After the 1964 election a book appeared damning Conservatism’s debut as a “€œbrute assault on the entire intellectual world”€ and charging, “€œRepublicans as a party have been alienating intellectuals deliberately, as a matter of taste and strategy.”€ This withering critique of the politics of Senator Goldwater and his spokesman Ronald Reagan came not from Bill Moyers, but a recently graduated pair of Republican Harvard roommates, stalwarts of The Ripon Society, who, like some of the liberal democrats who applauded their book, have been flung though a sort of political time warp to land on the anti-intellectual end of the neoconservative spectrum. Bruce Chapman is now The Discovery Institute’s President, and George Gilder its preeminent Senior Fellow, together leading the Seattle group in a metaphysical assault on everything that smacks of materialism. Though founded with a Reaganite focus on cutting-edge technology policy and the electronic revolution, Discovery has morphed away from futurism and libertarian economics”€”it began as a spinoff of Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute and become the bane of scientific modernity, waging culture war on everything from Darwin to Einstein to stem-cell biotech and quantum indeterminacy, now even dark matter.

As neoconservatism ascended, its regard for science slipped to the brink of open contempt, for it owed much of its political traction to social conservatives apt to dismiss science as corrupt as literary theory, only more materialistic, and a born-again Base defensive of Biblical authority. Both seemed to worry little about what children needed to know about science as technological change transformed the world economy in the post-Reagan era. So to the horror of yuppies raised on a mixture of Doctor and Mister Spock, a counterculture of tabloid science providers and anti-science journalists arose on the right in the ’90s, catering to a Base ten million families strong. The End Of Natural History wasn”€™t what Francis Fukuyama had in mind, but as long as televangelism competes with the internet for hearts and minds, some media niches serving the Base will prosper by anathematizing science.