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statetalks · 3 years ago

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Were The Confederates Democrats Or Republicans

Th United States Congress

Were The Democrats That Founded The Confederacy, KKK & Jim Crow CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL? Lets Go!!!!

As of September 13, 2017, 16 Senate Democrats cosponsored the Medicare for All Act of 2017. As of September 26, 2017, 120 House Democrats cosponsored the Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act. This was all for naught, as the Republican majority made sure that the Democratic minority remained impotent.

National Democratic Redistricting Committee

On January 12, 2017, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a 527 organization that focuses on redistricting reform and is affiliated with the Democratic Party, was created. The chair, president and vice president of the umbrella organization is the 82nd Attorney GeneralEric Holder, Elizabeth Pearson and Alixandria “Ali” Lapp respectively. President Obama has said he would be involved with the committee.

Protests against Donald Trump

At the inauguration of Donald Trump, 67 Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives boycotted the inauguration. This was the largest boycott by members of the United States Congress since the second inauguration of Richard Nixon, where it was estimated that between 80 and 200 Democratic members of United States Congress boycotted.

Democratic Party PACs

In November 2018, the Democrats gained 40 seats in the House of Representatives, retaking the majority in the chamber. Nancy Pelosi was nominated to retake the speakership in January 2019.

Southern Democrats Split With Republicans Over Confederate Symbols Is More Recent Than You Might Think

Following the recent police killing of George Floyd, recent months have seen Confederate monuments and symbols removed;from public display;in parts of the Southern US and elsewhere. And while Southern Republicans generally oppose Democrats who are pushing for these changes, this is a relatively recent development, argue;Christopher A. Cooper;and;co-authors. By;analysing;public opinion data, they find that up until the 1990s, there were no partisan differences among white;southerners on opinions toward Confederate symbols.;

In the ongoing;and contentious;conversation about;Confederate;symbols, one thing is taken as a given:;compared to Republicans,;Democrats;are;more likely to support;removing displays of the Confederate past;which had been publically approved in the past. This;fact;is;evident;in public opinion polls and in the results of recent;votes;in state legislatures,;like the one in;Mississippi;where every Democrat voted to remove the Confederate;emblem;from the Mississippi state flag,;while;Republicans split on the issue.

How The Democrats Became Socially Liberal

The Third Party Democrats began to change from social conservative to social progressive in the 1890s at the end of the Gilded Age under the;progressive populist Democrat;William Jennings Bryan. Under Bryan, the Democratic Party became;increasingly socially progressive and necessarily authoritative. From Bryan to Wilson, to LBJ, to Clinton the Democratic Party;increasingly favored progressive social liberalism regarding government enforced social justice and economic intervention over;laissez-faire governance, this attracted progressive Republicans and drove social;conservatives from the party over time.

TIP: See History of the United States Democratic Party.

Also Check: Why Did Republicans Hate Obama So Much

Why Democrats Avoid Confederate History While Republicans Embrace It

Governor Bob McDonnell made a proclamation to recognize April as Confederate History month, which caused an outcry from the very same people who are vilifying those attending tea parties as terrorists. These are citizens who are invoking the spirit of our founding fathers, reminding current lawmakers of the original intent of the Constitution and suggesting that an 8-year war to end tyranny and guarantee liberty for all should never be forgotten. But the left is always keen to distort history, or just ignore it all together as they want to do now, by denying a closer look at Confederate History.

It is not a huge surprise as to why Democrats react so viscerally to anything dealing with the history of the Civil War, the role of the Confederacy in that war, and why racism is still a hot topic in the country. It is because their very policies are at the heart of what caused the Civil War, and have kept racism alive to this day. They dont want people to learn the truth about the founding of the Republican Party and that its first president was Abraham Lincoln, and that within 11 years of the founding of this civil rights party, a war was fought and won to end slavery. It would be a bigger surprise to see a Democrat governor proclaim a Confederate History month since their history, as it relates to race and slavery, is not one to be proud of.

A Reconstituted Early 20th Century Kkk Attracts Members From Both Sides

After Reconstruction, and as the Jim Crow period set in during the 1870s, the Klan became obsolete.;Through violence, intimidation and systematic oppression, the KKK had served its purpose to help whites retake Southern governments.

In 1915, Cornell William J. Simmons restarted the KKK. This second KKK was made up of Republicans and Democrats, although Democrats were more widely involved.

The idea that these things overlap in a Venn diagram, the way they did with the first Klan, just isnt as tight with the second Klan, Grinspan said.

Don’t Miss: How Many Republicans Voted To Impeach Trump

Progressive Era And The New Deal

As the 19th century drew to a close, the Republicans had been firmly established as the party of big business during the Gilded Age, while the Democratic Party strongly identified with rural agrarianism and conservative values.

But during the Progressive Era, which spanned the turn of the century, the Democrats saw a split between its conservative and more progressive members. As the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, William Jennings Bryan advocated for an expanded role of government in ensuring social justice. Though he lost, Bryans advocacy of bigger government would influence the Democratic ideology going forward.

Republicans again dominated national politics during the prosperous 1920s, but faltered after the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first Democrat to win the White House since Woodrow Wilson.

A Century Of Jim Crow But Otherwise Lots Of Progress

From 1877 to at least the 1960s, the Solid South KKK-like;Progressively Socially Conservative Democrats remained a formidable faction of the Democratic Party.

This is true even though the party was increasingly dominated by Progressives like William Jennings Bryan. We can see in Wilson that both factions held sway in the party, Wilson was both a progressive liberal and a son of the Confederates.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow | PBS | ep 1 of 4 Promises Betrayed.

TIP: During the late 1800s and early 1900s Eugenics was a popular theory. In this era, we might find;Margaret Sanger, liberal economists and social scientists, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, a young Hitler, and the KKK all agreeing on aspects of eugenics. There are many sides;of the eugenics argument, and one must study its history in earnest before making a judgment call. Very;radical right-wing propaganda equated birth control with;genocide, but there was a wide range of beliefs. An espousal of;negative eugenics is part of the dark history of the Democratic party.

You May Like: What Is Republicanism And What Does It Value

Presidency Of John F Kennedy

The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 over then-Vice President Richard Nixon re-energized the party. His youth, vigor and intelligence caught the popular imagination. New programs like the Peace Corps harnessed idealism. In terms of legislation, Kennedy was stalemated by the conservative coalition.

Though Kennedy’s term in office lasted only about a thousand days, he tried to hold back communist gains after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the construction of the Berlin Walland sent 16,000 soldiers to Vietnam to advise the hard-pressed South Vietnamese army. He challenged America in the Space Race to land an American man on the Moon by 1969. After the Cuban Missile Crisis he moved to de-escalate tensions with the Soviet Union.

Kennedy also pushed for civil rights and racial integration, one example being Kennedy assigning federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders in the South. His election did mark the coming of age of the Catholic component of the New Deal Coalition. After 1964, middle class Catholics started voting Republican in the same proportion as their Protestant neighbors. Except for the Chicago of Richard J. Daley, the last of the Democratic machines faded away. President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

Andrew Johnson And Presidential Reconstruction

Democrats became the Confederacy, NOT the Republicans!

At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states rights. In Johnsons view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level. Under Johnsons Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmens Bureau reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery , swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

As a result of Johnsons leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as the black codes, which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states.;

Don’t Miss: Where Are Republicans On The Political Spectrum

The South And The House Go Republican

“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” President Johnson said shortly after signing the Civil Rights Act, according to his aide Bill Moyers. And indeed, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican specifically for this reason.

Yet party loyalties take a long time to shake off, and the shift of white Southerners from being solid Democrats to solid Republicans was in reality more gradual.

And while race played an important role in this shift, other issues played roles too. White evangelical Christians became newly mobilized to oppose abortion and take stands on other “culture war” issues, and felt more at home with the conservative party. There was that suspicion of big government and lack of union organization that permeated the region. And talented politicians like Ronald Reagan promised to defend traditional values.

Still, Democrats continued to maintain control of the House of Representatives for some time, in large part because of continued support from Southerners, as shown in this map by Jonathan Davis at Arizona State University. But in 1994, the revolution finally arrived, as Republicans took the House for the first time since 1955. And many of the crucial pickups that made that possible came in the South.

The First Party System: The Federalist Party And The Democratic

To start, the founding fathers can be put into two groups: the;Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party .

Alexander Hamilton favored central Government and had ties to Britain, and wanted centralized banking. He favored national power over state power. He is todays Washington Liberal/Conservative. Hamilton wanted free-market capitalism and globalization with Britain/America, as a world leader hundreds of years before his time. He is an impressive character.

The Democratic-Republican Party, headed by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, generally opposed Hamilton and his views . In simple terms, they are todays Social-Libertarians . They are more in-line with what people think when they think rebelling from the authority of the King to be free.

In this scenario we can say the big government aspect of the current American left is with the Federalists, and the socially liberal of left, and anti-big government of the right, part is with the;Democratic-Republicans. But remember, the who far-right thing simply doesnt exist yet. So the divisive politics of today arent anywhere to be found .

The duality of the;Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party;is well displayed in the clip below in a discussion between Hamilton and Jefferson .

Read Also: How Many Senate Seats Do The Republicans Have

Republican Voters Turn Against Their Partys Elites

The Tea Party movement, which sprang into existence in the early years of the Obama administration, was many things. It was partly about opposing Obamas economic policies foreclosure relief, tax increases, and health reform. It was partly about opposing immigration when Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson;interviewed Tea Party activists across the nation, they found that “immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern” those activists expressed.

But the Tea Party also was a challenge to the Republican Party establishment. Several times, these groups helped power little-known far-right primary contenders to shocking primary wins over establishment Republican politicians deemed to be sellouts. Those candidates didnt always win office, but their successful primary bids certainly struck fear into the hearts of many other GOP incumbents, and made many of them more deferential to the concerns of conservative voters.

Furthermore, many Republican voters also came to believe, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, that their partys national leaders tended to sell them out at every turn.

Talk radio and other conservative media outlets helped stoke this perception, and by May 2015 Republican voters were far more likely to say that their partys politicians were doing a poor job representing their views than Democratic voters were.

Rural And Urban Population

A Home on the MississippiCurrier and Ives

The CSA was overwhelmingly rural. Few towns had populations of more than 1,000; the typical county seat had a population of fewer than 500. Cities were rare; of the twenty largest U.S. cities in the 1860 census, only New Orleans lay in Confederate territory; and the Union captured New Orleans in 1862. Only 13 Confederate-controlled cities ranked among the top 100 U.S. cities in 1860, most of them ports whose economic activities vanished or suffered severely in the Union blockade. The population of Richmond swelled after it became the Confederate capital, reaching an estimated 128,000 in 1864. Other Southern cities in the border slave-holding states such as Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Wheeling, Alexandria, Louisville, and St. Louis never came under the control of the Confederate government.

The cities of the Confederacy included most prominently in order of size of population:

The CSA was overwhelmingly Protestant. Both free and enslaved populations identified with evangelical Protestantism. Baptists and Methodists together formed majorities of both the white and the slave population . Freedom of religion and were fully ensured by Confederate laws. Church attendance was very high and chaplains played a major role in the Army.

Read Also: How Many Electoral Votes Do Republicans Have

An Overview Of The Party Systems

The party systems, AKA eras of the United States;political parties, can be described;as follows :

In other words, as the Democratic Party became more progressive in the progressive era, it attracted progressives from the Republican party and alienated the Democrats of the small government socially conservative south. Meanwhile, as the Republican party conserved toward Gilded Age politics in the 20th century, and embraced socially conservative single-issue voter groups and individualism, it attracted the solid south and alienated progressives. These two factors, and many more explained in detail below, substantially changed the party platforms, seats held in Congress, and the voting maps over the course of the 20th century .

To sum up and connect all of the above, the switches we see that change the parties and define different eras include things like Teddy Roosevelt or Strom Thurmond switching parties , the Democratic Party platform becoming more progressive in the progressive area , the southern Democrat southern bloc tending toward the Republican party after the Civil Rights era , all this impacting which regions of the country tend to support each party , and all of this affecting which party has a stronghold in which region as new elections occur .

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Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the Souths first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs .

READ MORE: The First Black Man Elected to Congress Was Nearly Blocked From Taking His Seat

You May Like: How Many Republicans Voted For Impeachment

Better Understanding The Changes In American Politics

Above we summarized the switching of ideologies and platforms;between the parties by looking at the party systems and Presidents.

Below we explore;details, clarify semantics, answer questions, present curated videos, and illustrate some of the key telling moments regarding the changes described above.

Please consider sharing your insight below, our summing up of the history of American politics is an ongoing effort, see the videos for supplemental content from other authors.

For deeper reading:

Also, see a breakdown of each party and President and how they would be placed on the left and right.

Effect On Women And Families

Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?

About 250,000 men never came home, some 30 percent of all white men aged 18 to 40 . Widows who were overwhelmed often abandoned their farms and merged into the households of relatives, or even became refugees living in camps with high rates of disease and death. In the Old South, being an “old maid” was something of an embarrassment to the woman and her family, but after the war, it became almost a norm. Some women welcomed the freedom of not having to marry. Divorce, while never fully accepted, became more common. The concept of the “New Woman” emerged she was self-sufficient and independent, and stood in sharp contrast to the “Southern Belle” of antebellum lore.

Recommended Reading: How Do Republicans Feel About Donald Trump

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/were-the-confederates-democrats-or-republicans/

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Were The Confederates Democrats Or Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/were-the-confederates-democrats-or-republicans/

Were The Confederates Democrats Or Republicans

Th United States Congress

Were The Democrats That Founded The Confederacy, KKK & Jim Crow CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL? Lets Go!!!!

National Democratic Redistricting Committee

Protests against Donald Trump

Democratic Party PACs

In November 2018, the Democrats gained 40 seats in the House of Representatives, retaking the majority in the chamber. Nancy Pelosi was nominated to retake the speakership in January 2019.

Southern Democrats Split With Republicans Over Confederate Symbols Is More Recent Than You Might Think

How The Democrats Became Socially Liberal

TIP: See History of the United States Democratic Party.

Also Check: Why Did Republicans Hate Obama So Much

Why Democrats Avoid Confederate History While Republicans Embrace It

A Reconstituted Early 20th Century Kkk Attracts Members From Both Sides

In 1915, Cornell William J. Simmons restarted the KKK. This second KKK was made up of Republicans and Democrats, although Democrats were more widely involved.

The idea that these things overlap in a Venn diagram, the way they did with the first Klan, just isnt as tight with the second Klan, Grinspan said.

Don’t Miss: How Many Republicans Voted To Impeach Trump

Progressive Era And The New Deal

A Century Of Jim Crow But Otherwise Lots Of Progress

From 1877 to at least the 1960s, the Solid South KKK-like;Progressively Socially Conservative Democrats remained a formidable faction of the Democratic Party.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow | PBS | ep 1 of 4 Promises Betrayed.

You May Like: What Is Republicanism And What Does It Value

Presidency Of John F Kennedy

Andrew Johnson And Presidential Reconstruction

Democrats became the Confederacy, NOT the Republicans!

Don’t Miss: Where Are Republicans On The Political Spectrum

The South And The House Go Republican

Yet party loyalties take a long time to shake off, and the shift of white Southerners from being solid Democrats to solid Republicans was in reality more gradual.

The First Party System: The Federalist Party And The Democratic

To start, the founding fathers can be put into two groups: the;Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party .

The duality of the;Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party;is well displayed in the clip below in a discussion between Hamilton and Jefferson .

Read Also: How Many Senate Seats Do The Republicans Have

Republican Voters Turn Against Their Partys Elites

Furthermore, many Republican voters also came to believe, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, that their partys national leaders tended to sell them out at every turn.

Rural And Urban Population

A Home on the MississippiCurrier and Ives

The cities of the Confederacy included most prominently in order of size of population:

Read Also: How Many Electoral Votes Do Republicans Have

An Overview Of The Party Systems

The party systems, AKA eras of the United States;political parties, can be described;as follows :

Babe Didrikson Zaharias Wins Final Lpga Tournament Of Her Career

READ MORE: The First Black Man Elected to Congress Was Nearly Blocked From Taking His Seat

You May Like: How Many Republicans Voted For Impeachment

Better Understanding The Changes In American Politics

Above we summarized the switching of ideologies and platforms;between the parties by looking at the party systems and Presidents.

Below we explore;details, clarify semantics, answer questions, present curated videos, and illustrate some of the key telling moments regarding the changes described above.

Please consider sharing your insight below, our summing up of the history of American politics is an ongoing effort, see the videos for supplemental content from other authors.

For deeper reading:

Also, see a breakdown of each party and President and how they would be placed on the left and right.

Effect On Women And Families

Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?

Recommended Reading: How Do Republicans Feel About Donald Trump

0 notes

viralhottopics · 8 years ago

Text

The climate change battle dividing Trumps America

Climate change denial and energy conspiracy are high on the presidents agenda, but US scientists are fighting back

Ever since Donald Trump became US president, certain sectors of American society have felt particularly embattled. His statements on Mexicans and Muslims are notorious, but there is another community, less heard about, that has also been sent reeling: scientists.

If politics has never been a world that is overly respectful to empirical research, Trumps victory exploited a growing popular suspicion of expertise, and a tendency to seek out alternative narratives to fact-based analysis. Conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination campaigns and climate change deniers have all traded on this rejection of science, and their voices have all been heard, to differing degrees, in the new administration. But for the science community perhaps the most provocative act so far of Trumps short time in office was the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a Republican lawyer and climate change sceptic, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Id say a lot of Trumps cabinet picks are not ideal, says Shaughnessy Naughton, of the science activist group 314 Action. But Pruitt is really an offence to the organisation. Hes spent his career suing the EPA. Hes for state rights when its for polluters and against state rights when its for conservation or protecting the environment.

Naughton is the founder of 314 Action, which seeks to promote Stem science, technology, engineering and maths education and help scientists become politicians. The name refers to the first three digits of the mathematical ratio pi, a scientific imprint that occurs everywhere in life. But too often, Naughton believes, science has remained aloof from politics, while politics has grown less troubled about getting involved in science.

Pruitt is perhaps the most conspicuous example of this development. As attorney general for Oklahoma, he frequently sued the EPA in alliance with oil and gas lobbyists. Since taking over at the EPA, he has promised to weaken regulation of carbon emissions from cars and power plants, and has withdrawn requests for information on industrial production of methane.

A leading EPA official called Mustafa Ali, who is involved in environmental justice, recently resigned from the agency, complaining that there has been a concerted effort to roll back the positive steps that many, many people have worked on through all the previous administrations.

Science is under attack, says Naughton, and this administration is an example of that. If you look at the science committee in the House [of Representatives], its clearly hostile to empirical evidence. We are not going to win this battle by signing polite letters. We are going to win by getting a seat at the table. That means getting people that have pro-science agendas and scientific backgrounds elected at all level of government.

A former chemist who has worked in cancer research, Naughton has twice run for Congress, both times losing out in the Democratic primaries. She knows from experience a lot about the pitfalls and demands of American politics, particularly the vital role played by donors.

Though it has only existed since the end of last year, 314 Action has already had more than 3,000 scientists and people from scientific backgrounds sign up for training. One of them is Brian Johnson, a 32-year-old nuclear engineer. Johnson doesnt have much of a political history. He was an active supporter of the independent Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential elections, but thats about it. Now hes aiming to run for Congress in the 2018 elections. The more I look into it, he says, the more I realise it really is a huge commitment. I will probably have to resign from my job in order to campaign.

He will run as a Democrat. Isnt that a long way, politically speaking, from the libertarian Ron Paul? Johnson insists that, on all the critical issues, he supports the party line. But it is striking that his political stance is largely about what he is against rather than what he is for. And first and foremost hes against Trump.

Johnson says he waited to see if Trump would honour his campaign commitment to appoint the best people. When that didnt happen, Johnson got angry.

He appointed Rick Perry to be in charge of the Department of Energy, he says. Hes not exactly a nuclear engineer. Hes been looking to defund data collection on global warming. Hes just protecting his interest in fossil fuels, not serving the American people.

Perry, a former governor of Texas, is an enthusiast for extracting fossil fuels, does not believe that the human effect on climate change is a proven case, and is on record as wanting to scrap the Department of Energy, which is largely devoted to nuclear energy and its applications.

You know Donald Trumps views are not founded in evidence, says Johnson. They are founded in whatever feelings hes got. He doesnt really care if theres evidence for what hes doing.

Not all scientists agree with Johnson and Naughton. For instance, William Happer, the distinguished professor of physics at Princeton University, argues that global warming is not a problem, that climate science is a so-called science, that climate scientists are a glassy-eyed cult, and that increased C02 emissions are beneficial, because they are a boon to plant life.

Naughton laughs when I mention Happers name. Thats like talking about Andrew Wakefield, she says, referring to the British medical researcher, now based in America, who maintains, despite a wealth of contrary evidence, that the MMR vaccination is a cause of autism.

It would be wrong to compare Happer to the thoroughly discredited Wakefield, but its no coincidence that he has been touted as Trumps chief science adviser. Its as if the president is not interested in mainstream scientists who are proponents of widely accepted theories.

Climate change sceptic and now head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

Enraged by the administrations appointments and Trumps immigration policy, Brian Johnson turned to 314 Action. But if he thought that his scientific background and opposition to Trump was enough, he soon began to realise what running for office in America involves. He discovered that a deep knowledge of nuclear fusion came a poor second to the ability to fundraise.

314 Action told me the steps I would have to take, how I would fundraise, who I would talk to, and the networks I needed to tap into, he says. Ive learned how to make myself a viable candidate that can run a serious campaign.

Some of what Trump and his cohort say can make the scientific establishment sound like a bastion of political correctness. But science is not only under threat from the right. For many years now the postmodern strand of leftwing thought has tended to view science as a social construct.

This outlook, exposed by Alan Sokals notorious 1996 hoax (in which a spoof scholarly article was published by an academic journal) has often dismissed emphases on empirical research as scientism, in other words as just another belief system.

Indeed, in some cases science has been accused of being simply a cultural pillar of western ideological hegemony. Perhaps the most notorious example of this kind of thinking saw the South African leader Thabo Mbeki reject the orthodox scientific thesis on HIV-Aids as a product of centuries-old white racist beliefs.

In such cases science is understood not as a neutral, or unbiased means of analytical observation and prediction, but instead as a deeply ideological interpretation of events. Both political extremes, for different reasons, have a history of questioning the science establishments political underpinning.

And both have employed the same method to discredit mainstream science: promoting the dissenting voice. Trump seeks out climate change deniers to support his agenda, just as Mbeke made use of the molecular biologist Peter Duesbergs controversial, and now discredited, theory that HIV did not cause Aids. Mbekes stance is estimated to have cost more than 300,000 South African lives.

That took place in a pre-internet age. Now the wonders of technology have made it even easier to disseminate an anti-science message through a medium the web that serves to flatten out hierarchies of empirical truth.

Naughton is familiar with the tactic of digging out heterodox opinions to justify bad policies. What I find completely remarkable, she says, are the people who reject all the experts and find an outlier with a PhD who says something that confirms their belief. It doesnt make any sense. There is a place for questioning everything. Thats important. But we do need experts, we do need to accept facts. Gravity is not something we debate. At a certain point, your opinion is not as relevant as the facts.

But of course its not always easy to distinguish opinion from fact, especially when accusations and counter-accusations of fake news dominate the debate. Scientists are used to a long process of peer review. Thats not how it works in politics.

Politics is much more emotional and volatile than science, says Molly Sheehan, a bioengineer, who is considering whether to enter the congressional race in the Philadelphia area. It moves a lot faster.

She too is using the know-how provided by 314 Action to inform her preparation. Although she is a longstanding political activist, she says it was Trumps election that galvanised her to look at becoming a politician. It went from a hobby to the feeling of I need to do everything in my power to ensure our country comes back to paying attention to reality and paying attention to fact.

Sheehan says the kind of scientific belief and optimism that America experienced under JFK in the 1960s has been replaced by apathy and cynicism. She believes that the US has been growing more anti-science for many years. Its just that Trump has made the drift definitive.

People dont remember how bad diseases were, she says They dont remember polio, or measles or mumps. They dont realise that medical science has had a huge impact on child mortality and morbidity. People dont have the emotional connection to science that they had in the 1960s.

But can scientists create that connection by becoming politicians? President Kennedy, after all, was not a scientist, but the space race he launched captured the public imagination. What can scientists bring to the political scene?

First of all, says Johnson, I think a scientist can really understand technical issues, whether its climate change or cyber security. Politicians like Trump make a decision and then go out and find the science to support it. If I were in Congress I would want to seek out the science first, and then have that inform my policies.

Its an admirable ambition, but is it one that will inspire the public? One of the criticisms that has been launched at politicians, not just in America but in the UK and Europe too, is that they have become too technocratic. Which is to say that instead of viewing issues from a personalised emotive basis, they are more likely to be dry utilitarians, allowing research to show the sensible policy.

The triumph of Trump was to portray that kind of politics as divorced from peoples reality and therefore insular, and most likely corrupt. It worked. But how long will it last? On the whole people tend to prefer trained pilots flying planes and experienced surgeons carrying out serious operations. In other words, when it really matters, we want expertise.

The question is whether the experts are the best people to argue for expertise. Scientists are good at winning the argument, but that doesnt necessarily mean they are good at winning over the people.

Sheehan sees the Trump election as an opportunity for scientists to reassert themselves. For while his presidency may at first be a backward step, Sheehan believes it will provide the impetus to force science back on to the national agenda. It might be the wake-up call thats needed for the pendulum to swing back the other way, she says.

The European temptation to look down on America and its more garish habits has proven particularly irresistible in recent months, but there remains an energy and optimism in the country that should not be underestimated. 314 Action is a fine example of a spirit that doesnt dwell in defeat but instead looks at practical ways of putting things right.

Trump should beware. The scientific revolution starts here.