THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WHY THE LEFT HATES TECHNOLOGY | 2001-08-04

In 1968, George Wallace's American Party had a huge "Science and Technology" platform. The very party that leftists called "reactionaries" and "yahoos" was fanatically in favor of more space exploration, more basic research.

Meanwhile, the project for a moon landing was going forward. Just before the moon shot began, a liberal demonstration protested it. They said that all that money wasted on science should go to the poor.

Norman Mailer spoke for other fashionable liberals in denouncing the whole space program as "Faustian."

Once again, nobody remembers that but me.

All that "wasted" space research founded Silicon Valley, led to the heart pacemaker and hundreds of other lifesaving devices, and yielded many, many times its costs in benefits. So liberals say they were always all for it.

In the present energy crunch, liberals want all the solutions to be government regulation and government rationing and government alternative energy research which goes nowhere. It is anti-liberals who look to technology to solve problems. Leftists want those problems to continue. They want to use them to expand government power.

The last thing leftists want is for technology to solve the crises they want to use.

The leftists are against new technology because they have gained absolute power over the old technology.