This diary originally appeared as a comment, in slightly different form, responding to Meteor Blades’s Abbreviated Pundit Round-up for December 1st.
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We live in an era when fake news is now ‘a thing for news outlets to fret over’. For example, my hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, ran an Op-Ed today, decrying it: “Fake news has become a threat to American democracy.” (No mention of the piss poor showing of journalistic responsibility they displayed over the course of the election, with uncritical front page banner headlines normalizing Trump’s candidacy, wall to wall emailghazigate, and no coverage of HRC’s actual campaign to speak of, but I suppose we should be heartened that the major newspaper for the eastern half of the state thinks factual reality might sometimes matter when covering the events of the day.)
But this did not begin with Trump’s pathological lying, or even the introduction of ‘as first reported in Breitbart and Infowars’ into policy discussions.
Let’s be clear— it’s the GOP as a whole, and anybody who identifies themselves as conservative, who’ve dispensed with empirical reality and logic, long before Trump. In fact, it’s this shrugging off of any burdensome trifle like data or critical thinking that created the conditions for Trump, and for the sixty million people who voted for him. Trump is not sui generis. They built this monstrosity, one absurdly false statement at a time.
Here’s an article in the open-access journal, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, that addresses ‘climate change skepticism’, and related issues of ‘my superstitious, ideologically driven ignorance is as valid as your evidence based scientific conclusions’:
Public debate and skepticism are essential to a functioning democracy. Indeed, skepticism has been shown to enable people to differentiate more accurately between truth and falsehood (e.g.,Lewandowsky, Stritzke, Oberauer, & Morales, 2005, 2009). However, when medical researchers who investigate the adverse health effects of tobacco are accused of being a “cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence” (Abt, 1983, p. 127), or when climate change is labeled a “hoax” that is ostensibly perpetrated by corrupt scientists (Inhofe,2012),or when an American corporate front group likens climate scientists to the Unabomber (an American anarchist convicted of terrorism) in a billboard campaign (Zwick, 2012), then those statements are more indicative of the denial of scientific facts than expressions of skepticism (Diethelm & McKee, 2009; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Oberauer, 2013; Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, 2013; McKee & Diethelm, 2010). (pg. 559)
It’s not that we live in some new, post-truth era, this is a hoary tradition— the antecedents for conservatism’s disregard of any factual information that they find irksome can be traced directly to the Catholic Church’s trial of Galileo— observations that refute dogma are suppressed or discredited. It is somewhat novel how modern conservatism has been able to contort the good-faith framework of scholars and researchers— reliance on criticism, counter-hypothesis, and reasoned debate to strengthen scientific claims, and discard faulty ones— to undermine faith in the scientific enterprise itself:
A curious feature of these attacks on scientists is that they tend to be accompanied by public calls for “debate”; often the same individuals who launch complaints with institutions to silence a scientist are also proclaiming that they want to enter into a “debate” about the science that they so energetically oppose. (pg. 539)
I mean c’mon now— a disturbingly small percentage of Americans fully accept evolution:
Roughly six-in-ten U.S. adults (62%) say humans have evolved over time, according to data from Pew Research Center’s recently released Religious Landscape Study. But only a little more than half of them (33% of all Americans) express the belief that humans and other living things evolved solely due to natural processes. A quarter of U.S. adults (25%) say evolution was guided by a supreme being. The same survey found that 34% of Americans reject evolution entirely, saying humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.
Evolution is still up for ‘debate’!
Like a free press, independent scientists and academic institutions are the enemy of autocrats and oligarchs— that’s why conservatives have been relentlessly attacking them from every conceivable angle for decades, just as GOP governors and conservative ‘think tanks’ are doing today, and just like Putin, and a Trump administration, will.
None of it is really new. Trump sure as hell didn’t build that.