Science vs. Populism And The Potential Fallout

I grew up in a home full of books. My father had only a primary Grade 6 education, but his love of reading made him amass nearly 10,000 books in his lifetime. The basement of my parents’ house looked like the stacks in a university library. His interests ranged from history to science, music, art and literature. He was a travelling salesman who sold ladies’ clothing to small town retailers across Ontario. If he wasn’t working, he was playing his guitar, sitting at the piano, or reading.

He encouraged me to be a reader at a very early age. There was always a book to show me, and I was a willing student. I fell in love with history, science fiction, science and nature. By the time I was a teenager, the science and nature books he bought me got me going on field trips studying plants, animals, rocks, minerals and more. I had a chemistry lab in the basement, grew pea plants to reproduce the experiments of Gregor Mendel. I had numerous fish tanks filled with all kinds of tropical and freshwater fish and crustaceans.

In university, I began studying geography and geology, but after an accident took a year off. When I came back, I decided to major in history. Even then, the history I often studied was science.

When I retired more than a decade ago, I picked up my interest in science right where I had left off. That is the reason for this blog. Science, however, these days is under attack. It is being discredited by populist rhetoric. No one should confuse science and populism. They are different, and when the latter rises to become the predominant way we are asked to think, and in how we are governed, it poses a threat to the future of humanity and the planet.

The Cause of Science

Science is defined by principles and methodology based on observation, hypotheses, experimentation, repetition and reporting. Scientific facts are not opinion-driven. They aren’t subjective. They don’t carry any bias. Science principles and methodologies that are poorly conceived and executed are weeded out through a peer review process.

Science tries to explain the observable Universe. It does this by asking questions that lead to experimentation and the observation of results. It is an iterative process that gains new insights into our Universe.

What Defines Populism

Populism isn’t scientific. It is political and ideological. It usually starts as a social movement opposing governing elites, whether economic, political, intellectual or religious.

The first noteworthy populist movement that I can relate comes from my study of Medieval History. The People’s Crusade was led by Peter the Hermit, an itinerant preacher who prior to the First Crusade organized a march of peasants across Europe to the city of Constantinople where the Eastern Roman Emperor responded by transporting them across the Bosporus to their ultimate demise facing the Seljuk Turks. The People’s Crusade was a spontaneous, grassroots movement of ordinary people motivated by religion and millennialist thinking.

The rise of Protestant Christianity in the 16th century also fits within the definition of populism, as do the American and French Revolutions in the 18th century. Populism never left America after the Revolution, reappearing as agrarian and social movements throughout the 19th century.

Russia in the 19th century saw populist peasant revolts. The Soviet Union owed its existence to Russian populist movements. The 19th and 20th century populist movements in France and Germany led to nationalist uprisings and increasing antisemitism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Nazism was a right-wing populist movement that gained power through the ballot box and fomented the Second World War and the Holocaust. Brexit was a populist movement that led to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union (EU). Current anti-immigration, Eurosceptic and populist-nativist political parties can be found in almost every EU member.

North America in the 21st century has not been spared. The American Tea Party that hatched Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was populist to the core. MAGA is nativist, anti-globalization, anti-immigrant, skeptical about vaccines and anti-science.

What is the prescription behind populism? Economic uncertainty, pandemics, war, religion, immigration, poverty and politics. The current Trump tariff war reflects populism manifested in nativist policy.

The following chart summarizes the comparison between populism and science:

The Current Populist Threat

The Donald Trump administration is taking a populist hammer to America’s “elite” universities of late. It is a declaration of war against universities like Columbia and Harvard. This insertion into higher learning isn’t about free speech or about pro-Palestinian versus pro-Israeli on-campus rhetoric, but rather a political agenda backed by MAGA populism.

The threat to universities from populism is real. Universities are bastions of scientific thinking and discovery. Now, research grants are dependent on meeting the right populist point of view.

Trump is replacing scientists with quacks. He has appointed a vaccine skeptic to head up the country’s health science research. He has anti-climate political appointees running government agencies responsible for environmental and scientific research.

The scientific method is being replaced by opinion. Science is being censored with significant implications for the United States and the planet.

Populist thinking produces bad science, as history has shown us. China’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 is a prime example of populism targeting intellectuals and scientists, leading to a catastrophic impact on the country that lingered for more than a decade after.

The anti-vaxxer movement is another good example, with expert opinion being outweighed by celebrity videos touting non“common sense” non science nonsense. The current result is a growing global measles epidemic, a disease for which we have had a proven vaccine for decades. It doesn’t bode well if populism ends up leading to the death of millions who have been persuaded not to be vaccinated for the next pandemic, considering the backlash from COVID-19 and the anti-vax rhetoric of the Trump administration.