CHRIS MOONEY has a new book out, "The Republican Mind" (here's a brief essay-length version of the thesis), that looks from a frankly liberal standpoint at evidence that conservatives and liberals tend to have different character types and different attitudinal approaches to reality. There's plenty such evidence, and, before half the people who read this blog go ballistic, it really shouldn't be considered offensive to point out the correlations between character types and political affiliation. Anyway, Mr Mooney thinks that in a broad variety of political clashes—and here I'm just describing Mr Mooney's views so I can get to the main point—conservatives have a tendency to begin building alternate universes of fact that close off the possibility of debate. The most familiar and consequential example is the widespread conservative disbelief that the world is getting hotter, the sea level is rising, and it's happening because humans burn fossil fuels. And the concomitant widespread belief that the scientific consensus on climate change is some form of conspiracy or hoax.See full Article.
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