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Senator Chris Murphy (D, Connecticut): To me, a progressive foreign policy is internationalist. Photo: Zach Gibson/Getty Images

Donald Trumps air strike against the Assad regime didnt do much to resolve the conflict in Syria but it did do a great deal to expose the conflict over foreign policy within the Democratic Party.

Hours after the attack, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate applauded the presidents decision to answer Bashar al-Assads use of chemical weapons in the language of force. By the end of the ensuing week, only five Democratic senators had voiced opposition to a unilateral military intervention ordered without congressional approval by a man their party had just recently deemed a mentally unsound puppet of Vladimir Putin who could never be trusted with the nuclear codes.

Which is to say: Eight years after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination on the strength of his caution about knee-jerk-liberal interventionism, most elected Democrats remained credulous toward that creed.

Their voters felt differently. A Gallup poll taken in the strikes immediate aftermath found that 61 percent of Democrats opposed Trumps decision. But if the progressive base is against the reflexive use of American missiles, its not entirely clear what the movement is for on matters of foreign affairs.

The policy debates that animated Democrats in the 2016 primary were almost exclusively domestic ones. On the home front, progressives fought over how to advance a set of shared, affirmative goals among them the establishment of universal health care, paid family leave, financial reform, and affordable higher education. But on foreign affairs, the partys left flank offered little beyond condemnation of Hillary Clintons hawkish history.

Chris Murphy is one of the few elected Democrats who both prioritizes issues of foreign policy and calls for the United States to exercise greater restraint in its use of military force. The Connecticut senator espouses a kind of progressive realism. He believes that Washingtons foreign-policy establishment routinely deludes itself about the limits of American military power. But he also insists that our nations supreme wealth and might can and should be used to proactively advance human welfare and national security. Last month, Murphy released a report titled Rethinking the Battlefield, which calls for doubling Americas budget on diplomacy and foreign aid, so as to provide policy makers with viable, nonmilitary means of addressing threats to human rights and global stability. We spoke last week with Murphy about his vision for the future of American foreign policy.

Lets start with an easy one: What would a properly progressive response to the Syrian civil war have looked like? There was never going to be a U.S.-led military solution in Syria and we should have understood that from the start. What we did in Syria was to give just enough support to the Syrian rebels so that they could keep the fight up but never enough for the rebels to actually prevail over the Assad regime. In Syria, a progressive foreign policy would have shown military restraint, while pumping up our ability to gain political leverage over Syrias benefactors, and providing humanitarian funding to make sure that anybody that wanted to leave Syria could.

I think the way in which we fund foreign policy didnt allow us to meet those two alternative avenues. One, we simply dont have a lot of levers in a relationship with Russia because we have no effective means to counteract the work they do to try to use energy to bully their neighbors or spread their message or propaganda. And we continually underfund humanitarian accounts such that we effectively trap people inside Syria because they couldnt support the refugee flows coming out of that country.

You think that with a greater investment of smart power, we would have had enough leverage over Russia to get them to withdraw their support for the Assad regime? Probably not. But I think we would have been in a better position if we had other means of leverage over Russia. If we, for instance, had an account that funded energy independence in and around Russia, one that put money behind creating gas and oil interconnections, so that countries didnt have to rely on Russia, that would give us additional leverage over Russia in conversations about Syria.

I think most of the Washington foreign policy establishment exists in a fantasy world when it comes to Syria. They fundamentally dont understand that Russia and Iran, from the beginning, had much more at stake in Syria than the United States did. Russia and Iran were going to do everything possible in order to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. U.S. military support to the rebels has had the effect of simply prolonging the war that ultimately Assad will likely win. Thats abhorrent to me. I lose sleep over the fact that Bashar al-Assad may eventually control the majority of the territory in Syria. But that has likely been the inevitability from the beginning.

About that foreign-policy establishment: The Obama administration famously developed an antipathy for Washingtons bipartisan foreign-policy elites. Some members of the administration reportedly took to referring to that establishment as the blob and to many foreign-policy thank tanks as Arab-occupied territory, in light of how much Gulf-state money is invested in those institutions. Do you sympathize with those sentiments? Specifically, do you think there is a structural bias towards both intervention in the Middle East and unconditional support for Saudi Arabia, which is due, in some part, to how foreign-policy think tanks are funded? I think when you have so many people working for American-based think tanks, and American-based defense companies, there is always going to be a bent towards proposing American-led solutions for foreign problems. People get paid big money in Washington to come up with ways that America can fix problems overseas, and they are not always right. There is not an American-led solution to what is happening today in Syria. Ultimately, stability in Syria will come from decisions made on the ground by the Syrian people and by their immediate neighbors. Now, the United States can assist in that effort. We can help convene those conversations. But its not going to be U.S. military support for the rebels that is going to ultimately be dispositive in a political solution like Syria.

I cant represent whether thats accurate about the Obama administration or not. Others have written that. But I have tended to be countercultural in some of my foreign-policy views because I think that the foreign-policy establishment here sometimes continues the trend of American hubris, the belief that America alone can come up with a plan to cure the ills of foreign lands.

What about the specific role that the Saudis play in our politics? Youre one of the few members of Congress who has expressed concern about American support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen. Why do you think the Assad regimes horrific gassing of 80 Syrians causes so much more moral concern in Washington than the Saudis inducing famine conditions in Yemen, a human-rights violation that threatens the lives of millions? I continue to be perplexed at this towns unabashed and largely unconditional support for the Saudis. The Saudis are doing horrible things inside Yemen. Thousands of civilians have been killed, many of them targeted intentionally by Saudi bombs. The Saudis are directly funding a version of Islam that is used as the building blocks for the very extremist groups that we are fighting. Whether the Saudis like it or not thats the truth.

I dont know why the Saudis have so much influence in this town given the fact that their human-rights record is amongst the worst in the world, and their support for a very intolerant version of Islam is one of the reasons why we have such a big extremist problem on our hands.

Would you support suspending arms sales to the Saudis? Or, how would you go about dealing with Riyadh, if you had more of the smart power resources that you believe we should fund? The only tools that we have to win friends today are, largely, military tools. We build an alliance with Saudi Arabia through massive military sales because we dont have other real tools to deploy. If we had real economic-assistance dollars that could help the Saudis convert their economy, or help partner with them to build up stability inside Yemen, we might be able to avoid some of the traps that occur when all we can do is transfer military equipment.

I am a proponent of suspending the U.S.-Saudi military relationship as it relates to Yemen. I think the United States should stop funding the civil war inside Yemen.

Lets turn to the big picture: What are the key tenets of your vision for a progressive, 21st-century foreign policy and what distinguishes that vision from the policy America pursued under our last Democratic president? To me, a progressive foreign policy is internationalist. It recognizes that America can play a role for good in the world and understands that America has to be deployed outside of our borders in order to protect ourselves from attack.

A progressive foreign policy also understands that there are limits to the blunt force of military power. So long as the president has almost no substantial nonmilitary tools to confront the new threats presented to this country, then whether he or she be Republican or Democrat, the president is always doomed to fail overseas. I unveiled a very detailed plan two weeks ago to pump up the nonmilitary tool kit thats available to every president in order to protect ourselves abroad. I dont think a progressive foreign policy is about stealing money from the military in order to fund nonmilitary power. I just think that we have badly underresourced the ways in which America projects its power through non-kinetic means.

Now progressive foreign policy also has other components to it. You shouldnt be engaging in military force without the support of the American public and the authorization of Congress. Progressive foreign policy also believes in international institutions and the value of doing things in a multilateral fashion.

The Obama doctrine is, to the extent it existed, at its roots based in progressive foreign policy the idea that American military power cant solve complicated political problems overseas. Admittedly restraint was often, but not always, practiced by the Obama administration. They got into some messy entanglements in places like Syria and Yemen that just showed the limits of American military power and the harm that can be caused if you exercise it in the wrong way.

You said that you didnt want to steal money from the military. But one of the lefts priorities on foreign policy, in past eras, was to radically reduce Americas defense budget. The U.S. already spends an enormous amount on its military, more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, France, India, and Germany combined. By contrast, we spend relatively little on feeding our poor, educating our children, and caring for our sick. Every time Trump orders an air strike these days, liberals on Twitter lament that our government could have ended the Flint water crisis for less money than it cost to build the expended bombs.

As a supporter of a larger defense budget, how you would respond to two progressive criticisms of that proposal: First, that our government shouldnt spend more on its military until it can afford to provide basic social services to its citizens. And second, that spending such outsize sums on the military perpetuates an institutional bias towards intervention that leads to bad outcomes. (If you build it, the war will come, in other words.) Our national security policy should never be dictated by the amount of jobs created in the United States, right? I mean Im very supportive of the defense jobs that exist in Connecticut, but not for the sake of those jobs in and of themselves. I believe that the capabilities created by submarines and jet engines and helicopters ultimately help protect America. I argue that a modern progressive foreign policy celebrates the strength of the U.S. military.

We have burdens that no other country has. We have treaty obligations that keep vast lots of the globe safe. We have the burden of protecting the free navigation of the seas. The United States, whether we like it or not, has security burdens all over the world that necessitate a pretty large expenditure of our funds on defense.

I think, broadly, the American public supports a very strong military, so I think Democrats would be swimming pretty hard upstream if we were arguing for massive transfers of funding from the Department of Defense to other accounts.

I think you can have it all. I think you can have a strong military and you can build up these nonmilitary tools that will make it less likely that you are going to have to use that military power overseas. Listen, maybe down the line, if you had real anti-propaganda resources and real energy independence resources, and real economic empowerment resources, you might not need the military at the size that it is today. But thats not today.

In a column you wrote with senators Brian Schatz and Martin Heinrich for Foreign Affairs, you argued that military interventions should focus on creating space for local political solutions to the underlying problems for unrest. And if there is no achievable political solution on the ground, it should cause Congress to question the wisdom of the proposed military action.

It seems to me, in debates over intervention, very few people argue for military action, even though they, themselves, admit there is no achievable political solution to the conflict. So the question is: How do we know that there will or will not be a political solution in advance of intervention? How do you think Congress should go about discerning the feasibility of a political solution? And what conclusion would your method have reached about our intervention in Libya? Understanding whether there is an achievable political solution on the ground in a war zone is not a science. Its an inexact art, so theres no formula to determine that. My argument is that that discussion is not happening in a realistic fashion. People are too often ignoring the complicated political realities and fashioning fantasy constructs of how various sects and factions are going to come together and live in harmony. I think there are a number of different questions that you look to, including whether theres a recent history of effective central governance. You look at how many different factions and sects exist within a space. Is there a history of those factions working together or living inside a government together? You have to ask all of those questions.

I think Libya was a very hard case because in a fairly closed state, it was hard to know what would happen after Gaddafi fell. But we clearly didnt ask those questions. We didnt have that conversation. We made a decision to use military force in order to protect civilians. Thats a laudable goal, but because we didnt have the conversation about the political after-effects, we ended up creating chaos on the ground that has arguably killed more civilians than were at risk when we launched the bombing campaign. In Libya, in retrospect, it doesnt appear that we have either saved lives or added to political stability by making the decision to militarily intervene.

Another foreign-policy issue that, in the past, has been a focus for progressives is nuclear de-proliferation. Do you think President Obamas decision to spend a trillion dollars on modernizing Americas nuclear arsenal was a wise one? Like I said, we have burdens that no other country has. And part of the way that we enforce our treaty obligations is by having a fairly massive nuclear deterrent, to dissuade countries that might think about invading mainland Europe or Japan or Korea. I think theres always a discussion as to how much money you put into nuclear modernization. I have a lot of questions about some of these smaller-scale nuclear weapon delivery systems. I really worry about a trend towards smaller nuclear warheads that can be deployed tactically. But, in general, I think youve got to maintain a robust nuclear deterrent.

On those burdens: What do you say to those on the left who thought Donald Trump actually had a point about NATO or about our East Asian allies that it would be fair to expect them to contribute a larger share into the cost of their defense, and to make themselves less reliant on our military for their security? I think its a fair criticism of NATO that those countries have not been spending as much on defense as promised in the underlying agreement. But lets remember that the mutual defense provision in the NATO treaty has only been exercised once and it was by the United States asking European nations to come to our defense. I agree that some of our friends should have more capacity to defend themselves. But I also think we should recognize what the real story of NATO is.

In the Middle East, a lot of people said, Instead of defending our friends in the region, we should just sell arms to them and let them defend themselves. Well, look whats happening in Yemen today. We decided to sell a lot of arms to the Saudis and asked them to defend themselves. They took those arms and have ended up killing thousands of civilians inside Yemen and freeing up territory for ISIS and Al Qaeda to grow, threatening the United States. Sometimes when we decide to hand weapons over to our allies so that they can defend themselves, it comes back to bite us in the ass.

The Trump administrations affinity for foreign tyrants has drawn attention to a perennial dilemma in American foreign policy: When our narrowly defined national interests conflict with our our broader goals of promoting democracy and human rights, how should we balance these imperatives? To take one example, do you think the American government should cut off funding to Sisis Egypt to punish its human rights abuses, or subordinate our humanitarian concerns to support a (supposed) ally in the fight against ISIS? I dont think you can avoid situations where there are conflicts between immediate security interests and long-term human-rights concerns. But they dont exist in as many places as we think. The fact of the matter is, in Egypt, the Sisi government is likely creating more radicals than they are eliminating, and Trumps idea to continue to provide funding to Sisi with no strings attached is going to end in the massive radicalization of jailed Egyptians. And that ultimately presents a threat to the U.S. homeland. In most cases, our investments in authoritarian regimes with bad human-rights records end up hurting our core national security concerns.

Do you believe that the drone strike program has been similarly self-defeating? Have our drone strikes made the world safer? Or has their toll in civilian casualties been unacceptable ethically, and counterproductive strategically? I support a drone program that specifically targets very bad guys that present an immediate threat to the United States. The drone program we have today, by some reports, kills the right person only 5 percent or 10 percent of the time. Thats not acceptable. We have become complacent about the civilian casualties and the accompanying effects on U.S. national security. When these civilian populations are targeted by drones and they see good guys being killed 90 percent of the time and the bad guys being killed 10 percent of the time that feeds right into the terrorists recruitment material. Im not somebody that says we should get rid of the drone program, I just think we have to have some better oversight of it, to make sure that the intelligence is pretty rock solid before we start firing.

Independent from the executive? You could have it in the Executive branch. You could have a quasi-judicial oversight of that program. I dont think it makes sense to have congressional oversight. But I think whatever weve been doing thus far has clearly not exercised the right amount of caution.

One foreign policy issue that Democratic voters have strong and often, diametrically opposed views on is the Israel-Palestine conflict. Polls show that younger progressives are much more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than their elders. And many such voters, along with pro-Israel, anti-occupation groups like J Street, believe that the United States should do more to discourage Israeli settlement expansion, and bring an end to the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. Do you agree? I think that conflict is very hard to resolve given the existing leadership on both sides of the divide. The United States has always had a tricky position. We have to stand by Israel as a sacred friend in that region, but we also know historically that no deals get done unless the United States isnt willing to tell some hard truths to Tel Aviv. The settlement construction under Netanyahu did make peace less likely because it ultimately carved out sections of a future Palestinian state in a way that wasnt constructive. I think, Im a believer in supporting Israel, but also in not being afraid to call them out, when theyre doing something that isnt ultimately good for peace.

I think you can walk that line. I dont support those that the only way you are a friend to Israel is to support whatever the existing government asks you to support.

Why do you think there isnt a mobilized constituency for the foreign policy you describe, and do you have any ideas for how to change that fact? I think the relative dormancy in the Democratic Party on foreign relations is a natural extension of having a president be in power that the grassroots largely believed in, when it came to foreign affairs. There are points where I departed from Obamas foreign policy. But by and large, the base was supportive of a president who was pulling us out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was talking about the value of American ideals, not just American intervention, abroad. I think its natural for a party who has a president in the White House to take the foot off the gas when it comes to building a grassroots constituency around foreign affairs.

Its somewhat ironic given that some of the most active organizing groups in the Democratic constituency flow out of foreign affairs. Many of the groups like MoveOn, that are still at the center of the progressive establishment, built up their credibility in opposition to the Iraq War. I hope it doesnt take another war for the Democratic Party to build up a capacity on foreign policy but I understand why this wasnt a centerpiece. We also had a massive recession and 10 percent unemployment. For a good part of the last decade there was a reason why the Democratic Party was focused on domestic politics: We had a whole lot of people out of work.

This Photo of Martha Stewart Giving the Finger to a Donald Trump Portrait Is Everything

Michelle Obama Accidentally Tweets Former Staffers Cell-Phone Number to 7 Million People

Debra Messing Delivered Her GLAAD Media Awards Speech to Ivanka Trump: Start Defending What You Say You Believe In

The Trump supporter will be challenging a Democrat-controlled seat in Southern California.

To state the obvious, you dont want your national security adviser compromised by the Russians, the former acting attorney general testified.

He has just nominated ten federal judges. Democratic senators can use the arcane blue slip practice to block three.

The liberal network continues to bring on former Fox News talking heads.

Ever-anxious about their first-in-the-nation status yet happy to leverage it, Iowans lean into another caucus cycle.

Or rather, Trump thought he was kidding.

If women wanted to pay the same amount as men, they should have thought of that before they got a uterus.

The party came into power promising a string of high-speed victories. Now, after a lot of screwups and delays, its mired down.

Abdul Hasib died in an April 27 raid, along with dozens of ISIS fighters, in eastern Afghanistan. He had led the terror group for less than a year.

They may replace some academics with people who work in the industries being regulated.

He hopes theyll look at the facts and speak the truth, even when it contradicts party positions though thats not really their style.

Local authorities could face fines or jail time for refusing to comply with federal immigration officials.

Kim Hak-song, a university professor, is the fourth U.S. citizen currently imprisoned in North Korea.

Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut is trying to sell liberals on restrained realism in Syria and other global hot spots.

In his new book, longtime urban optimist Richard Florida appears worried.

Macron won big over a right-wing nationalist in Frances election. That was the easy part.

The European political Establishment exhales.

Link:
This Senator Wants to Make Foreign Policy Progressive Again - New York Magazine

You may have heard alarms that if we hold a national convention for proposing constitutional amendments the gathering would be an uncontrollable constitutional convention (con-con) that could propose anything at all.

The claim is called the runaway scenario. It has almost no basis in history or law. But it has long frightened Americans away from using the Constitutions chief mechanism for bypassing Congress and curing our dysfunctional federal government.

Now we have more information about how it was conjured up.

Last year, the Article V Information Center published my paper showing that confusion between an amendments convention and a constitutional convention first arose in the 20th century. The paper further documents how, during the 1960s and 1970s, leading establishment liberals, such as Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen and Kennedy confidant Arthur Goldberg, capitalized on that confusion by raising the runaway specter.

The paper concluded that their plan was to scare people away from using the Constitutions convention mechanism. Their goals were twofold. First, they wanted to protect from reversal by constitutional amendment several Supreme Court decisions that had proved highly controversialamong them Roe v. Wade, the case that legalized abortion nationwide. Second, they sought to block growing momentum for amendments imposing term limits and requiring a federal balanced budget.

Now the curator of the Article V Library has produced more evidence confirming these conclusions.

The Article V Library collects every state legislative resolution calling for an amendments convention. It also offers features for screening them by subject and for ascertaining which are still in effect.

Without prior knowledge of my own conclusions, Robert Biggerstaff, the librarys curator, conducted an n-gram search in Google Books to find out when the phrase runaway convention arose (now updated to 2008, the last year for which data are available). He discovered that the term was almost unknown until around 1960when it suddenly became extraordinarily common. Usage rose to counter rising popular demand for constitutional amendments. In the 1990s, as momentum for amendments abated, so also did resort to the runaway scenario. Another n-gram search shows that the abbreviation con con, widely used by convention opponents, also was invented around 1960.

Biggerstaff notes: In the 1950s and 60s progressives actively sought change through courts when it was not possible through legislatures. This was an express tactical choice to seek through judicial activism what was stymied by legislatures.

However, their strategy had what he calls an Achilles heel. Supreme Court decisions can beand several times have beenoverturned by constitutional amendment. After the Supreme Court required states to reapportion their legislatures in the 1960s, for example, 33 of the necessary 34 state legislatures filed applications demanding a convention to propose an amendment reversing the courts rulings.

As a result, Biggerstaff says, it became important to neuter the Article V Amendment processparticularly to prevent triggering by convention applicationsto protect progressive successes achieved in the courts.

Biggerstaff concludes that this was why the runaway convention fiction suddenly emerged from nowhere during the 1960s. In his view, generating unwarranted fear of the Article V convention process was a ploy introduced by progressives as a way to prevent states from countering progressives use of judicial activism.

Rob Natelson is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence and heads up theArticle V Information Centeratthe Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver. He was previously a constitutional law professor.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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How progressives promoted the 'runaway convention' myth to save judicial activism - The Hill (blog)

With just one day left until South Koreaspresidential election, many are busy speculating who will lead the country.Meanwhile, someare trying to tackle this incredibly challenging question about the future of the country: What will people eat while watching the post-election coverage?

Spoiler alert: Fried chicken won the poll, but not by an absolute majority.

On May 6, Realmeter released the result of a riveting poll commissioned byTBS radio show host Kim -jun, likely as a joke. When Kwon Soon-jung, a Realmeter researcher, reported the poll results on Kims radio program, Kim laughed so much that Kwon had to tell him to stop.

Joke or no joke, the poll really happened. Here are its results. 502 respondents told researcherswhich late-night snack theyd consume on election day. Illogically enough, respondents were categorized by political tendency, supporting candidate, supporting party and age among others (I mean, does your political preference say anything about your love of pork belly?).

Predictably, the most popular choice was fried chicken. South Korea didnt get its nickname, the Chimaek (fried chicken and beer combo) Republic, for no reason. Other popular Korean dishes, from jokbal (pork trotter) to tteokbokki (stir-fried rice cake with pepper sauce), didnt even come close to fried chickens popularity.

For the most part, the love of fried chicken seemed like a bipartisan choice. But there was a notable difference between progressive andconservative midnight snackers.

Respondents who identified as conservative seemed to opt more for pork than their moderate and progressive compatriots. And this couldnt have been truer when the poll got a little more specific. Check out how the snacks fare for supporters of different presidential candidates:

The biggest mystery is why there are no fried chicken-lovers amongCho Won-jins supporters. A whopping 56 percent of them opted for grilled pork belly: over six times the average. Dont draw any conclusions, but many of Chos supporters are also fervent supporters of Park Geun-hye. We will meet again! Chos campaign posters say underneath a photograph of Cho smiling at the now detained former president.

Kwon from Realmeter speculated that the noticeable absence of fried chicken may have to do with a preference for alcoholic beverage soju over beer. Chicken goes with soju. Pork goes with soju, he said.

Dont go away just yet. Theres even an age breakdown for the post-election snack poll:

Younger voters generally preferred fried chicken more than their older counterparts. And none of those aged 19-29 chose grilled pork belly as their late-night snack option, while the older age groups (forties and up) leaned towards it. But the future of pigs in slaughterhouses still looks dismal: The young respondents in the same age category chose jokbal (pork trotter) more than any other age group.

By the way, lovers of pig trotters out there might want to be careful. Jokbal is a politically controversial dish. In March, conservative daily newspaper Joongang Ilbo sparked controversy after reporting on Moon Jae-ins supposed penchant for jokbal, which it described as a North Korean dish. (Conservatives often criticize Moon for his supposed pro-North Korean tendencies.)

We hope this article illuminated a critical aspect of South Korean society and the presidential election. One thing is for certain: The future of South Korea may not be as revolutionary or rosy as many of the candidates suggest but it will most certainly be greasy.

Cover image: Fried chicken and pork belly are popular inSouth Korea (Source: Pixabay)

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Progressives vs Conservatives: Fried Chicken or Pork Belly? - Korea Expos

Common Dreams

Why Progressives Need a Long-term Strategy, Built on Values | By ... Common Dreams There's a fight on for control of the Democratic Party. Incredibly, the old-guard neoliberal establishment is doing all they can to hold onto the status quo that ... and more »

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Why Progressives Need a Long-term Strategy, Built on Values | By ... - Common Dreams

Progressives claim to love science, but what they truly love is power.To be a good progressive is to adhere simultaneously to two incompatible notions: one, that science provides the final word on any question about which scientists offer any opinion; two, that the scientific method is illegitimate, a tool of the sundry atavistic forces conspiring to keep down the female, the black, the brown, the poor, the gay, the disabled, the gender-fluid everybody except Mitt Romney.

If you were looking at the college campuses with the right kind of eyes in the Eighties and Nineties, you could have seen this coming.

The more philosophically self-aware progressives have long been ensorceled by the belief that science or, really, Science could be pressed into service bearing loads of social management too heavy for a mere bureaucracy. The Soviet Union invested a great deal of its scarce capital in something it called Soviet cybernetics, a sort of Stone Age attempt at using what wed now call Big Data to analyze and solve social problems, especially those related to the management of economic production. The old Marxists took their scientific socialism seriously.

In the English-speaking world, progressives, under the influence not only of political philosophers such as John Dewey but also of the engineer and management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor, fell into something like a cult of expertise. Experts under the tutelage of Science could, would, and should decide . . . almost everything. How much steel should U.S. firms produce? How should they produce it? What should the line workers at the factory be paid? What about their supervisors? Taylors Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, provides a testament to the ambitions of the Progressive Era: He and his contemporaries believed that, using such new technological tools as stopwatches and motion-picture cameras, one could study industrial processes at the most granular level how a certain employee turns a certain screw and produce a single, best way of performing any task.

There is a great deal of ideology embedded in that belief, along with a great many political assumptions, but Taylor and the others denied that they were engaged in any sort of politics at all: Their business, as they saw it, was Science. There is a reasonably straight line from early-20th-century progressivism to contemporary, Barack Obamastyle pragmatism, which is dishonestly and glibly characterized as simply doing what works. In reality it means doing what I want done, in the most convenient way.

But managerial progressivism, with its implicit faith in hierarchy and its inescapable elitism (not everybody gets a Ph.D. from Harvard), was always set for conflict with the more populist and emotional tendencies on the left that came to prominence in the Sixties, political currents originating largely in issues of identity (from black power to Chicano power to what we used to call womens liberation). Such concerns exist uneasily alongside a managerial progressivism based on the wisdom of people who were and are overwhelmingly white, male, and highly educated, working in institutions built by (and, the identity Left would argue, for) people who were overwhelmingly white, male, and highly educated. For years, this played out as old-fashioned progressive elites exercising a kind of managerial veto over the wilder ambitions of the identity Left: Bernie Sanders proposes reorganizing the American economy around the cultivation of organic hemp, and somebody responsible tells him, No.

This gave the identity Left a very strong incentive to work to undermine the prestige of Science, a project that was undertaken with great enthusiasm back during the heyday of postmodernism. The academic world endures a lot of voguish nonsense about African science and feminist mathematics and queer physics (My early postulate is that queer physics speaks about knowledge-making in physics that takes the form of subverting the hegemony of a dominant and mainstream discourse). The extreme, Foucauldian version of that analysis was ridiculous and lame and easy to write off if you were not an academic. But the more moderate version of that view became quite mainstream: We may not hear very much about feminist physics, but we hear about womens ways of knowing, gay perspectives on this, black perspectives on that, etc., as if there were not as many black perspectives as there are black people. Michel Foucaults lurking malice was reinvented as the motive force in the rhetoric of intersectionality, the belief that the oppression of people with certain characteristics (black, gay, disabled, etc.) isnt a matrix of attitudes and discrete episodes but a complex nest of social relationships that can, conveniently, explain anything the phlogiston of identity politics.

The Indiana Jones heuristic the search for fact is science, the search for Truth is philosophy can go only so far in finessing the inherent conflict between science, which is organized around assumptions of objectivity, and the poisonous identity politics holding as its fundamental principle that everything is subjective. The scientific view is that true is true and false is false, irrespective of any particular demographic or political characteristics of the speaker. (Though these of course may provide grounds for skepticism: Who paid for your study? is not an entirely unreasonable question.)

At the same time, the identity Left has its uses for Science. For one thing, it was a convenient cudgel to use against conservative-leaning Christians distressed by certain implications of evolution or discombobulated by the possibility that homosexuality is a phenomenon with roots that are biological rather than diabolical. That sort of thing is usually the stuff of low-value conversation: A certain kind of eternal adolescent never stops getting a thrill out of scandalizing his retrograde Lutheran grandmother. But if you have a sufficient number of such interactions and we have no shortage of them they can become a part of the tribal identity that is the real basis of our politics, however much we might pretend that what we are really talking about is public policy. As the identity Left moved out of the communes and into the suburbs and progressivism became much more strongly associated with the interests and habits of affluent, educated, coastal elites, professing ones love of Science became an exercise in telegraphing status.

But if it were really about science, wed be hearing more from scientists and less from people who have batty, superstitious attitudes about modern agriculture and evidence-based medicine. You will not hear Democrats complaining about the fact that the Affordable Care Act clears the way for subsidizing such hokum as acupuncture and homeopathy. Seventh-day Adventists may make some claims about the world that sound ridiculous from the scientific point of view, but so do practitioners of yoga and sweat-lodge enthusiasts. The public adoration of Science isnt about science.

Which brings us to the recent March for Science and the popular poster boy for all things Science, Bill Nye. The March for Science was no such thing; in the main, it was a march for the one thing almost every faction of the Left can agree on: a larger public sector. Progressives are culturally at home in large institutions (universities, federal agencies, Fortune 500 HR departments), and they have learned how to game those systems pretty well. More funding for science means a lot of funding for things tangentially related to science and a lot of comfortable sinecures related to science in the vaguest way: A great many people with degrees in womens studies or Latino studies have jobs in science as community-outreach coordinators and program officers with responsibilities that might charitably be described as light. Its a safe bet that $100 spent on science gets you about $17.50 worth of astrophysics with the balance going to community development, paid political activism, and overhead. That is not an argument against spending on science it is an argument for better and more responsibly run programs.

And that would be a fine argument to have, if we could have an argument. Which we cant.

Charles Murray, who wrote one of the worlds most famous books bringing scientific research to bear on social questions, has in effect been forbidden to speak at college campuses. In one of the most shameful spectacles of contemporary academic malfeasance, Bert Johnson, the chairman of the political-science department at Middlebury, has apologized for the episode in which Murray was prevented from speaking on campus by rioters: Professor Johnson apologized to the rioters for having had the poor judgment to invite someone to campus whose views are at variance with their own. It could be that Murrays work represents poor science; some respected parties have made exactly that argument. But what does Science have to say about the disputation of claims?

The postmodernists were correct in one thing: There is some politics built into the scientific method, in that the scientific method assumes an environment in which people are at liberty to speak, debate, and publish a liberty with which the American Left, particularly on college campuses, is at war. They are not interested in debate or conversation. They are interested in silencing those who disagree with them, and they have high-profile allies: Democratic prosecutors around the country are working to criminalize the holding of nonconformist views about global warming (some prominent activists have openly called for jailing climate deniers), and Howard Dean has taken up the novel argument that the First Amendment does not actually protect political speech with which he disagrees. (It is, he insists, hate speech, a legally null term in the American context.) Dean has argued that the federal laws governing the conduct of political campaigns could and should be used to regulate all public speaking.

The partisans of Science believe themselves to be part of an eternal war between Galileo and the Inquisition, but they have in fact chosen the Inquisitions side. They have chosen the side of the Censor and the Index so long as they get to choose who serves as Censor and who manages the Index. That is how they have reconciled Science and its claims of objective fact with identity politics and its denial of the same: They are engaged in neither the pursuit of fact nor the pursuit of Truth only the pursuit of Power.

READ MORE: Science vs. Science! The Left Hijacks Science The Lefts New Cure-All: Science

Kevin D. Williamson is National Reviews roving correspondent. This story first appeared in the May 15, 2017, issue of National Review.

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