Thinking about endorsements and breaking norms

SciAm breaks the norm of silence

A spate of controversy about newspapers endorsing or not endorsing Harris or Trump is making the rounds. Corey Doctorow writing for Medium comments:

Scientific American endorses Harris

“Conservatism never fails, it is only failed.”

If Trump’s norm-breaking is a threat to democracy (and it is), what should Democrats do? Will breaking norms to defeat norms only accelerate the collapse of norms, or do we fight fire with fire, breaking norms to resist the slide into tyranny?

Writing for The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein writes how “every time the forces of democracy broke a reactionary deadlock, they did it by breaking some norm that stood in the way.”

The tactic of bringing a norm to a gun-fight has been a disaster for democracy. Trump wasn’t the first norm-shattering Republican — think of GWB and his pals stealing the 2000 election, or Mitch McConnell stealing a Supreme Court seat for Gorsuch — but Trump’s assault on norms is constant, brazen and unapologetic. Progressives need to do more than weep on the sidelines and demand that Republicans play fair.

Luckily, some institutions are getting over their discomfort with norm-breaking and standing up for democracy. Scientific American the 179 year-old bedrock of American scientific publication, has endorsed Harris for President, only the second such endorsement in its long history.

Predictably, this has provoked howls of outrage from Republicans and a debate within the scientific community. Science is supposed to be apolitical, right?

Wrong. The conservative viewpoint, grounded in discomfort with ambiguity (“there are only two genders,” etc.) is antithetical to the scientific viewpoint. Remember the early stages of the covid pandemic, when science’s understanding of the virus changed from moment to moment? Major, urgent recommendations (not masking, disinfecting groceries) were swiftly overturned. This is how science is supposed to work: a hypothesis can only be grounded in the evidence you have in hand, and as new evidence comes in that changes the picture, you should also change your mind.

Conservatives hated this. They claimed that scientists were “flip-flopping” and therefore “didn’t know anything.” Many concluded that the whole covid thing was a stitch-up, a bid to control us by keeping us off-balance with ever-changing advice and therefore afraid and vulnerable.

This intolerance for following the evidence is a fixture in conservative science denialism. How many times have you heard your racist Facebook uncle grouse about how “scientists used to say the world was getting colder, now they say it’s getting hotter, what the hell do they know?” 

Sometimes, science can triumph over conservativism. But it’s far more common for conservativism to trump science. The most common form of this is “eisegesis,” where someone looks at a “pile of data in order to find confirmation in it of what they already ‘know’ to be true.” Think of those anti-mask weirdos who cling to three studies that “prove” masks don’t work. Or the climate deniers who have 350 studies “proving” climate change isn’t real.

Respecting norms is a good rule of thumb, but it’s a lousy rule. The politicization of science starts with the right’s intolerance for ambiguity — not Scientific American’s Harris endorsement. (emphases in original)

Can fighting norm-breaking fire with norm-breaking return fire be done in principled, good faith, pro-democracy ways? I don't see why not. In the midst of America's authoritarian radical right war on democracy and inconvenient facts and truths, sometimes one needs to do what is needed to mount a good defense. Norm breaking is not necessarily law breaking. 

After all, radical right authoritarians are openly attacking science they dislike. Is SciAm supposed to keep quiet in the name of allegedly apolitical science?  

But at this point in the war, what norms other than a few endorsements are left that can be broken to be meaningfully helpful in defending democracy? Is science supposed to be apolitical as the authoritarian radicals hypocritically claim? American's radical right authoritarian wealth and power movement politicized inconvenient science by weaponizing “bad” science, i.e., science contrary to radical authoritarian ideology.