ethic in the US

Schools We Can Envy – an overview of education success in Finland, and how it contradicts the testing and anti-teacher union agenda of education “reform” advocates here in the US

Why Not Frack? – a review of two books and a movie about the dangers of fracking and the impacts that the natural gas industry is having on local communities

Beginning of the End – a good overview of things that need to occur in Afghanistan as we prepare to begin bringing our troops home.

(By Josh Marks, cross-posted at Green Forward)

It is a rare sight to see an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker arrested while recording a public congressional hearing. But that is exactly what happened yesterday as “Gasland” director Josh Fox was handcuffed before a hydraulic fracturing hearing at the request of the Republican leadership of the House subcommittee on Science, Space and Technology.

Fox is making a follow-up to his critically acclaimed movie about the risks to public health and contamination of the water supply from chemicals used by the natural gas industry when they drill and then administer high-pressure injections into shale rock to fracture the shale and extract natural gas. His sequel explores the corrupt connection between the oil and gas industry and the United States government.

Anyone concerned about the First Amendment, Freedom of the Press and civil liberties should be outraged that the Republicans would first deny Fox a media credential, as was reported on many news sites, and then ask for him to be arrested for filming without a credential. This despite the fact that it was a public hearing where people take pictures and shoot amateur video of proceedings all the time. I have attended many of these public hearings and sat there with my video camera shooting and never have been asked to be removed.

And anyone concerned about the stranglehold the oil and gas industry have on Republicans in Congress and our government should be appalled at the arrest of Fox. There are serious questions that need to be asked about chemicals seeping into groundwater from the fracking method. This is about the public health of the citizens of the United States, not just about jobs and the economy in this rush to tap into every inch of shale rock for every drop of natural gas in this country.

And remember that these are the same anti-science Republicans who have done nothing to implement a renewable energy policy in America. Millions of jobs are being lost overseas because the United States does not incentivize clean energy nearly enough compared to subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. Republicans are in no position to talk about jobs when they refuse to allow America to compete in the global clean energy race with biofuel, biomass, wind power, solar power, tidal power, wave power, hydroelectricity and geothermal energy.

Here is Fox’s statement to the press followed by him talking about his arrest on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” with Ed Schultz.

I was arrested today for exercising my First Amendment rights to freedom of the press on Capitol Hill. I was not expecting to be arrested for practicing journalism.

Today’s hearing in the House Energy and Environment subcommittee was called to examine EPAs findings that hydraulic fracturing fluids had contaminated groundwater in the town of Pavillion, Wyoming. I have a long history with the town of Pavillion and its residents who have maintained since 2008 that fracking has contaminated their water supply. I featured the stories of residents John Fenton, Louis Meeks and Jeff Locker in GASLAND and I have continued to document the catastrophic water contamination in Pavillion for the upcoming sequel GASLAND 2.

It would seem that the Republican leadership was using this hearing to attack the three year Region 8 EPA investigation involving hundreds of samples and extensive water testing which ruled that Pavillion’s groundwater was a health hazard, contaminated by benzene at 50x the safe level and numerous other contaminants associated with gas drilling. Most importantly, EPA stated in this case that fracking was the likely cause.

As a filmmaker and journalist I have covered hundreds of public hearings, including Congressional hearings. It is my understanding that public speech is allowed to be filmed. Congress should be no exception. No one on Capitol Hill should regard themselves exempt from the Constitution. The First Amendment to the Constitution states explicitly “Congress shall make no law…that infringes on the Freedom of the Press”. Which means that no subcommittee rule or regulation should prohibit a respectful journalist or citizen from recording a public hearing.

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