Why Republicans No Longer Trust Science. NewsWire

NewsWire: 8/30/21

• Republicans’ confidence in science is down nearly 30 percentage points since 1975. Yet even while Republicans’ confidence in science has tanked, confidence among Democrats has surged. (Gallup)
• NH: In 1975, 72% of Republicans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science. Among Democrats, this share was five percentage points lower at 67%.
• Nearly 50 years later, this gap has reversed and then some. Democrats’ confidence in science has climbed 12 percentage points to 79%, while Republican confidence has dropped 27 percentage points to just 45%.

• How in the world did science ever become such a partisan litmus test? And why has the sign of the delta flipped since the mid-1970s?
• One theory points to changes in party affiliation by education. A signal political trend of the last decade or so, especially since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, is the migration of more educated (and often professional) voters into the Democratic camp and the migration of less educated (and often working-class) voters into the Republican camp. (See "Election 2020: The Ghosts of Elections Past, Present, and Future.") Historically, more educated Americans are more likely to express confidence in science than less-educated Americans.
• This seems like a plausible explanation for the new "science" divide. But it can't possibly account for most of what has happened. The current difference in the belief in science by education is modest: 72% of college grads have confidence in science versus 60% of non-college grads. What's more, this divide exists only among Democrats. On the GOP side, Gallup explains, there is no longer any difference at all between the most educated and the least educated voters in their trust in science.
• Something a lot more important must be going on.
• That something was the subject of a recent WSJ op-ed by AEI fellow Tunku Varadarajan. He argues that rising public skepticism of science, especially among conservatives, is directly linked to the growing role of science in political debates. “As we’ve seen during the pandemic,” he writes, “science can be a source of power”--and to Republicans it seems like such power always aligns with the agenda of the other party. 
• The clashes over mask-wearing, vaccinations, and pandemic shut-downs in recent months have helped bring this issue to the forefront. But the problem has been emerging for decades, at least since the beginning of the culture wars in the 1990s.
• "Following the science," complain conservative Republicans, is used by progressive Democrats to justify whatever it is they want to do: tax carbon fuels, subsidize EVs, flatten inequality, protect snail darters, mandate extra bathrooms, ban spanking, or regulate speech. Last month the AMA announced that sex should be removed as a designation on public documents because it subjects some citizens to "marginalization and minoritization" and "is deleterious to their health." Science speaks again.
• By invoking science, conservatives say, progressives seek at every turn to end the conversation by reframing their opponents' views as not merely politically or morally objectionable (that always happens in a democracy), but rather as anti-evidence, anti-logic, and anti-truth. Opponents' views are thereby cast outside the realm of consideration.
• Conservatives, especially in the populist alt-right, have responded in kind. The result is a gigantic fault line. One side trumpets the triumphs of science (the mRNA vaccines); the other decries scientific misdeeds (lab-created viruses). One side likens climate-change questioners to holocaust "deniers"; the other exposes ideological bias within the climate-change "consensus" (Climategate). One side obsessively rakes its opponents for "factual errors" (20 pinocchios!); the other accuses its opponents of elitism, conspiracy, and depravity.
• So much for why the GOP now resents science. But why has the divide flipped over the past 45 years?
• The answer is pretty simple. In the late 1960s and 1970s, it was the political left, not the political right, that most distrusted science. Back in the era of campus revolts, antiwar protests, and hippie communes, it was called the New Left. And this New Left, energized by a loud rising generation of "counter-culture" youth (Boomers), excoriated scientists and technocrats for empowering the "military-industrial establishment" that was irradiating our food, polluting our environment, napalming poor people abroad, and condemning us all to conformist, repressive lives in middle-class suburbia.
• Amazingly, all of the most popular young professors back then were on board. They attacked "western rationality" and deconstructed the very notion of "objective reality" in an effort to discredit "the system" and give voice to oppressed minorities. There was no one narrative; there were only multiple narratives.
• This is when the first wave of postmodernism--led by apostles of relativism like Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Michel Foucault--broke across America. As Kurt Andersen points out in Fantasyland, nearly all of the most viral conspiracy theories of that era were associated with the left, not the right.
• Democrats sympathized and at least pretended to understand. Republicans, meanwhile, were clueless. They were the folks with crewcuts and clip-on slide rules who voted for Nixon, still admired technocrats, and spent more time watching the Apollo moon landing than Woodstock. 
• Today, clearly, America has become a very different place. “I believe in science,” Joe Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president. “Donald Trump doesn’t. It’s that simple, folks.”
• Along the way, as the bluezone dons the white-coat brand of the expert, the redzone has embraced the anti-rationalism of the outcast. Donald Trump, announced the New Republic, became America's first "postmodern president," rallying supporters with emotions rather than with logic by means of sound bites in which (to quote Jefferson Airplane) "logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead." Top GOP leaders, now playing hardball identity politics, appeal directly to the "lived experiences" of their constituents without any regard for the so-called truths of the so-called experts.
• The circle is nearly complete. As NYT columnist Ross Douthat recently noted, the French postmodernist Michel Foucault, a hardcore transgressor of every social norm back in the '70s, is now popular again--but on the political right!
• Foucault, like so many anti-vax Republicans today, argued that "science is nothing other than the power to define our reality," and as such, science inevitably gets used by its elite practitioners to oppress the rest of us. (Sample Foucault: "All teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power.") Nowadays, it's the right which is quoting this stuff, and it's the left which is trying to forget it. 
• History moves on. The generational constellation shifts up. And the popularity of the scientific establishment changes accordingly.
• Conservatives today worry about the influence of aging radicals teaching at today's universities. I have no such worries. Boomers may teach postmodernism, but IMO Millennials will refashion it to suit their own agenda. And that agenda clearly presupposes one objective reality that unites all of us. According to Pew, Millennials put more trust in science (and less in religion) than older generations, not just in America but in most other developed countries as well.
• As for Foucault, well, it's fair to say that while many Boomers were once swayed by him, few Millennials would even recognize his name. Foucault denounced science precisely in order to make society ungovernable. Not many young Millennials share that goal today, though many young Boomers once did back in the day--and some older Boomers speak fondly of it still.