Partisan Contrarians: Right-Wingers Oppose Any Idea That Falls Outside Their Narrow World-View

There's a strain of contrarianism in the country these days that attracts followers who oppose any idea that falls outside their chosen belief system. It isn't that questioning what the latest opinion mill is churning out is wrong. But taking an oppositional position about everything to make political points isn't a valid form of criticism or a way of mounting constructive arguments. It's just misleading gibberish.

Opposition is expressed at every turn by the right-wing media and resistance-minded Republicans in Congress. Compromise seems not to be a goal, nor is devising reasonable alternatives. When every option is couched in terms of tax-cuts, and presidential initiatives are treated with disdain, there is a crushing sense that our political system is degraded by a lack of seriousness and by self-serving politicians whose only objective is to claim victory in the next election cycle.

There are, of course, ideological differences between the two major parties and among splinter groups of various descriptions that should be respected. However, on some big issues the degrees of separation are so profound, the reasoning so deeply flawed it is impossible to find any basis upon which to begin intelligent conversation. For example, at an event hosted by the Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, writer Steven Miller, discussed his book Green Hell, that contests the importance of environmental vulnerabilities. He instructed listeners to heed Oklahoma's Republican Senators Inhofe and Coburn who say global warming is nonsense - - Inhofe has declared global warming a "hoax" while Coburn, calls it "a lot of crap."

In his remarks, Miller said he couldn't think of a single instance in which human factors impacted the environment in ways that caused serious health risks like cancer or respiratory illness. But there are numerous such examples one of which is the infamous Love Canal in upstate New York: "Twenty-five years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the ...Canal ...as an industrial dump, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens ... [percolated] upwards through the soil, their drum containers rotting and leaching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes and a public school ..." (Eckart C. Beck, the EPA Journal, January 1979)

More recently, as depicted in the film "Erin Brockovich", the PG&E Company in California was found liable for contaminating the ground water surrounding its plant with the substance Chromium-6, a known carcinogen. In that case, people in the area were adversely affected by cancers, miscarriages and birth defects.

As for global warming, a PBS "Nova" documentary on the subject explored an alarming phenomenon of what was referred to as "global dimming", a climactic condition caused by polluted particles in the atmosphere's cloud masses. This dimming of the sun has had the effect of disrupting normal rainfall patterns, creating droughts and famine in some parts of the world. The irony is that this condition represents a "tug of war" between atmospheric warming and cooling. The polluting particulates that create the dimming effect cool the climate while masking the harmful effect of greenhouse gases that trap heat - - toxic global twins in a vulnerable environment.

In an article about the Nova film, producer David Sington says one reason people "reject the idea of man-made climate change...is that on the whole people tend to believe what is convenient to them. Faced with a choice between an awkward fact and a comforting fiction, most people will take the fiction any day." And he suggests that such skeptics are "more prevalent in the USA than in Europe" because "American rhetoric tends to present prosperity as the natural consequence of political freedom. Like Democracy, it becomes a moral good in its own right. Anyone who seems to question the wisdom of unconstrained economic growth risks appearing un-American, if not downright immoral." (PBS.org)

Perhaps politicians like Inhofe and Coburn, encouraged by writers like Steven Miller, believe the country is more threatened by ‘tree-hugging environmentalists' than scientific research would suggest. Sadly, much contrary opinion relies not on fact but on convenient fiction. However, protecting the environment is demonstrably a patriotic endeavor. And expanding green industries could jump-start the economy in ways that would create jobs, develop new technologies and fashion a new version of prosperity.