George Bush and the Ming Dynasty

In his commentary today Eugene Robinson compares the anti science policy of the Bush administration to the emperors of the Ming dynasty.

In the early 1400s the Ming emperor Zhu Di made China into the world's leading maritime nation, sending huge fleets on missions of trade and exploration as far as the Swahili coast of Africa. It should have been just a matter of a few years before Chinese sailors discovered the Americas. But Zhu Di's successors, influenced by court politics, called home the fleets and forbade them to sail again, forfeiting the riches of the New World -- and five centuries of global domination -- to an underdeveloped backwater called Europe.

Robinson thinks that George Bush's anti science stance which is influenced by "court politics" is similar and he's right as far as he goes. But is it right to blame the politician for the politics. The source of "politics" is the people. I had a post here in November where I talked about a poll that indicated that almost half of all Americans think the earth is 10,000 years old and only a third believed in Darwin's theory of evolution. While polls indicate that over 50% of Americans support stem cell research the political reality is that the ones who don't are more likely to vote.

A lawmaker or president that doesn't check the direction of the political wind is rare. The direction of the political wind is determined by those who vote and it's the flat earthers who have consistently gone to the polls in recent years. George Bush is above all a politician and he's doing what politicians do. It's ultimately the citizens of the United States that are responsible for it's decline.