“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” H.L. Mencken, The Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
The modern Republican Party has worked relentlessly to discredit media as a trusted voice among the public for decades, and to become the sole trusted source of information to their base. However, the mainstream media and Democrats weren’t the only groups conservatives needed to discredit to become the only source of “truth” to the people voting for them: they needed to also destroy all faith in science, academia, and subject matter expertise.
One of the most familiar conservative misuses of science in the 20th Century was the effort to confuse the public over the link between tobacco use and cancer. By 1953 it was clear to the tobacco industry that their product caused cancer. The response was to hide the evidence as best they could and, by creating the Tobacco Institute to provide plausible-sounding pseudo-science propaganda, to deny the link between tobacco and cancer. The goal was to confuse people and encourage “debate” when there really wasn’t any. The scientific consensus was overwhelming, yet it took 40 years for Republicans to turn on the tobacco industry.
This denialism continued even after settling the largest class action lawsuit in history in the 1990s. The courts found that the tobacco industry waged a decades-long fight against science and research, while deliberately muddying the waters with their own deceptive, low-quality studies. Conservatives from the south were the biggest proponents of their attempts to confuse the issue. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was a “special friend” to the tobacco industry for decades. He regurgitated tobacco industry talking points nearly word for word, including denying the connection between the product and cancer. Rush Limbaugh was an avid cigar smoker who, as late as 2015, denied the link too. He was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in 2020.
The Republican Party hasn’t just been hostile to science related to tobacco: it is hostile to any science that threatens the cash flow of its corporate sponsors, contradicts the religious beliefs of its base, or runs counter to conservative ideologies in general. Belief in anthropogenic climate change has become a heresy to Republicans because it might hurt fossil fuel industry profits, and because the base literally believes God will not let it happen. They reject research on LGBT people because it contradicts their religious beliefs. Most believe people choose to be LGBT and oppose efforts to ban harmful conversion therapy.
They reject research on abortion, and instead force doctors to lie about the procedure to their patients. They have joined ranks with the anti-vaccination movement in the name of “parental control” and “religious freedom” and oppose strengthening vaccination laws, even attempting to tear down these laws in conservative states. They reject research by Nobel Prize winning economists on the effects of wealth inequality.
They adamantly oppose any effort to research gun violence, because they know it will show that easy access to firearms is the cause of high gun homicide rates in the US. Accepting the blindingly obvious would run counter to their dogma that being awash in guns somehow makes us safer. Instead, their leadership blames mental illness (which also exists in countries with low gun violence), video games (gamers in countries with little gun violence have played until they die of exhaustion), and lack of prayer in schools .
The list of anti-science stupidity runs on and on.
To get people to reject scientists, academics, and subject matter experts in government, you have to make people want to disbelieve them. The conservative movement in the US has been doing this for decades. For example, people who believe in climate change are portrayed, and then seen, as weak or womanly. Anyone who doesn’t want to ban abortion is disregarded, because only a very evil person would listen to someone who supports murdering babies, right? Anyone who thinks people don’t need unfettered access to assault rifles and high-capacity magazines is a gun-grabbing closet dictator, and you love freedom and hate commies, right?
These sorts of narratives are frighteningly effective. For example, only 17% of Republicans believe climate change is a critical issue, compared with 72% of Democrats.
This might seem simplistic, but this basic us vs. them narrative pulls people into orthodoxy over time. This is true for Republicans more than Democrats due to homogeneity within the GOP. This messaging creates an “us” that sets Republicans against the evil “them.” In one of Trump’s speeches, he railed, “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage. They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” Republicans are significantly more likely to see their democratic counterparts as lazy, immoral, and unpatriotic. Disagreement is a sign of both immorality and treasonous intent.
Which brings us back to what has happened to Republicans and their faith in scientists, academia, and subject matter experts in government. Rush Limbaugh called academia, government, science, and media the “four corners of deceit.” For decades they planted distrust in all four, using flawed logic and a belief that their down-home common sense was intrinsically more capable of discerning truth than people who have studied these things their entire lives. Perhaps nothing better embodies this outlook than Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) bringing a snowball to the Senate floor as “proof” that climate change isn’t real.
Years of denigrating expertise have taken a measurable toll. Conservatives consistently trust scientists less than any other group, regardless of whether the issue is climate change, nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, evolution, or vaccines. Only a third of conservatives trust scientists on evolution and climate change, and a slim majority (56%) on vaccines. It has also destroyed faith in academia and college educations.
In 1990, roughly an equal number of Democrats and Republicans had college degrees. Today, Democrats have become the party of the college educated. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans believe that colleges are bad for America, and that number has been growing. Seventy-four percent of Democrats said they believe graduating from college is important to being successful, compared with only 40% of Republicans.
Conservatives are literally afraid to send their kids to college because they will be exposed to liberal ideas, like climate change. Denis Prager, of the infamous and ironically named “PragerU” propaganda videos on YouTube, went on Martha MacCallum’s program on Fox News and told people not to send their kids to college to prevent them from being infected with such nonsense. “”Sending your child to college is playing Russian roulette with their values,” he concluded.
Trump was an anti-intellectual who “goes with his gut,” rather than relying on research or expertise, and didn’t really place a lot of value on education when he was actually there. A professor at Wharton called him, “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Trump doesn’t read, his briefings consist mostly of pictures, and he has “the attention span of a gnat.” Yet, Trump enjoyed support from similarly anti-intellectual pundits like Hannity and Limbaugh from day one of his campaign, much to the consternation of the Republican establishment.
Trump has been called a “fucking moron”, “dope”, “moron”, “fucking idiot”, “dumb as shit”, and “has the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader,” and this is by members of his own cabinet. However, he is exactly what the base wanted. They didn’t want Republicans who sounded like Ivy-League educated lawyers, especially not after Barak and Michelle Obama (who were exactly that). They wanted someone who saw the world the way they did and sounded like the political voices they listened to the most. Which is to say, they wanted someone who resembled college dropouts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the cast of Fox News.
When Trump talked about “draining the swamp,” starting in October 2016, he couched it as getting rid of lobbyists, foreign and corporate influence, and term limits. Of course, he did no such thing. “Draining the swamp” came to mean an all-out assault on the “deep state” and the “administrative state”. They began systematically dismantling the federal apparatus of experts in areas Republicans and the President didn’t like, or found inconvenient.
From day one of the administration, Trump installed people who were hostile to the agencies they led, or who were comically unqualified. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon-Mobile, was frustrated by the fact that the State Department doesn’t operate like a company. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry reportedly didn’t even know what his department did until a month before he took the reins. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who did not have any experience in government, teaching, or school administration prior to her appointment, was put in place specifically because she wanted to tear down the public education system. Her confirmation hearing went so badly as to become a farce. Ben Carson was a former brain surgeon (with offensive views about a lot of things) who was inexplicably put in charge of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He believed poverty motivates people to work harder, which is why he supported cutting HUD’s budget.
The Soviets often believed that the correct communist ideology will always result in the right solution, explaining the millions of rubles they poured into researching Lamarckian evolution. Likewise, modern Republicans also seem to believe that education, expertise, and experience are far less important to running a government than correct ideology. The Republican solution to dealing with inconvenient ideologies, and the people who hold them within the federal civil service, is to make them go away.
The Trumpist “America First” policies, along with a series of deeply unpopular secretaries of state, have led to low morale and mass resignations, including 60% of all career ambassadors. The Department of Justice has been similarly devastated, as it has been turned into a tool for attacking Trump’s enemies, while tearing down civil rights for women, people of color, and LGBT individuals. The National Labor Relations Board has been actively undermining workers’ rights under leadership of Trump appointees, leaving its civil service work force utterly demoralized. The Department of Education and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also being actively destroyed from within, have fared even worse.
Scientists who have to deal with the realities of climate change are being systematically forced out, leaving empty offices and a government incapable of performing vital services for agriculture. According to the Office of Personnel Management, over 1600 scientists left federal service in the first two years of Trump’s administration alone. They describe the US as having “lost a generation of research.” Morale at the Environmental Protection Agency has been shattered as Trump appointees roll back decades of progress. The Trump Administration has been putting policies in place that hamper the ability of agencies to conduct research, which has been compared to previous efforts by the tobacco and petroleum industries to shut down government research into their products.
The SCOTUS Event Horizon for the LGBT Movement
Stop for a moment. Imagine how bad it will be…