Attacking the messenger is nothing new in politics.
Conservatives are applying this across the board, utilizing what William F. Buckley once told Charlie Rose was conservatism’s main goal: attacking and fighting against issues.
So, if scientific facts don’t promote your political agenda, attack it.
A study highlighted by Mother Jones is quite illuminating and proves the “New Right’s” plot perfectly. Kevin Drum focuses on “conservatives don’t trust science,” but that’s not the message that’s most important.
At the core of what Gordon Gauchat calls the “New Right” objective against science points to something far more challenging for the left. Oh, if only there was a “New Left” to match the conservative “New Right.” (Is there even a “left” anymore?)
The critical point in the study is that not only is the conservative distrust of science found in the study coming from educated conservatives, which Drum highlights, but more importantly, it’s calculated and politically purposeful in intent, which can be seen through corporations joining in, as well as religious conservatives, to push their ideology over science to win the ideological argument.
In other words, educated conservatives are purposefully manifesting changes through their anti-science intent for ideological gains alone.
The facts and truth of science don’t matter as long as conservatism wins. It’s not that they’re ignorant. It’s that they don’t care. It you elongate this thesis to include our economy, health care, even entitlements, but especially the war drums on Iran, you’ll see once again why bipartisanship for Democrats is a loser. Conservatism at its core thrives off of scorched earth, because it has no other choice, because facts don’t support it.
Bill Clinton saved the economy after 12 years of Reagan ruin; Barack Obama had an economic catastrophe dumped in his lap after 4 years of Bush, who was handed a whopping surplus from Clinton, with Obama barely able to save the country from financial ruin. Imagine if Obama would have done tax hikes like Clinton, then you get what might have been, but even with his modest approach, Obama dug us out from what yet another “conservative” president wrought.
A snippet of the study is below:
In addition, a comparison of predicted probabilities indicates that conservatives with college degrees decline more quickly than those with only a high school degree (p < .05). These results are quite profound, because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives. Put another way, educated conservatives appear to be more culturally engaged with the ideology and, in Martin and Desmond’s (2010) terms, more politically sophisticated.
[...] The NR’s [New Right's] ideology conflicts with the scientific community on a number of crucial aspects. First, Mooney (2005:5) identifies an inherent tension between conservatism as a political philosophy that emphasizes traditionalism and the “dynamism of scientific inquiry—its constant onslaught on old orthodoxies, its rapid generation of new technological possibilities.” Mooney also stresses two key constituencies of the NR, the religious right and transnational corporations, that each have vested interests in scientific outcomes. Corporations subject to government regulation often challenge science to undermine federal controls and protect their profit margins (McCright and Dunlap 2000, 2003). Religious groups clash with science over moral, epistemological, and ontological issues, such as Darwinian evolution, stem cell research, and AIDs research (Ansell 1997; Burack 2008; Smith 2001). Studies of the conservative movement in the United States have also focused on its cultural dimensions and, particularly, the NR’s media empire. Beginning with radio and book publishing houses and then extending into cable television, think tanks, and Internet social networking sites, the NR [New Right] has created an intellectual apparatus that promotes the conservative agenda and articulates a conservative cultural identity. This intellectual base represents an alternative to academic locations and the scientific community and is often socially distinguished and reinforced through its criticism of “liberal” bias in these cultural spheres…
No wonder Al Gore became the Republican Party’s number one nemesis.
The calculated conservative head-in-the-sand-on-science-so-you-can win-politically-plan has a potentially devastating outcome, especially for climate change advocates, but also our energy policy, which is a national security issue.
It also proves another reason why religious conservatives, led by Rick Santorum, and Michelle Bachmann, are such hard core homeschooling advocates.
The nefarious aspect of the study reveals that even educated conservatives walk away from science upon discovering that it holds too many inconvenient truths.
There’s no reason to believe that this won’t hold true for every other issues where facts fail to fall their way.
I’d say it’s one reason why the number of independents is growing, with Republicans losing the most on party identification. Unfortunately, independents don’t trust Democrats or Republicans anymore and it’s not hard to understand why they don’t.
I am dumbfounded that anyone with a functioning brain ever assumed or thought otherwise?!!!!
Ignorance is just SO sad.
It’s like what a 12 year old girl said to me many years ago:
“… so you’re telling me God isn’t powerful enough to have created evolution?”
The insidious infiltration of movement conservatism into all corners of our society has taken the long road. This approach has paid off in more ways than one. They have created a perfect storm with which to annihilate a society built on thought, education, inclusiveness, fairness, moral and ethical values. A society where any religion was welcome, any nationality was welcome, a society where, as Bruce Springsteen says, ” We take care of our own. ” To dismantle a society like this the conservatives made use of the CIA playbook; you undermine it in every way possible. The process of undermining creates hostility, confusion and anger. This in turn results in the polarization of not only society but of congress, which of course represents said society. Polarized government eventually destroys everything good and leaves only the bad. It does not take a rocket scientist ( did I say scientist ) to realize that stupid people are more pliable than educated people. Stupid people aren’t going to care about science, they only care about survival. So we have it, the movement conservative dream state; overworked, exhausted, angry, bewildered and poorly educated people struggling to survive, who don’t have the time to understand that their is a larger plan, a plan to create a ruling class and a working class. In a sense, their very slowly being eaten alive.
The willful ignorance is on the part of the repugnantklan/teabagger voters. The “leaders” if you can call them that….are cynical, utterly loathsome meat puppets willing to say or do anything to get power.
given that our president was *against* the medical ‘mandate’ when Hillary was ‘for’ it, I’d say pandering isn’t exclusive to the ‘right’, Sec.
Hey pmichael~ How have you been?
Thank you, Lake Lady. Not great. Just got back from a CT scan and I’m down to 106# – but my attitude is positive, and my project is going well. We’re about to get non-profit status.
I’m going to have to read Gordon Gauchat’s paper in detail, but I can already tell you I’m skeptical of his hypothesis. There was an across the board drop in trust of science that starts at that left side of that graph. Liberals regained their trust, but the others did not. I also have my doubts about Kevin Drum’s assertion that this isn’t due to lack of education on the part of conservatives. If all you do with an education is to use it to find more excuses to deny reality, then you’re not educated. You just went to college, and unless that degree got you a better job, you wasted your time there.
What that chart tells me is that something happened in the late 1960s that precipitated the public’s lack of faith in science. Liberals may have kept theirs because scientists tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. I don’t know what that change might be, but that’s where I’d start looking, and I’d look first in the area of how higher education changed back then.
Having read through now, the paper does offer some plausible explanation for why the gap exists, and for why it’s gotten wider. They mention that conservatives seem to see science as something different from what liberals do. This may be true, but I think the fact remains that neither group is terribly familiar with what science actually is. Discussions I see even here tend to support that notion, and I’d judge that most people here have had at least some post-secondary education.
It might help if more people actually had a working understanding of science. That’s something that I think has become less true since the 1960s. Liberal arts and business programs seem to have almost no science in them, beyond basic “bonehead” courses. More attention to that, and math and philosophy, is something a lot of people who graduated from college since the 1970s could sure have benefited from.
Cujo, what happened was that in 1971 the future Justice Powell wrote his famous memo telling corporations to start sponsoring “research” that supported conservative goals and to cut off funding to any concern, academic or charitable, which did not support corporate goals. The Kochs and the Olins, among others, poured money into the new right wing think tanks, and the rest is history.
As Thomas Frank notes in the current issue of The Baffler, all checks against money power are now gone. Even the medical profession has been corrupted, what with the influence of the insurance and pharma companies; the economics profession is set up so that its self perpetuating in crowd supports deregulation and other conservative causes; public interest law has been starved for funding and is but a shadow of its heyday in 60s and 70s, and as to journalism, well…. Our regulatory agencies, where science used to count for something are, like Congressional staffs, filled with people who hope to get jobs with industry or lobbyists; and the way regulation has been beaten to death, what morale could possibly survive at, say FDA or the SEC?
So it all boils down to, whatever serves the 1% pays well, and nothing else does. There’s a reason why Nixon rewarded Powell with a Supreme Court seat. Nixon prevailed, despite being forced to resign.
Changing people’s attitudes takes more than that, I think, at least at first. That change was precipitous. Whatever it was, it had to be learned, or not taught. Unlearning takes longer. In any case, that doesn’t explain why liberals also trusted science less for a time.
Let me just add another thought that might clear up why I’m skeptical. Note the far left of that chart. The curves were already falling when that particular poll was started back in 1974. What started that was a lot more momentous than some right wing crank writing a letter. You could convince me that a decade later that was having a big effect, but two or three years later? Not a chance.
Whatever happened to change things was either big, or it happened long before 1971.
I worked at CBO in the late seventies and yes, one could feel the vertical rise in rightwing power in DC then, despite the Democrats’ post Watergate gains. You had the beginning of single issue pressure groups led by driect mail gurus such as Richard Viguerie, who would attack any otherwise acceptable legislator who was against their narrow agenda (guns, abortion, whatever). You had AM Rosenthal become the executive editor at NYT, and then coverage of Nader’s work plummeted at NYT and then across the media spectrum. You had well funded rightwing groups like the Moral Majority and the Phyllis Schaffly people. What you don’t seem to understand, is how rapidly these folks got the power to write the narrative and got people to go along.
Public opinion, as pr experts like Edgar Bernays proved, is very malleable. He only needed 3 years, with the quaint means available during WWI to (1) shift US opinion away from Germany and towards the Allies, and (2) actually whip up pro Allies war fever that got us into the war in 1917. Or think about this: how long did it take for Hitler, who was elected in 1933 with 1/3 of the vote, to get Gemans enthused with Nazi views on about the Jews and the Nordic “master race?” Three years, maybe?
Of course it was child’s play for the much more sophisticated 1970s, wingers to change public opinion once they obtained the means.
Bernays had lots of help, like sinking ocean liners. Besides, that was mostly about changing attitudes about a country most of us knew nothing about. Granted, getting people to accept England as an ally back then was a bigger problem, but they weren’t sinking our ships.
Getting people to not trust science requires, or at least should require, a lot of unlearning of things. If they didn’t have to unlearn very much, then I’d say that’s your real problem. Like I just wrote, some right-wing crank writing a letter isn’t going to have that kind of effect in a couple of years. Whatever happened, it seems to have shaken Americans’ faith in science already in 1974, or was on its way to doing so by the time those polls were begun.
Well considering the level of “belief” in this country it really isn’t a surprise is it? I mean really, if you start out from a base of accepting superstitious nonsense as a reality…then you have one of the political parties and their backers start pounding the “don’t trust the egg heads” drums for 40 years now…is it REALLY a surprise?
The amazing thing to me is how many folks reject the superstitious nonsense now.
Yes, but why so much “belief”? That and the faltering attitude about science go hand in hand, I think. We understand so much more about the world and the universe than we did even in the early 1970s. Plate tectonics was just getting started as an idea, really. Much of what we know about what exists beyond our own galaxy, and a fair amount of what we know about biology have happened since that time when respect for science was already falling.
To me, the two phenomena have the same root cause, whatever that is. We didn’t just suddenly get stupid for no reason. Or did we?
Neil deGrasse Tyson says we stopped dreaming.
Dr. Tyson on the most astounding fact in the universe.
I’m inclined to agree with him.
Cujo, a quick tutorial on how pressure groups work. When some Member of Congress tries to tighten gun control, for example, NRA sends tens of thousands of postcards to supporters among the Member’s constituents. Many of these supporters sign the cards and send to the Member’s office, which gets overwhelmed. The Members have learned how fanatic some politically engaged gun owners are, and it doesn’t matter how beneficial the Member’s work has been for district or country. Oppose NRA and you’re dead unless your district is very, very blue. As Congresspeople quit trying to enact even the most reasonable gun controls (background checks before purchase, restricting assault rifles) the media coverage shifts right along with the Members. Same thing with raising taxes or anything else conservatives don’t want. It’s not about a “few cranks writing letters.” It’s about organized, game changing tactics.
Of course the conservatives had help. They were afraid of drugs, hippies, the sexual revolution, women’s rights. The seventies brought defeat in Vietnam, Watergate (and the vengeful wingers who thought Nixon was an innocent victim of those damn liberals), inflation, the Iran hostage crisis. But note that the first four were not all that substantive and they remain on the winger hot button list to this day. Hitler made a big deal about “decadence” too. The point is, while the wingers had help, if you control the opinion makers and the media you can get the results you want. You can always accuse the other side of “decadent morals” to get the ball rolling; after that a real grievance or two will put you over the top.
As for the Lusitania, whose sinking helped ignite US WWI fever: It was “secretly” carrying military supplies to England and the Germans had every right to turn it away and sink if it persisted on course to Liverpool. http://bit.ly/Q7chE
The public didn’t know, the passengers didn’t know but the US government did know and the Germans found out. So… Wilson used the passengers as human shields for arms shipments, and set up a situation where passengers would die so that we’d have an excuse to enter the war. As you can see in the link, the US was ready and willing to pounce on the sinking to hype war fever the minute the news hit the wires. Sound familiar???
The Lusitania was carried on the British roles as an ARMED merchantman.
Did everything I’ve written here and on my blog disappear?
I’ll give you a quick tutorial on my views on the subject to get us up to speed. Yes, this is the way successful lobby groups work. They have an adversarial relationship with politicians. When politicians stray from the path, they call those politicians out, and defeat enough of them to reinforce the message. These days, there are very few successful progressive lobby groups. This, and the general attitude of progressives that it’s better to go along to get along, explains why we keep getting our asses handed to us.
Progressives love to blame the vast right wing conspiracy, and it certainly is a problem. There’s a problem that’s much closer to home, though, and most don’t want to face it.
And yes, that VRWC all started in the 1970s. Actually, it’s been good to be reminded of all this, so thanks. Some of the origins of the conservative propaganda movement are still a mystery to me, but I understand the basics, I think.
Nevertheless, the VRWC doesn’t explain why respect for science was already falling across the board by 1974. Despite the supposed scientific nature of these campaigns, they are as full of pitfalls and false starts as any applied science, and probably more than most. People think that they’re omniscient and scientific because, once one forgets about all the mistakes, any process can look that way. In addition, organizations that perform the work have to be organized, etc. That wasn’t happening enough in 1971 to explain this. In the 1960s, Americans still had a Disney-esque view of the wonders of science, and at least some respect for what it achieved and how it got there. Unlearning an attitude is much harder than implanting one where no countervailing attitude exists. That’s why I don’t buy WWI as analogous to the VRWC’s effect on science attitudes.
It does explain why the gap between how liberals view science versus how everyone else views it grew later, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Whatever the cause, it was more general and widespread by the early ’70s, I’m sure.
If you didn’t like my tutorial maybe you shouldn’t have mocked me regarding ” a few cranks writing letters,” especially when I had already made it plain I was talking about Viguerie types
As to the raw material that was there in the 70s, I listed it in para 2 of my last post. At least conservatives began feeling insecure in being left behind in the newer world described by Toffler (in a shallow fashion, to be sure) in “Future Shock,” what with a computer revolution on the one side, and loosening of the authority/ ties symbolized by church and family. They saw the future and freaked, looked for blame rather than try to understand. I believe Toffler was writing in the late 60s, so this material had already been mapped by the time period studied in the report Taylor quoted.
Actually, that’s just exasperation on my part. That’s something I keep repeating to people, only to be told, in essence, that the problem is that we just don’t support Democrats hard enough, and then to be told that if I fail to do it this time I’ll be really, really, sorry. As if the Democrats won’t turn right around and screw us the same way Republicans would, anyway.
And I think of those guys as cranks. Some of them are rich cranks, but they’re still cranks. It takes a while to get from the letter-writing stage to the effective organizing stage, even for the rich and single-minded.
My suspicion is that part of the problem is that we just don’t have leaders anymore who have actually had to deal with the cold facts of life. Most are affluent and isolated enough now that the things that affect us don’t bother them at all. It’s like they’re in a different world. That was definitely true in the 1960s, too. Look at the difference between George H.W. Bush’s military career and George W. Bush’s. With people like that running things, the petty and selfish have a natural advantage, because they still have motivation to get whatever it is they’re after.
I hope I’m wrong about that, because little will change if that’s the case, until those people are no longer able to be elected. That’s going to take a long time.
“As if the Democrats won’t turn right around and screw us the same way Republicans would, anyway.”
And there in lies the problem, because THAT statement is fundamentally not true.
WILL the Dems screw us if they are elected? Almost certainly…however…they will NOT screw us the same way the repugs do.
I have to agree with Cujo359.
I would dearly love to see some data points prior to 1974. I note with interest that most precipitous fall was among “moderates” wich bottoms out around 1982. Yes, what the hell happened there? Is it a lag from a possible “liberal” fall off, not in the data set?
Hum, 1972, Apollo was in the rear view mirror Nixon was going down in flames, all the institutions we believed in were taking a hammering. Maybe science was taking a ding because it did not live up to the hype of the late ’50s and early 60′s. I would sure love to see those non-existant data points from 68 and 69. Could there been a bump when the successful moon landing occurred? Who knows, maybe the fall off began before that.
What does concern me is the almost straight line fall off among Conservatives. Both the liberal and moderate data points seem to do a dead cat bounce before settling into a steady state, with the data meandering around a steady, flat line.
I also like to know how the “trust in science” question was pitched. I’m abord with Cujo359 again as I think most people have a very hazy notion of what science is, or how it is done. Small example, if people really understood how the immune system works, anti-vaxers would not exist. If people understood how probability worked State Lotteries would collapse in heartbeat along with Los Vegas. I fairly sure most people conflate science with technology and maybe 1 person in 10,000 could give an adequate explanation of the scientific method. I doubt even fewer could explain how scientific theories work; which is why so many low-information folks still believe that you can “teach the controversy” about evolution.
“Could there been a bump when the successful moon landing occurred?”
Or could there have been a dip when the WE NEVER LANDED ON THE MOON crowd started getting fired up?