A topic turned wrong side out

"Science, like all other facets of the country’s intellectual life, was maimed by the Nazi regime," observes Oxford University Press. "Around it grew the rank and malodorous weeds of Aryan physics, biology and, worst of all, medicine. They were propagated not only by impressionable dunces but also by genuine Nazi zealots inside the scientific community and by a host of cynical opportunists, not all of them inferior intellects."

In the passage, picture "Trump" as the identifying regime and you can see the historical trio of dunces, zealots and cynical opportunists thick among the malodorous weeds of his midnight anti-science garden of evil. The inapplicable exception is that Hitler at least had the superior intellect of Wernher von Braun. Trump? Only cartoonish Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s.

Rick Mcgee, CagleCartoons

I cite Oxford, as does The NY Times in "Historians See Autocratic Playbook in Trump's Attacks on Science." The article's title is dispositive; so too is virtually all of its text. "Critics see Mr. Trump’s backers either as blind to the ubiquity of [his] authoritarian parallels and playbook or as trying to give the White House political cover," writes William Broad, a Times reporter with an academic background in the history of science.

He notes that Dr. Paul Josephson, a historian of Russia's 20th-century science and technology, "cast[s] Mr. Trump’s acts as brazenly totalitarian." Says Josephson: "Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had."

Broad also quotes UCLA's Dr. Daniel Treisman, coauthor of Spin Dictators. He remarks that today's authoritarians "want their own science" — the applied kind only, to develop, for instance, surveillance technologies — "not someone else’s. They don’t want to be lectured by liberals on inconvenient truths about the environment or health care." And they include Trump.

That, Mr. Broad makes clear. "Trump," he writes, "has long scorned experts as overrated and has stated that he prefers to rely on common sense and gut instincts." (Both might reliably inform you that the Earth is flat.) Said Trump at a 2016 rally, "The experts are terrible. Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have." (The unarticulated mess escaped the sight of most voters that year. Nonetheless ...)

Here we come to the odd part of the Times article. Note that I now refer to the piece as that of the Times, not Mr. Broad's. I take little risk in assuming that he, with a graduate degree in the history of science, knows better. But at the Gray Lady there are always the impossible editors, always trimming — trimmers being those "in law and politics" and journalism, I would add, who "attend carefully to competing positions and attempt to steer between the poles." (From Harvard Law Review.)

Brace for parts odd. "Few if any analysts see Mr. Trump as a Stalin ... or even as a direct analog to this era’s strongmen leaders." Emphasis mine, so that no reader misses the declarative sentence's immediate nullification: "But his assault on researchers and their institutions is so deep that historians and other experts see similarities to the playbook employed by autocratic regimes."

Say what? The Times deploys poor Mr. Broad to characterize Trump as indistinguishable from the very strongmen of this era to whom the paper insists he has no direct analog. Yet similarities = comparabilities; comparabilities = analogs; and analogs mean like. So while Trump is incomparable to today's anti-science autocrats — Bolsonaro, Xi, Putin, Orbán, each of whom the article takes direct care to reference  — on the other hand, he's just like them.

The editors don't steer between the poles, they simultaneously occupy both. Such journalistic trimming is odd, I wrote. But I confess — that was but a genteel euphemism for infuriating.

* This piece is cross-posted at Substack. Subscribe to be notified of new posts.