The leader shoots itself in the foot and the world is surprised. In the United States we see an unprecedented attack on universities, research institutes and science itself under President Trump. Budgets are cut, climate research canceled, vaccines undermined. After eighty years of global dominance, America no longer seems to see the value of its most precious possession.
Now there is a long tradition of hostility to science within the Republican party. At the time of President George W. Bush, a book with the meaningful title has already been published The Republican War on Science. Traditionally, the anti-scientific forces are on the one hand in Evangelical-Christian angle and on the other within the established business community, in particular the fossil industry. The first believes that science exceeds moral and ethical boundaries, for example in stem cell or embryo research; The second precisely that she imposes unnecessary limits on free entrepreneurship. These two currents find each other in a joint aversion to government intervention – whether in life or the economy.
But the surprising element in 2025 is that a third party has joined this coalition: the Tech Right. This influential group in Silicon Valley, with Elon Musk as the loudest exponent, pays a libertary vision of society with a sacred belief in technology. Their hostility to science is especially surprising because the tech world is traditionally the largest beneficiary of public financing of research. Without the decades of huge military and space spending expenditures – more than half of all the federal research budget goes to Defense – the semiconductor industry in California would never have come there.
Why do these technological pioneers bite the hand that feeds them, or even chop the entire arm? Where else are their engineers trained than at the same top universities that are now being attacked? And why now, in the middle of the AI revolution that will be at least as influential and profitable as the arrival of computers, the internet and social media?
There are at least three ideological motives. First of all, in the eyes of these techno-optimists, science embodies the old world that is coming to an end. According to them, universities suffer from innovation atrophy and bureaucratic proliferation with more and more rules and codes of conduct. On the campus, the thought police are about that indoctrinates students with paralyzing Woke ideology. All this stands in the way of the rough creative power of entrepreneurs. It is not without reason that mega investor Peter Thiel, the spiritual father of the Tech-Tawanten, started a trade fair program for students to stop their studies and start a start-up.
All this happens at a time when a lot of groundbreaking research shifts from the public to the private atmosphere. The five largest American technology companies invested around $ 250 billion in R&D last year, double the public spending of all over Europe. A large part of it goes to gigantic data centers, which can ask as much electricity as a city of a million inhabitants. This trend feeds a second motivation: people are old news, because computers and robots are going to take over the research. Human intelligence is heavily overestimated. Soon we will have, in the words of Dario Amodei, the maker of Chatbot Claude, “a country full of geniuses in a data center.” After Musk Twitter had taken over, three -quarters of the staff were able to leave. Now it’s researchers’ turn.
Sustainability, ethics and trust are curse words for the libertary tech industries
I find the third motivation the most revealing: science is not softened or irrelevant, but rather too dominant. The research that is most under fire is precisely the knowledge that is relevant to policy and politics – topics such as climate, environment, infectious diseases and social inequality. All problems that manifest themselves on a global scale and ask for a global approach. This call for a ‘world government’ makes science so threatening in the eyes of these technologists. In a recent interview, the believer Thiel said that global technology regulation is the modern manifestation of the antichrist – the beast from revelation that rises from the abyss to grab world rule. Attempts to save the earth stand in the way of the new industrial revolution. In the Techno-Optimist Manifesto Of the influential investor Marc Andreessen, the new curse words are terms such as sustainability, ethics, trust and the precautionary principle. In this reverse thinking, the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations are the true enemy. And all from the mouth of industrialists that pursue world dominance of their services.
Now it is a easy -going reflex to write all this as ‘American situations’. But time and time again we see such crazes with a few years of delay over the Atlantic Ocean. The Netherlands then appears to be a fruitful landing site with its Westwart orientation and released politics. The first seeds have already been planted. In the Lower House, too, the scientific consensus on climate and biodiversity is dismissed as activism and universities are described as elitist breeding grounds of Woke thoughts. There is even the call for a Dutch version of Musk’s chainsaw.
Van Karl Marx is the famous statement that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. This certainly applies to science. Technological revolutions have changed our lives unrecognizable, from the steam engine to the computer.
But it is not just the other way around, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin wondered. Are revolutions not just an attempt from the train passengers to pull the emergency brake and to stop history? Science has a dual role: as a locomotive of progress, but also as a brake to keep the train of history on track.