It is a common practice for folks to criticize the Right Wing in the United States for being "anti-science". Climate change denial and "anti-evolution" education being the most noticeable examples. It is also common for the "American Left" to chastise and mock the Right about this. The left should not.
I posit both sides accept the science that matches their pre-scientific values, or at least tolerate (i.e., Ben Carlson's acceptance of antibiotic science and the Bush families utilization of paleontology in oil and gas exploration; while both rejecting evolution through selection and old earth geology, but i digress) and rely on the science, while denying it.
The Left or as it is now sometimes called, the "Regressive Left", accepts basic science for the most part, but often dismisses the core of liberalism on the grounds of relevance , or refuses to apply the science because doing so would skewer a sacred cow.
An example of the latter is the hostility towards the integration of what we now know about evolution and genes, into the social sciences, law, etc. Try bringing up Cultural Universals in a group of regressive liberals when talking about violence and prejudice, and many other topics. Anything that is not on the "nurture side" of the nurture/nature debate (which is not a scientific debate anymore. Behavior is a relationship between a phenotype and an environment in a state of constant change; ie. it is naturenurture...) is deemed anathema ex cathedra. The role of what is in the "wetware" and what is learned after birth are not united by the regressive left to actually try to address the problems they are supposedly concerned about.
The end of liberalism
Historically, the concept of "liberal" was part of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Adam Smith was a liberal.
“If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
I think that both the left and right have in essence embraced in their own ways and per their member's perceived pre-scientific self identifications; identity politics .
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
So many groups, position, differences. Whether it is the discriminated against while male, females, people of colour, or other social subdivision of homo Sapiens into a minutiae of MOPES*; we are pulling apart while doing the same thing as the other is. In times of stress, pseudospeciation can infect everyone. Are we no longer even paying lip service to the central tenet of the enlightenment, as so well put by Maajid Nawaz, "No idea above scrutiny, no person below dignity."?*Most Oppressed People Ever
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