As regular readers of Telic Thoughts know, I both looked forward to and applauded the arrival of the post-wedge world. However, I am now beginning to doubt whether the post-wedge world will last very long. Two significant developments have occurred and they have nothing to do with the Discovery Institute. First, as I originally noted, the most famous scientist alive has been undercutting the Dover decision and secondly, this scientist, and several others from academia, have sparked a new socio-political movement that has absorbed this message. This movement includes scientists like Sam Harris, who denies the NAS position that science is neutral about the existence of God and instead uses the NAS membership as evidence to the contrary.

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David Heddle has some fitting words for members of the political ID movement:

News that Cobb County case had been settled, and that the textbook stickers are a thing of the past, made me think of a closing parenthesis. In my mind, and admittedly not in strict concurrence with the actual timeline, the placement of the stickers was the shot across the bow from the Political-Activist Intelligent Design (PAID) movement, and the settlement of the case is the tippy-top of the PAID movement mast disappearing beneath the surface. (Those aren't mixed metaphors, are they? I can't tell.)

I don't have much new to say about the PAID movement. But I thought I would try to restate some old criticisms in graphical form. I'm not sure if the plot succeeds at making my three recurring PAID movement themes: 1) it backfired, big-time 2) it created a cottage industry complete with a cult-like following and leaders with delusions, it would seem, of becoming the White House Science Advisor 3) it was deceptive - it really is about religion - which makes its ends-justify-the-means methods all the more inexcusable.

I think Heddle exaggerates things a bit for effect, but I agree with the gist of his post. Some people thought they could use ID-the-idea as a spearhead for social reform, creating the so-called "ID movement". The goal was a pipedream, as the string of legal defeats have showed, but it gave critics an opportunity to conflate the concept of ID with the movement, drumming up fear among scientists. The Sternberg affair shows how individual careers suffer when their colleagues think they have to squash every ID-friendly expression in the name of Science and Democracy. Had the ID movement not existed, would-be witchhunters would have had to look much harder for things to scare their colleagues with.

Okay, since most critics can only hear "God/religion" when "ID" is spoken or written, things have becomes more complicated in the Post Wedge World. For now it appears that we have at least four types of ID critics.
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In our comments section, one TT member noted, "Its not real suprising that when President Bush said he supported teaching intelligent design he was only pandering to social conservatives. Since then, of course, the Dover, Pa. school board was voted out of office, Kitzmiller v. Dover was decided by a conservative Bush appointee, creationists were voted out of power on the Kansas School Board in the GOP primaries, Ohio deep sixed its ID policy, and a bunch of creationists lost in the November elections, the most prominent being Senator Rick Santorum, who couldn't run away from IDism fast enough after Kitzmiller. I'm inclined to agree with the 'Rev. Dr.' Lenny Flank that IDism is dead, dead, dead."

But it depends on what he means by "IDism."

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The Washington Post had an article the other day, "Let's Stop Stereotyping Evangelicals" (HT: Darwinian Fundamentalism).

It was in 1976 — the "year of the evangelical," according to Newsweek — that conservative Christians burst upon the political landscape. Critics have been warning about the theocratic takeover of America ever since. Thus the plaintive cry of a Cabinet member in the Carter administration: "I am beginning to fear that we could have an Ayatollah Khomeini in this country, but that he will not have a beard . . . he will have a television program."

This election season produced similar lamentations — Howard Dean's warning about Christian "extremism," Kevin Phillips's catalogue of fears in "American Theocracy" and brooding documentaries such as "Jesus Camp," to name a few. This theme is a gross caricature of the 100 million or more people who could be called evangelicals. But the real problem is that it denies the profoundly democratic ideals of Protestant Christianity, while ignoring evangelicalism's deepening social conscience.

Evangelicals led the grass-roots campaigns for religious liberty, the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage. Even the Moral Majority in its most belligerent form amounted to nothing more terrifying than churchgoers flocking peacefully to the polls on Election Day. The only people who want a biblical theocracy in America are completely outside the evangelical mainstream, their influence negligible.

It then proceeds to list a number of cases that illustrate that evangelicals are far more concerned about fighting things like AIDS and illiteracy than they are in promoting a theocracy. Though the article paints a rosy picture of evangelicals - not all causes fit so easily into the "social consience" angle - it certainly is a refreshing change from the many worries about the Coming Theocrach.

Update: I can see that people are already using the comments to discuss the election results, and I have no intention of breaking up a good discussion. So this is now officially an open thread. Feel welcome to discuss the WP article, the election, or something else entirely.

In the discussion over whether a US theocracy is right around the corner, one of the points I have been making is this: Again and again, we have seen attempts to merely teach criticism of evolution crumble. If those dastardly "religionists" cannot even manage this, what reason is there to believe that far more marginalized groups will succeed in re-writing the Constitution to turn the US into a theocracy?

As if on cue, this point was further fortified the other day, when both Michigan and Ohio rejected attempts to teach criticisms of evolution. More at Dispatches from the Culture Wars and The Beacon Journal.

For those of us who realize that we are living in a post-wedge world, none of this is very surprising. But those critics who still cling to rhetoric about the Coming Theocracy will soon have to look for new things to be alarmed over.

Apparently frustrated by continued reluctance among the riff-raff to embrace his evolutionary metaphysic, PZ Myers cites an economist's observation that there is no real penalty for not believing-in evolution [a.k.a. Neodarwinism], and suggests we may need to impose "financial and societal disincentives" on those who resist or dissent.

PZ doesn't forward what he thinks these disincentives should be, but his fan club member "Dan" offers:

The perfect disincentive for evolution deniers: breeding bans.

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Despite some complaints about the political nature of these sociopolitical issues, I thought I'd go ahead and introduce for everyone's pleasure the official Anti-Wedge Strategy [hat tip to PT via none other than Pim] launched by Massimo Pigliucci, David Baum and Mark McPeek for the joint council of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalism. It's a true jewel in the sense that it helps to elucidate well the reason why the emotionally-invested critics of ID aren't yet ready to let go of the Wedge now that it's been soundly defeated in the US courts.

We like to call this the "Post-Wedge World." Mike coined the phrase on purpose, demonstrating the fact that the attempt by creationist fundamentalists to 'wedge' their way into public school science classrooms was ill-conceived from the beginning. Now the engaged DarwinDefenders are left bereft of the Wedge as a reason to justify their strident political activity. So they came up with this in order to keep the brawl going.

Who here is promoting the politics?

Paul Nelson has some words of advice that many in the ID movement would do well to heed:

The debate about design vs. no design has been going on since antiquity. Where it counts, in the minds of those one really wants to persuade, like my hypothetical bright 15 year old, school board elections (!) just aren't meaningful or relevant. At all.

Unfortunately, much of the ID movement seems to think that they are. More legal, legislative, or public policy action, they say, is the route to pursue, and the most important goal of all is to affect the public school science curriculum.

I disagree, strongly. What can be won by a vote can be lost by a vote. And science - the gaining of knowledge - is not, and never will be, a matter of ballot boxes, lobbying, commercials, billboards, clever campaigns, or any of the rest of the apparatus of political persuasion or force.

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Mano Singham appears to have figured out that we are in the Post-Wedge World:

This is the latest domino that has fallen since the Dover, PA court decision, driving the IDC forces back even more. I wrote about these Dover dominoes back in May 2006.

I had thought that the Kansas issue would also end up in the courts. But it seems like the voters have decided to pull the plug first. If the new board in November reverses itself and removes the pro-IDC language, then the people of Kansas will have saved themselves a long and probably losing court battle. I am not sure what the IDC forces will do now. One of their chief architects, law Professor Phillip Johnson of Berkeley, in an interview given after the Dover decision, sounded discouraged:

"I think the fat lady has sung for any efforts to change the approach in the public schools. . .the courts are just not going to allow it. They never have. The efforts to change things in the public schools generate more powerful opposition than accomplish anything. . .I don't think that means the end of the issue at all." "In some respects," he later goes on, "I'm almost relieved, and glad. I think the issue is properly settled. It's clear to me now that the public schools are not going to change their line in my lifetime."

It is clear that he thinks the battle had a better chance of being won in the court of public opinion, rather than in the courts of law. But the Kansas primary results are an ominous sign that the tide may be turning there too.

Eugenie Scott, however, cautions against letting go of too much of that Fear:

Scott said opponents of evolution hardly are finished, however. "They have had a series of setbacks," she said, "but I don't think for one moment that this means the intelligent design people will fold their tents and go away."

PZ Myers is not satisfied with the victories, as he explains the reason for his own sense of panic:

Elections and courts are stop-gaps. They are ways to temporarily block trends from becoming entrenched in our social institutions, but as I tell everyone, all we have to do is lose one and we're screwed.

This is a culture war. It's not being waged in courtrooms and ballot boxes, but in people's homes and churches and schools, it's going on in newsletters and editorial pages and web sites"”it's going on in your neighborhood right now, and it's going on in every small town in Kansas despite the results of their latest election. Nothing has changed except that now creationists will redouble their efforts in the unobtrusive channels at the roots of culture.