Scientific American Didn’t Need to Endorse Anybody

Scientific American has been a mainstay of science and technology journalism in the United States. (It’s been in business 179 years, even longer than The Atlantic.) As an aspiring nerd in my youth—I began college as a chemistry major—I read it regularly. In 2017, I contributed a short article to it about the public’s view of science, drawn from my book The Death of Expertise.But the magazine’s decision to break with tradition and endorse Kamala Harris—only the second such nod in the magazine’s history—is a mistake, as was its 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden, on multiple levels.

I understand the frustration that probably led to this decision. Donald Trump is the most willfully ignorant man ever to hold the presidency. He does not understand even basic concepts of … well, almost anything. (Yesterday, he explained to a woman in Michigan that he would lower food prices by limiting food imports—in other words, by reducing the supply of food. Trump went to the Wharton School, where I assume “supply and demand” was part of the first-year curriculum.) He is insensate to anything that conflicts with his needs or beliefs, and briefing him on any topic is virtually impossible.

When a scientific crisis—a pandemic—struck, Trump was worse than useless. He approved the government program to work with private industry to create vaccines, but he also flogged nutty theories about an unproven drug therapy and later undermined public confidence in the vaccines he’d helped bring to fruition. His stubborn stupidity literally cost American lives.

It makes sense, then, that a magazine of science would feel the need to inform its readers about the dangers of such a man returning to public office. To be honest, almost any sensible magazine about anything probably wants to endorse his opponent, because of Trump’s baleful effects on just about every corner of American life. (Cat Fancy magazine-—now called Catster-—should be especially eager to write up a jeremiad about Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance. But I digress.)

Strange as it seems to say it, a magazine devoted to science should not take sides in a political contest. For one thing, it doesn’t need to endorse anyone: The readers of a magazine such as Scientific American are likely people who have a pretty good grasp of a variety of concepts, including causation, the scientific method, peer review, and probability. It’s something of an insult to these readers to explain to them that Trump has no idea what any of those words mean. They likely know this already.

Now, I am aware that the science and engineering community has plenty of Trump voters in it. (I know some of them.) But one of the most distinctive qualities of Trump supporters is that they are not swayed by the appeals of intellectuals. They’re voting for reasons of their own, and they are not waiting for the editors of Scientific American to brainiac-splain why Trump is bad for knowledge.

In fact, we have at least some evidence that scientists taking sides in politics can backfire. In 2021, a researcher asked a group that included both Biden and Trump supporters to look at two versions of the prestigious journal Nature—one with merely an informative page about the magazine, the other carrying an endorsement of Biden. Here is the utterly unsurprising result:

In other words, readers who supported Biden shrugged; Trump supporters decided that Nature was taking sides and was therefore an unreliable source of scientific information.

But even if Scientific American’s editors felt that the threat to science and knowledge was so dire that they had to endorse a candidate, they did it the worst way possible. They could have made a case for electing Harris as a matter of science acting in self-defense, because Trump, who chafes at any version of science that does not serve him, plans to destroy the relationship between expertise and government by obliterating the independence of the government’s scientific institutions. This is an obvious danger, especially when Trump is consorting with kooks such as Laura Loomer and has floated bringing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crackpot circus into the government.

Instead, the magazine gave a standard-issue left-liberal endorsement that focused on health care, reproductive rights, gun safety, climate policy, technology policy, and the economy. Although science and data play their role in debates around such issues, most of the policy choices they present are not specifically scientific questions: In the end, almost all political questions are about values—and how voters think about risks and rewards. Science cannot answer those questions; it can only tell us about the likely consequences of our choices.

Also unhelpful is that some of the endorsement seemed to be drawn from the Harris campaign’s talking points, such as this section:

An endorsement based on Harris’s tax proposals—which again, are policy choices—belongs in a newspaper or financial journal. It’s not a matter of science, any more than her views on abortions or guns or anything else are.

I realize that my objections seem like I’m asking scientists to be morally neutral androids who have no feelings on important issues. Many decent people want to express their objections to Trump in the public square, regardless of their profession, and scientists are not required to be some cloistered monastic order. But policy choices are matters of judgment and belong in the realm of politics and democratic choice. If the point of a publication such as Scientific American is to increase respect for science and knowledge as part of creating a better society, then the magazine’s highly politicized endorsement of Harris does not serve that cause.

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P.S.

J. D. Vance yesterday made the disgusting comment to my colleague David Frum that the two apparent attempts against Trump’s life were by people from “your team.” David discussed Vance’s obscene—and desperate—comments here today.

Vance’s trollery aside, assassins are now understandably on our minds as the election approaches. Tomorrow, I will suggest a look at our archives, in which contributors to The Atlantic tried to make sense of the assassinations of four presidents, in articles from 1865, 1881, 1901, and 1964. Some of them are angry; some are elegiac. Each, in its way, is a writer examining an attack not just on a president, but on the American spirit.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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