Important thread here. Wealthy conservatives try to undermine science not because they're backward rubes, but because empirical research combined with government action in the public interest = a form of public accountability they dislike because it cuts into their profit margin.
It's a similar dynamic that's at work with Trump, his cronies, and the rule of law. Legal proceduralism, in the minds of such corrupt people, is "unfair" because it intrudes upon their ability to act however they want in the world.
The dynamic depicted in that Times article (and the thread about it) is a longstanding feature of American conservatism that I unpack in this thread--dismantling the administrative state in the name of "freedom." But whose freedom are we talking about?
In the name of free market fundamentalism, conservatives have spent years railing against the inefficiencies that come with government oversight and regulation. That ongoing effort has now been paired with Trump's more thuggish approach to regulation.
It's hard (if not impossible) to disentangle the good faith, empirically-grounded arguments against government regulation/oversight that see it as counter to the public interest, and the self-interested, bad faith versions of it.
One facet of our political culture that has muddied how we talk about government regulation is the faulty, Reaganesque-Cold War framing around government oversight.
No gov't intervention = freedom
Any gov't intervention = slippery slope to the gulag.
No gov't intervention = freedom
Any gov't intervention = slippery slope to the gulag.
But as anyone who's ever gotten food poisoning or lost a loved one from tainted, industrially-produced food will tell you; there's a tension between our freedom to eat food that won't kill us and the freedom of large-scale food producers to run their factories without oversight.
In its most philosophically robust and coherent form, American conservatism has centered the idea of personal liberty from government coercion. Conservatives have claimed to support "small government" because they want to maximize individual freedom.
But the problem with this case, in a modern world that has gotten ever interconnected and complex since the founding era, is that "the state" is not the only form of power that threatens the liberty of citizens.
If it's corporate power we're talking about, then it is "the state," acting on behalf of ordinary citizens and consumers, that is the only entity with sufficient heft and scale to check the power of such concentrations of wealth.
We can't do that work individually, hence we turn that job over to the government. Will the government sometimes muck it up? Of course. Should the government's power be unaccountable? Of course not. But the claim that all evidence-based gov't regulation restricts freedom is dumb.
Conservatives claim that their anti-government position squares with the ideology of the founding, but most historians would disagree. The founders did not see personal liberty and political power as opposites.
Most people in the founding generation understood that power and liberty always existed in delicate tension with one another. Too much power could squelch liberty, but a world without the power of law and the state was a world in which individual liberty was always vulnerable.
The difficult trick, as the founders saw it, was to find the proper balance between state power and individual liberty. A conservatism that frames that not as a balance but as a zero sum game is not a conservatism that can authentically claim the founders in their genealogy.
This is not to say that the founders were correct. Maybe they got the relationship between power and liberty wrong. But when a conservative tells you that they want to dismantle the federal government "because founders and freedom" they're being disingenuous.
I want to add one more big concept to this discussion--and that's "trust." Living in a modern, interconnected world means, by definition, that the quality of our life depends upon how well-founded our trust is in others.
Trump says "trust me, don't trust scientists or the media or the deep state. Trust only me." That is textbook authoritarianism...the ultimate imbalance between liberty and power.
Trump's M.O. has been to weaponize peoples' healthy and legitimate sense of skepticism in order to undermine all sources of knowledge and authority that might provide a counterweight to his version of reality.
A healthy democratic political culture requires both trust and skepticism. Too much implicit trust in institutions or powerful leaders leaves us vulnerable to corruption. But a world in which we can trust no one other than our friends and "Great Leader" is dark authoritarianism.
There's no magic bullet here. It's complicated. Any political leader who tells you it's simple is just lying to you. To live inside this complication is to live inside a political culture that aspires to be democratic. It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternative.
So yeah, as I was saying about the oversimplifications that have come to define “American Conservatism.”
