How science became so political in the United States

Roger Pielke Jr., Jun 18, 2025

Earlier today I lectured at the University of Oslo on the “Causes and Consequences of the Politicization of Expertise in the United States.” It was the first time I gave this talk, which was both challenging and fun to prepare. I am very appreciative of the opportunity and my long-time friends and colleagues in Oslo.

I explained my goal with the talk as follows:

I seek to explain how it came to be that those leading the U.S. government have come to view scientists and universities as an enemy, which should be destroyed — and how many in science and academia have welcomed and even encouraged this conflict.

I explained that this language was no hyperbole. I cited the 2021 speech by then-Senator J.D. Vance titled, “The Universities are the Enemy” (which you can find on YouTube). Since January, the Trump administration has been taking a wrecking ball to universities and federal R&D — with no clear strategy or stopping point. But to understand where we are at today, we need to look back decades.

I showed the following slide to highlight long-term trends and inflection points in public confidence in science, and I made several points.

First, from 1970 to the end of the Cold War Republicans consistently expressed more confidence than Democrats in the scientific community. This was due in part to Democrat’s skepticism of the military-industrial complex following the Vietnam War, and Republican’s belief that the Cold War would be won through American scientific and technological might.

Second, with the end of the Cold War, the science and policy communities expressed a need to reconceptualize the “social contract” between science and society that had been mythologized in Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier following World War II. The Clinton administration had promised a “peace dividend” and the science community feared that science budgets would be tapped to help pay this dividend. Discussions of a new “social contract” were extensive, but ultimately unresolved.

Third, when George W. Bush ran for reelection in 2004, some in the scientific community decided that science might be a source of political power for Democrats. Leaders in the community mobilized to try to help elect John Kerry. Republicans had already decided that science would be a useful wedge issue — for instance by investigating climate science and demonizing stem cell research, tactics which played well with Republican voters.

Both parties agreed that science should be politicized because both anticipated electoral benefits among their changing constituencies. Leading scientists gleefully played along, seeking to become a “major political force.”

Starting in about 2004, we saw increasing confidence in the scientific community among Democrats, and decreasing confidence among Republicans, ultimately leading to today’s huge partisan gap. I spend much of the talk showing a diverse range of data on relevant trends — including trends in the constituencies of Democrats and Republicans, as well as in the political views of scientists and academics.

Democrats, once the party of the working class, increasingly became the party of the highly educated and wealthy. Republicans, once the party of the highly educated and wealthy, increasingly became the part of the working class. Meantime, the scientific community increasingly moved to the left, even the far left, with some of its leaders choosing to repurpose institutions of science in support of Democrats and against Republicans. Many of the complexities associated with these trends are summarized in the slide below, and discussed in depth, with data, through the many slides that follow.

The bottom line is that over several decades, Democrats, Republicans, and left-leaning scientists and academics were in agreement that science should be an arena for partisan battles.

Democrats saw championing science as a vehicle to cater to the interests and values of their increasingly highly educated and wealthy constituency. Republicans saw science as a means to show their less-educated and less-wealthy constituency that the elites did not share the values of the working class, which they argued was getting a raw deal. Some scientists and academics heard the siren song of greater political influence and joined the fight in favor of Democrats and against Republicans.

Lost in the collective enthusiasm was the idea of the social contract between science and society: The longstanding shared belief that public supports science because science supports all Americans — no matter who they work for, how much money they make, what they look like, where they live, or who they vote for.

This foundation was forgotten, tossed aside.

I quote Michael Clune, of Case Western University, who asked after last November’s election, in effect — What did we expect would happen?

“Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects. . . What links the work of a professor who conceives of her job as climate activism, to a student-orientation leader teaching that the term “illegal immigration” is a microaggression? . . . The thread is a shared commitment to a particular brand of partisan politics. If this is truly what the university stands for, if these are our values, then when we are called before our elected representatives to answer for ourselves, what can we say? Colleges have no compelling justification for their existence to give when the opposing political party comes into power. We have nothing to say to the half of America who doesn’t share our politics.”

My full talk will eventually become a long-form essay or perhaps even a short book. It is an incredible story, and a cautionary tale.