Paul Krugman: American Thought Police

What happens to people who express views that the GOP's hard right doesn't like?:

American Thought Police, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog... Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians ...

The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.

The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records. ...

Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety... But ... this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon. ...

Now,... Mr. Cronon ... has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business... Beyond that, Mr. Cronon ... has a secure reputation as a towering figure in his field. ...

So we don’t need to worry about Mr. Cronon... But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch-hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like.

Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.

What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.