Asked to name something that stands alone, a lot of people would say, “The cheese.” To New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, another reasonable answer is “the Republican party,” at least in regard to global warming specifically and hatred of government in general.
Chait’s main point is that the GOP is extremist not only in an American context but also by international standards: “Of all the major conservative parties in the democratic world, the Republican Party stands alone in its denial of the legitimacy of climate science…The fervent commitment to supply-side economics is also an almost uniquely American idea. The GOP is the only major democratic party in the world that opposes the principle of universal health insurance. The virulence of anti-government ideology in the United States has no parallel anywhere in the world.”
From Chait’s Sunday post (bolding added):
Jeb Bush [has] proposed to eliminate the Obama administration’s regulation of carbon pollution, and…to make any further climate regulation essentially impossible. In any other democracy in the world, a Jeb Bush would be an isolated loon…having no prospects of seeing his vision carried out in government. But the United States is different. Here in America, ideas like Bush’s fit comfortably within one of the two major political parties. Indeed, the greatest barrier to Bush claiming his party’s nomination is the quite possibly justified sense that he is too sober and moderate to suit the GOP.
Of all the major conservative parties in the democratic world, the Republican Party stands alone in its denial of the legitimacy of climate science. Indeed, the Republican Party stands alone in its conviction that no national or international response to climate change is needed…
A new paper by Sondre Båtstrand studies the climate-change positions of electoral manifestos for the conservative parties in nine democracies, and finds the GOP truly stands apart. Opposition to any mitigation of greenhouse-gas emissions, he finds, “is only the case with the U.S. Republican Party, and hence not representative of conservative parties as a party family”…
Rabid opposition is not the only quality that sets the GOP apart from other major conservative parties. The fervent commitment to supply-side economics is also an almost uniquely American idea. The GOP is the only major democratic party in the world that opposes the principle of universal health insurance. The virulence of anti-government ideology in the United States has no parallel anywhere in the world.
And so the “moderate” Republican climate position is that action is pointless, since countries like China will never reduce their own emissions…The more right-wing position within the party…is that thousands of climate scientists worldwide have secretly coordinated a massive hoax. And then the even more conservative position, advocated by the second-leading candidate in the polls [Ben Carson], holds not only that climate science is a massive hoax, but so are evolution and the big bang. The “moderate” candidates are still, by international standards, rabid extremists…From a global standpoint, the entire Republican Party has lost its collective mind.
