A few days ago Donald Trump bragged on Twitter that the cancer death rate in the U.S. is “the Lowest in Recorded History.” “A lot of good news is coming out of the Administration,” he declared, taking credit for something neither he nor his incompetent administration had anything to do with. On the contrary, his administration is constantly trying to cut funding to the National Institute of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. And, since under Trump environmental safeguards have been loosened, the U.S. cancer rate, which went down sharply in the decade to 2016 according to the Center for Disease Control, is sure to go up once again.
In general, Trump loves to play fast and loose with science even though he has no formal training and not even a lay person’s knowledge of popular science. In this he’s following in the footsteps of autocrats of the past — and the result is likely to be similarly disastrous for the United States — as well as the rest of the world.
Like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler before him, Trump has an abominable taste in art. Stalin put an end to the bold artistic experimentation in the early years of the Soviet Union, decreeing vapid socialist realism to be the only acceptable style in the communist state, in the visual arts, music, and literature. Brilliant Russian avant-garde artists, composers, and writers had to either conform or be sent to the camps.
Hitler, a failed artist himself, hated the same kind of art as Stalin, i.e. everything abstract, cubist, expressionistic, untraditional. He declared it all “degenerate art” and threw such works out of German museums. Instead, Nazi artists were told to portray heroic warrior types and their wide-hipped female companions whose only mission in life was to produce apple-cheeked Arian children.
Trump’s personal taste runs in the direction of a brash nouveau riche esthetic. He loves multicolor marble and gold leaf, the more the better, and solid gold bathroom fixtures. It is a poor person’s notion of splendor, beauty, and luxury, and this is why kleptocrats and gangsters from poorer countries love to buy apartments in his towers.
But, unlike Stalin and Hitler, Trump is not imposing his taste on the rest of the country – at least not yet. He’s simply not interested: there’s no record of him ever setting foot into a museum, attending theater or reading a book. So, artistic establishment has been left alone — aside from the fact that Trump’s budgets provide absolutely no money for the support of culture and the arts.
Not so in science. In science, Trump is very much the heir to Stalin and Hitler — both because like them he’s a total ignoramus as far as science is concerned, and because his ignorance has not kept him from opining on the hot scientific issues of the day.
Stalin had strong views on what was true communist science (acceptable) and what was bourgeois pseudoscience (to be stomped out). Since his secret police were quick to arrest everyone who disputed Stalin’s opinions about anything, Soviet scientists tended to agree.
Stalin’s most famous attacks were aimed at computer science and genetics — incidentally, two disciplines which are spearheading technological progress in the 21st century. His damage to Russia’s biology establishment was especially severe. Before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russia had the world’s cutting edge biologists, and two of them were awarded Nobel Prizes. But in 1940 world-renowned geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested and left to starve in a Stalin death camp.
Genetic research was rooted out as bourgeois heresy whereas a charlatan, Trofim Lysenko, got Stalin’s ear and began applying his pseudoscientific methods to agriculture across the entire Soviet Union. He was joined by an army of like-minded “proletarian biologists”. The result was the destruction of Soviet food production for several generations to come, but there were even more sinister aspects to it. Since Stalin-approved science could not be at fault, thousands of peasants were sent to the camps for failing to meet grotesquely unrealistic production targets.
Hitler, meanwhile, was highly skeptical of Albert Einstein’s “Jewish science.” His rise to power was accompanied by the emergence of “Aryan physics”. The damage that was done to the Central European physics research by Hitler’s loony views – in Germany, Austria and Hungary above all – ensured that Americans would develop an atomic weapon first. And this, in turn, meant that Hitler simply had no chance of winning the war under any circumstances.
Despite not being a scientist, Trump is a climate change denier. He has repeatedly called it a hoax and even declared that it had been devised by the Chinese to impede US economic growth. He has incorrectly claimed that wind turbines cause cancer, slaughter birds and, anyway, trigger blackouts on calmer days. Under his leadership, US government agencies have stopped referring to climate change and no longer fund research in this area.
As a corollary to climate change denial, Trump has been creating difficulties for renewable energy producers and encouraging the production and use of fossil fuels, including coal. Environmental regulations, which protect both nature and human health, have been eased or rescinded. Ambitious goals for motor vehicle efficiency set by the Obama Administration have been abandoned—and the state of California was forbidden to stick to them when it wanted to do so.
Climate science in America has been politicized almost to the point of becoming “American climate science” that is different from regular climate science — much like “Soviet biology” and “Aryan Physics.”
But this is only the tip of an anti-science iceberg. A recent article in the New York Times reported cuts in spending on science research, termination of important scientific projects and hounding of scientists across the boards. Science is no longer respected and scientists’ advice in government is no longer sought or worse, pointedly ignored. Hundreds of scientists have left the public sector, ensuring that the damage from Trump’s policies will extend well beyond the term in office.
These trends are exacerbated by Trump’s immigration policies and America First slogans which translate into an anti-foreigner bias around the country. Many foreign scientists will now think twice before coming to the United States to work. Likewise students may decide no to come to the US to study — or to stay on after getting an American education.
This is nothing short of a disaster. America is a global leader in a large measure because of its prowess in science and technology. Global competition in innovation is intense, because everyone in the world realizes that those who control technology own the future.
Thanks to climate change denial in the US, which to be fair predated Trump, the country has already fallen behind China in electric vehicle technology. Renewable energy, which will be the source of jobs and economic growth in the future, is already a reality in the EU, but still in infancy in America.
For the past 500 years, denying science has been the best way to become a loser. While Spain and Italy burned their heretics at the stake, England was developing a scientific establishment, which allowed it to become a dominant world power. Southern European nations, previously the most developed in Europe, stagnated.
Similarly, neglecting science will inevitably make the United States a second-rate power, and, given the speed of modern progress, it could happen very quickly.
That said, the fact that the US is denying climate change is more dangerous for humanity at large, since it encourages inaction by other nations and inaction is causing irreparable damage to the planet. We will all be losers from “American climate science.”
