Remember that partisanship and ideology aren't the same. Any time I get people taking about partisanship, the first thing that happens is that they slip into equating "Democrat" with "liberal," and "Republican" with "conservative." Nope. A party is a group. An ideology is a way of thinking, and connecting policy positions together. They are related, but they aren't the same. One of the most important pieces of scholarship in public opinion is Converse's 1964 article, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." Most people have no idea what liberalism and conservatism are, and few connections between their policy beliefs. That's not how people develop their party identifications. They develop their attachments to their parties through their group identities. Great book: Partisan Hearts and Minds, by Green, Palmquist and Schickler. Truth in advertising: Eric Schickler was one of my advisors in grad school. I'm not getting any kickbacks, though.
Unless...
Naaaah. That'd never work.
Anyway, short version: it's all about social group identification. After all, if you don't really have a coherent ideology, how else do you form strong and lasting party attachments? It was one of those books that came out and, well, damn, really? Nobody had just gotten all of that down before in one place? OK. I guess we all have to cite you now. Cool trick. (Really, it wasn't all obvious, and I'm simplifying for brevity's sake, but this is the main point.)
Where do scientists fit into this? How many lab geeks do you know? Are they hardcore politics geeks? If they are, we can probably guess their politics, and how those politics developed. But it wasn't always thus.
Think about a hardcore science-type in the not too distant past. Now, we do have to factor in the white male thing. Realistically, though, that has been a thing for a long time. Why? I'll leave that to others to comment. Still, there is a long history of surveys of academics and their politics. Within academia, politics always lean left. Why? That's complicated, but in the physical sciences, that wasn't as strong as in, say, sociology. Why not? Lots of apoliticals, for one thing.
Why would that be? Well, imagine yourself as a lab geek. Doing titration.
One...
Two...
Three...
...
...
WAKE UP!!!!
Fucking chem lab. This is why I'm a political scientist. Anyway, would you give a rat's ass about the capital gains tax? Or, would you look at a bunch of Gaia-spouting lefties, and eugenicist right-wingers, think they're all fucking nuts and wonder why we can't have people in charge who know how to solve a fucking math problem?
Sorry, am I just projecting?
Yeah, Trump brags about his uncle, the MIT professor. That doesn't mean Trump is smart. If you're the old-fashioned scientist, you want Trump's uncle.
Then what happened? Remember the "March for Science?" Yeah, that was a March against Trump and the Republican Party. Why? Because the official Republican Party line right now is that climate change is a hoax, we should keep re-litigating the Scopes trial because the Earth is 6,000 years old, and never mind what changes in antibiotic-resistant bacteria demonstrate about evolution and the threat those bacteria pose, and I might as well just stop now because, oh fuck it. You get the point.
Economists are still more divided. Why? Because tax cuts work! When the economy is depressed, you cut taxes, and the economy grows. John Maynard Keynes, people. By how much? Less than with increased spending, depending on the spending, and depending on the tax cut. That would be the multiplier effect. There's complicated stuff here, but there is economic value in well-constructed, well-targeted tax cuts. (Which is not to say that the latest bill was well-constructed-- it wasn't!) Republicans do stupid things on the economy, but Democrats don't have the clear high ground because they do stupid things too. See: Sanders, Bernie. Damn, I hate that guy. Regardless, when the entire GOP insists that carbon dioxide doesn't trap heat, leading to an increase in temperature, um...
And then they accuse the entire scientific community of falsifying their data in an elaborate conspiracy...
Yeah, that's gonna push scientists into the Democratic Party, and make the "March for Science" a partisan thing. Which it was.
So, Devin "Stoner-Philosopher" Nunes. This bullshit about a conspiracy within the FBI to take down Trump? No. This is, however, an attack on the integrity of the FBI. The FBI leans strongly right, and Republican. If the Republican Party keeps pushing this, though, what happens to the FBI? The CIA already fucking hates Trump. Remember that according to the Wall Street Journal, the CIA withholds intelligence from Trump because they think he's compromised! If the GOP keeps this up...
Green, Palmquist and Schickler. Partisanship is about group identity. Now, for the Feds and the Spooks, there's more at work than just group identity. They have real policy preferences, and those policy preferences put them squarely on the side of the squares. Then again, Stoner-Philosopher Nunes doesn't sound so square to me these days!
The pattern here is familiar. Attack a group, and you push them into the opposing party, because that, fundamentally, is what partisanship is. Group loyalty.
Will this matter? At the end of the day, not likely. What happens next is that Trump will probably fire Rosenstein, bring in someone who might Mueller, and we get an Inquisition within the FBI to purge it of anyone who isn't a Trump loyalist.
There are civil service protections to prevent that, and they are stronger in the FBI than in other executive agencies. The most innocent way this could happen is to reassign anyone within the FBI to jobs that ensure they go nowhere near anything that could possibly touch Trump. Or, Trump could bring in people to demand loyalty oaths, and then look for excuses to fire anyone who doesn't pass a Trump loyalty background check. Would it be illegal?
Hell, fucking, yes.
Does Trump want to do it?
Hell, fucking, yes.
At this point, who'd stop him? There are people in the FBI right now. What are they going to do, seeing the moves coming? They can continue leaking things, like the fact that Nunes is a shit, fucking liar, and that the feds did disclose the origins of the Steele dossier to the FISA court. Do any of those leaks matter?
Not without a Democratic majority in at least one chamber of Congress, and even then, only minimally.
This is our world now.
