Book Review: Does Science Threaten Democracy?

February 9, 2009

For many liberals, it is a truism that the recently departed conservative administration used politics to undermine science. But in Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy, Yuval Levin suggests that the real problem is in a sense the other way around. Democrats, he argues, are the party of science, and “science threatens sometimes to overwhelm our institutions of self-government [2].” In the lesser, partisan thread of this book, one can almost hear Levin’s worse angels whispering in his ear: “Those Democrats don’t just lack seriousness and proper understanding. They don’t just have shallow souls. They’re democracy’s unwitting enemies.”Science Progress