Resignation Watch

We’ve all been watching the great Republican purge for about one year now. Republicans like Dede Scozzafava and David Frum have been kicked out of being Republicans in good standing for not showing sufficient deference to wingnut orthodoxy. We’ve watched Republican party leaders like Michael Steele and Eric Cantor have to apologize for offending conservative entertainers like Rush Limbaugh. Lately though, there appears to be a bit of a pushback. Neocons are challenging Paulites and big government social conservatives have feuded with glibertarians. Now one NRO columnist, Jim Manzi, dares to take on conservative entertainer Mark Levin’s Libery and Tyranny book.

I started to read Mark Levin’s massive bestseller Liberty and Tyranny a number of months ago as debate swirled around it. I wasn’t expecting a PhD thesis (and in fact had hoped to write a post supporting the book as a well-reasoned case for certain principles that upset academics just because it didn’t employ a bunch of pseudo-intellectual tropes). But when I waded into the first couple of chapters, I found that — while I had a lot of sympathy for many of its basic points — it seemed to all but ignore the most obvious counter-arguments that could be raised to any of its assertions. This sounds to me like a pretty good plain English meaning of epistemic closure. The problem with this, of course, is that unwillingness to confront the strongest evidence or arguments contrary to our own beliefs normally means we fail to learn quickly, and therefore persist in correctable error.

That’s a lot of words to say the book has shoddy scholarship and is one-sided. It sounds like Levin is using the Ann Coulter trick of misrepresenting opponents arguments and having straw men attacks on those arguments. Jim Manzi is surprised by this?

I’m not expert on many topics the book addresses, so I flipped to its treatment of a subject that I’ve spent some time studying — global warming — in order to see how it treated a controversy in which I’m at least familiar with the various viewpoints and some of the technical detail.

It was awful. It was so bad that it was like the proverbial clock that chimes 13 times — not only is it obviously wrong, but it is so wrong that it leads you to question every other piece of information it has ever provided.

Does Manzi not watch Fox News or read his own website? One of his own co-bloggers, Jonah Goldberg, wrote a silly book called Liberal Fascism.

Levin argues that human-caused global warming is nothing to worry about, and merely an excuse for the Enviro-Statists (capitalization in the original) to seize more power. It reads like a bunch of pasted-together quotes and stories based on some quick Google searches by somebody who knows very little about the topic, and can’t be bothered to learn. After pages devoted to talking about prior global cooling fears, and some ridiculous or cynical comments by advocates for emissions restrictions (and one quote from Richard Lindzen, a very serious climate scientist who disputes the estimated magnitude of the greenhouse effect, but not its existence), he gets to the key question on page 184 (eBook edition):

[D]oes carbon dioxide actually affect temperature levels?

Levin does not attempt to answer this question by making a fundamental argument that proceeds from evidence available for common inspection through a defined line of logic to a scientific view. Instead, he argues from authority by citing experts who believe that the answer to this question is pretty much no. Who are they? An associate professor of astrophysics, a geologist, and an astronaut.

Yep. Most wingnut climate change denier writings come down to a massive conspiracy of scientist to steal our precious bodily fluids. Again, I ask, where has Manzi been for the last decade?

I’d like to hope that Manzi’s column would lead to a bit of soul-searching in the conservative intellectual world. As Balloon Juice is starting to document, so far the response has been to kill the messenger. Will Manzi soon announce that he’s taking a leave of absence to spend more time with his family?