In the February 25 issue of the New York Times Magazine, author Judith Warner wrote about the conservative war on the scientific establishment–a development that, she notes, is a turnabout from the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the left that challenged the idea of objective knowledge.

That turnabout was the subject of Michael Bérubé’s essay in our Winter 2011 issue. Indeed, Warner quotes Bérubé’s piece at length:

Following the Sokal hoax, many on the academic left experienced some real embarrassment. But the genie was out of the bottle. And as the political zeitgeist shifted, attacking science became a sport of the radical right. “Some standard left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust of ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research,” Michael Bérubé, a literature professor at Pennsylvania State University, said of this evolution recently in the journal Democracy. He quoted the disillusioned French theorist Bruno Latour, a pioneer of science studies who was horrified by the climate-change-denying machinations of the right: “Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth . . . while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.”

Click here to read Michael Bérubé’s piece in Democracy. Click here to read Judith Warner’s New York Times Magazine article.