Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy

In Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy, Yuval Levin explores the complicated meanings of science and technology in American politics and finds that the science debates have much to teach us about our political life. These debates, Levin argues, reveal some serious challenges to American self-government, and put on stark display the deepest strengths and greatest weaknesses of both the left and the right.
Most of the science debates, he concludes, are not about particular innovations, technologies, theories, or facts. Rather, they come down to a profound dispute between liberals and conservatives about the right way to think about the future. Science is only one subject of this broader dispute, but it is one that makes the nature of the divide at the heart of our politics unusually dear. Properly understood - which they have not been lately - those debates may illuminate the contours of our politics and the deepest meaning of scientific progress.

Yuval Levin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, director of the Center's Bioethics and American Democracy Program, and senior editor of The New Atlantis.