I just read "Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America From the Attack on Reason" by David Niose, former president and present legal advisor of the American Humanist Association and author of "Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans."
The first of two main themes is the book's appreciation of reason and evidence, as opposed to ideology, faith, belief, intuition or your daddy's opinions as the basis for public policy. Rational, human-centered decision-making has gained little traction lately in America. Instead, religious fundamentalism, militaristic chest-thumping, anti-government ideology, and corporate cash have dominated. President Obama achieved a historic breakthrough with a health care bill that expands coverage to more Americans, but even here deference had to be paid to corporate dominance of medicine and insurance, so the coverage was neither as comprehensive nor as public as it should have been. And conservatives continue fussing endlessly about this deeply humane measure.
The clearest examples of America's flight from reason are conservatives' anti-science beliefs. Less than half of Americans agree with the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans developed from earlier species of animals. Incredibly, 42 percent believe God created humans within the past 10,000 years. Only 47 percent of Republicans agree that global warming is even happening. Six of the 14 Republican presidential candidates opine that global warming isn't real, and seven say it's not caused by humans. Front-runner Donald Trump considers global warming to be "not a big problem at all. I think it's weather; I think it's weather changes." Anti-abortion zealots believe a nearly invisible fertilized egg is fully human with all the implied constitutional rights, and that aborting it is murder despite that most fertilized eggs miscarry.
One source of such irrationality is religious fundamentalism, by which I mean the unquestioning acceptance of religious beliefs regardless of evidence or practical effect. It's fine, for example, to be inspired by the symbolism of the Christian Bible, but once one believes in the literal truth of "miracles," one is fair game for all sorts of nonsense.
On the bright side, Niose notes that America's religiosity is now declining, that only 37 percent of Americans attend weekly religious services, 20 percent have no religious affiliation, 31 percent do not believe in a personal god, and many profess atheism, humanism or agnosticism. He calls on secular humanists to emerge as a declared political force, to make the case for rational policies, and to be publicly open about their non-theistic conclusions. He does not call for Americans to drop their religion, but he does call for those who really aren't religious to recognize the importance of being honest about it. In Niose's opinion (and mine too, or I wouldn't be writing about it), this will promote progressive policies by helping break the stranglehold that anti-intellectual conservatives, many of them religious fundamentalists, have on our politics.
Niose's second big theme is the domination of public life by corporate institutions. Relative to the industrialized world, America has lurched far to the right politically. This, Niose argues, is because our many thousands of richly-endowed publicly-traded corporations have gained the upper hand over mere humans. Public corporations are legally bound to serve their own bottom line. Actual humans who challenge corporate positions on such issues as the environment or worker welfare are disadvantaged because, as one ExxonMobil board member put it, "It's very much a take-no-prisoners culture. We will not settle to avoid a struggle. We will use our superior resources to fight and appeal for as long as possible." And fight they do, especially for favorable national legislation.
Supreme Court decisions play a big role. In the 1970s, Congress passed measures to regulate election financing, only to see them struck down by a court ruling that election spending is constitutionally protected "speech." In 2002, new campaign finance laws sharply limited political fundraising, but the court's 2010 Citizens United decision effectively declared that corporations are people, and are thus entitled to First Amendment free speech protections including the right to funnel essentially unlimited funds to political campaigns. Corporations' immense financial resources thus imply corporate control of the American political process. The recent escalation of campaign financing bears out this analysis.
Given the Court's decisions, this problem can only be fixed by constitutional amendments permitting regulation of campaign financing and ending corporate personhood. Bernie Sanders and other progressives have offered such an amendment. According to Sanders, "Nobody I know thinks that ExxonMobil is a person." Unfortunately, no such measures have come close to passage -- yet.
Commentary on 10/06/2015