Almost two years ago, on a chilly February afternoon in Washington, D.C., Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma took to the floor of the United States Senate, skeptically muttered a few things about rising global temperatures, then threw a snowball. His point, if you can call it that, was that since frozen water vapor still exists in nature (in winter no less), climate change must not really be happening. Or something.

Combined with decades of anti-intellectual posturing and pernicious legislative attempts to hobble science education in America, outrageous displays like this, whether born out of willful ignorance or duplicitous political maneuvering, have rightly earned the GOP the title of anti-science party. It’s a title some Republicans wear as a badge, the ire of liberals being a coveted mark of one’s conservative bona fides. But in the modern liberal mind, whether someone can be called a science-denier has taken on a scope limited to a small subset of scientific concepts: climate change and evolution. In essence, if you accept these concepts, you are pro-science; if you deny them, you are anti-science. True as that may be, this myopic view ignores a wide world of science, some of which is at odds with many beliefs popular on the left.



The time has come for Democrats to remove the beam from their own eyes, so to speak. Taking up the mantle of scientific liberalism—that is, adopting an evidence-based view of reality in pursuit of progressive policy—would serve both the strategic purposes of the Democratic Party in the menacing face of Trumpism, as well as the existential interests of humanity.

Take homeopathy, for example. Developed in the late 18th century by the German doctor Samuel Hahnemann, homeopathy is the dosing of a patient with a natural substance (e.g. white arsenic, deadly nightshade, poison ivy) in such a small quantity that it has been effectively diluted out of existence. In other words, there are no active ingredients in homeopathic remedies. They are basically just water. Sugar pills. Nothing more. Hahnemann’s pre-science idea is derived from the so-called “law of similars,” the idea that the key to curing an illness lies in infinitesimally small doses of substances that are harmful to healthy people in large doses. The smaller the dose, the more potent the remedy. If this sounds bonkers, that’s because it is. There is no scientific debate. Thousands of studies and meta-analyses have confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt that homeopathy is bunk. Yet, more than a quarter of Americans continue to believe in its efficacy, liberals being the worst offenders. Until last year, the Green Party even promoted homeopathy by name in its official platform. In May, it replaced that endorsement with the phrase “alternative health care approaches,” which is really just a less precise way to promote the same debunked nonsense with the added benefit of plausible deniability.

So, what’s the harm in entertaining anti-science views when it comes to so-called alternative treatments like homeopathy? After all, people should be free to throw their own money away. And since there are no active ingredients, homeopathy can’t really hurt anybody, can it? In fact, homeopathy is so ineffective at doing, well, anything at all, that science geeks across the world have staged massive collective “overdoses” of homeopathy in order to demonstrate its impotence. To date, not one person has been harmed—or healed, for that matter—from any of these mass ingestions. But the fact that it doesn’t work is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Many pharmacies sell homeopathic and other alternative remedies alongside real medicine. Consumers are entitled to a reasonable expectation that treatments sold in modern pharmacies have at least demonstrated a modicum of efficacy beyond placebo. Selling snake oil on the same shelf as real drugs betrays that trust. This is a consumer protection issue if there ever was one. Democrats should be all over it.