My New Feature Story in the American Prospect: "The Reality Gap"

How do you explain the current factual and scientific divide that separates the two U.S. political parties today? In the latest American Prospect, I've taken a stab. The explanation isn't simple--there are many moving parts--but also some key fundamentals: 1) Democrats have vastly more Ph.D.s and experts, and seem to be more factually correct about contested issues; 2) Republicans nevertheless have enough of their own experts and aren't giving up; 3) neither Democrats nor Republicans are inherently anti-science or anti-expertise, but they rely on these for very different reasons, and do not both share the "Enlightenment ethic" of using science and reason to forge a better society; 4) all this is set against a rightward shifting political backdrop since about 1970; 5) all of the foregoing, in combination with psychology and media, leave us with a "postmodern" discourse that helps nobody. Stephen Colbert's "truthiness," writ large. Anyway, that's the very, ...