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jjdina wrote:

>o

Science is a big leftist conspiracy designed to undermine MAGA ideology and 
bankrupt the oil and coal companies who the President is beholden to.

That's why there are only a few Conservative scientists and the majority of 
them are leftists.   That's why Trump decides what is valid science, not 
them.  Scientists who disagree with the government's agenda must be 
discredited and punished.   We have no interest in what they have to say.


From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against 
Science Open Access

Naomi Oreskes,
Erik M. Conway
Author and Article Information
Daedalus (2022) 151 (4): 98–123.
https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01946

 

Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in 
science. They do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust 
in science: polls show that American attitudes toward science are highly 
polarized along political lines. In this essay, we argue that conservative 
hostility toward science is rooted in conservative hostility toward 
government regulation of the marketplace, which has morphed in recent 
decades into conservative hostility to government, tout court. This 
distrust was cultivated by conservative business leaders for nearly a 
century, but took strong hold during the Reagan administration, largely in 
response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited 
governmental response. Thus, science-particularly environmental and public 
health science-became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes. 
We argue that contemporary distrust of science is mostly collateral damage, 
a spillover from carefully orchestrated conservative distrust of 
government.

In 2020, scientists performed an astonishing feat. In less than one year, 
they produced not one but several safe and effective vaccines against the 
novel coronavirus, sars-cov-2. Yet, by the summer of 2021, barely half of 
all Americans had been fully vaccinated, even though free vaccines were 
widely available. By the autumn of 2021, ten thousand deaths following 
vaccination had been reported, and only six positively attributed to the 
vaccine, with more than four hundred and fifty million vaccine doses 
administered. This is a vaccine-death rate of 0.00000001 percent.1 Yet 
public health officials still struggled to persuade the remaining Americans 
to get vaccinated.

Commentators have read this opposition as evidence of a crisis of public 
trust in science. Crisis-in-science narratives are widespread in both the 
scientific literature and in mass-media reporting, but the available 
evidence does not support the narrative.2 The General Social Survey has 
long included a question about trust in the leaders of major institutions, 
and its polling shows that most Americans evince confidence in scientific 
institutions. In 2021, the largest share of respondents answered that they 
had “a great deal of confidence,” rather than “only some” or “hardly any” 
confidence, in scientific institutions.3 In fact, scientific and medical 
leaders are generally second only to military leaders in public 
estimation.4 Moreover-and contrary to popular impression-overall trust in 
scientific leaders has not changed since the 1970s. A 2018 poll by 
Research!America found that more than 70 percent of Americans believe that 
government investments in science and technology pay off in the long run. A 
recent report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that analyzed 
the Research!America poll, as well as other data, found that most Americans 
view scientific research as beneficial, support an active role for science 
and scientists in public life, trust scientists to tell the truth and 
report findings accurately, and believe that scientists should play a major 
role in shaping public policy with respect to health and the environment.5

These findings do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in 
science. However, available data do support the conclusion of a crisis of 
conservative trust in science. Reaction to scientific findings is highly 
polarized, with Republican voters and self-identified conservatives far 
more likely than Democrats and self-identified liberals to reject consensus 
scientific findings, particularly in the areas of climate change and COVID-
19 response. In 2020, 88 percent of Democrats agreed with scientific 
findings that climate change was a major threat to the well-being of the 
United States, but only 31 percent of Republicans thought so.6 Similarly, 
94 percent of Democrats believe that the documented increase in global 
temperature is due to human activities (again, consistent with the 
scientific consensus), but only 69 percent of Republicans do. When it comes 
to the question of whether the globe is warming at all, the proportion of 
Republicans accepting that conclusion has decreased since 2000, from about 
75 percent to only about 55 percent, even as scientists have declared the 
fact of global warming to be “unequivocal.”7 These patterns cannot be 
linked in any obvious way to who holds the presidency. Democratic 
acceptance of climate science and concern about climate change increased 
during both the Obama and Trump administrations, but Republican views were 
largely unchanged until 2019, when extreme weather events-including the 
largest fire in California history-may have shifted some people's views.8

There is a similar pattern in reactions to COVID-19. Most Democrats support 
mask-wearing; most Republicans do not.9 Almost all Democrats are or plan to 
be vaccinated; many Republicans are not vaccinated and do not plan to be. 
In counties that Joe Biden won in the 2020 presidential election, 52.8 
percent of people were fully vaccinated by September 2021, but in counties 
that went to Donald Trump, the rate was 39.9 percent.10 At that time, 
nearly half of all unvaccinated people identified as Republicans or 
Republican-leaning. Republican confidence in science dropped during the 
Trump administration: a 2021 Pew survey found a striking decline in 
Republican confidence that “science has largely had a positive effect on 
society,” from 70 percent in January 2019 to 54 percent in March 2021, with 
no similar decline among Democrats.11

These patterns cannot be attributed to scientific illiteracy. Researchers 
have found that scientific literacy and educational attainment do not 
predict attitudes related to specific science controversies. In general, 
higher education correlates with positive perceptions of science, yet 
highly educated Republicans are more likely than less educated ones to 
reject climate science or think that scientists are exaggerating the 
threat.12 People who reported in the spring of 2021 that they would 
“definitely not” get the COVID-19 vaccine-as compared with those planning 
to “wait and see”-were not so much uneducated as overwhelmingly Republican 
(67 percent versus 12 percent Democrat).13 During the summer and autumn of 
2021, this partisan gap grew, even as the scientific evidence of vaccine 
safety and efficacy also grew. These patterns of partisan polarization 
confirm an argument we have already made elsewhere: the sources of science 
rejection lay not in the science itself, but in prior political and 
ideological beliefs and commitments.

In our 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, we showed that climate-change denial 
was grounded in conservative hostility toward “Big Government,” in 
particular the idea that government regulation of the marketplace-whether 
in response to environmental issues, public health crises, or other social 
problems-was a step on a slippery slope toward socialism.14 Also in 2010, 
Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap proposed that American conservatives 
tended to reject “impact” sciences - those concerned with identifying 
environmental and health damages-but not “production” sciences, those that 
support business and industry.15 In other words, conservatives are not 
rejecting science tout court, but rejecting sciences that undergird or 
might be perceived to demonstrate the need for government action. The 
problem with the “impact” framing, however, is that any science can become 
an impact science if scientists discover something that points to the need 
for government regulation. The scientists who discovered the ozone hole and 
acid rain did not think of themselves as environmentalists, or even 
environmental scientists. But they discovered problems created by 
activities such as burning fossil fuels, driving cars, and using 
refrigerants that could only be fixed by measures to reduce or otherwise 
control those activities. The solutions involved national government 
regulations and international treaties. The “merchants of doubt” did not 
oppose these laws and treaties because they doubted the science; they 
doubted the science because they opposed these laws and treaties.

Citizens protesting COVID-19 mandates have not for the most part questioned 
the science but have carried placards equating mask mandates with 
government tyranny and denial of personal liberty.16 When they have 
questioned the science, it has often been in the context of questioning the 
basis for government mandates that they oppose on other grounds.

All of these challenges lead to the question: Why do American conservatives 
distrust government? It is not obvious that conservatives, who historically 
have valorized order, authority, and respect for tradition, should 
necessarily distrust government. Classical liberal economists - including 
Adam Smith - recognized that governments serve essential functions, such as 
building infrastructure from which everyone benefits, and regulating banks, 
which, if left to their own devices, could destroy an economy.17 
Conservatives have also historically recognized that taxation was required 
to enable governments to perform those functions. For most of the 
nineteenth century, business leaders in the United States supported public 
investment in infrastructure too. Infrastructure investment helped create 
the modern business corporation, as state and federal governments used 
corporations to carry out large infrastructure projects, such as the 
electrification of rural America, the interstate highway system, the 
aerospace industry, and later the space program.18

Admittedly, there is a long tradition in American culture of believing that 
the government that governs best governs least.19 But broadly held cultural 
attitudes do not explain partisan divides. To explain that, we need to look 
more closely at a factor that has received insufficient attention: the 
prolonged attack on government by business leaders and political 
conservatives in the mid-late twentieth century, and the way in which anti-
government attitudes spilled over into anti-science attitudes in the Ronald 
Reagan administration.

Our story begins in the early twentieth century, when a group of 
conservative business leaders and economists shifted economic and political 
thinking in a radical way. They argued that any government action in the 
marketplace-even if well-intentioned-compromised the freedom of individuals 
to do as they pleased, and therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. 
Political and economic freedom were “indivisible,” they insisted, and so a 
compromise to the latter, even when it addressed an obvious ill like child 
labor, was a threat to the former. Their arguments gained some traction 
when Franklin Roosevelt dramatically expanded the scale and authority of 
the federal government through the New Deal. But they took serious hold 
during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who famously insisted in his first 
inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; 
government is the problem.” Reagan initiated a pattern of Republican 
rejection of any science that pointed to the need for more government 
regulation rather than less. Today, hostility to the federal government is 
a touchstone for political conservatives, and contemporary conservative 
distrust of science is collateral damage, a spillover effect of distrust in 
government.

American citizens in the mid-twentieth century were largely suspicious of 
“Big Business,” saw the government as their ally, and believed that 
government should address the problems that unconstrained capitalism had 
created.20 These included “social costs,” such as the deaths of workers in 
dangerous mines, mills, and factories, as well as market failures like bank 
runs and collapses. When thousands of workers were killed every year in 
railroad accidents, boiler explosions, and mine collapses, the U.S 
government created Workers’ Compensation and established standards for 
occupational safety.21 When banks failed during the Great Depression, the 
government created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (fdic) to 
protect people's savings. As massive pollution of the nation's waterways 
made the water undrinkable, and the air in Los Angeles grew so poisonous 
that people died from breathing it, the public demanded government 
standards for clean water and clean air. The Progressive Era, the New Deal, 
and 1960s environmentalism all reinforced the essential role of government 
in addressing problems created by economic and industrial activity.

But while politicians of both major parties were devising government 
remedies to the failures of the marketplace, a small coterie of businessmen 
and conservative intellectuals set to work to block those remedies. They 
did so in part by conventional means: lobbying Congress, making campaign 
contributions, running ad campaigns. But unifying these familiar activities 
was a bigger project to change the way Americans thought about “the 
marketplace” and the role of government in it. It was a project to build an 
American myth designed to undermine confidence in the very idea that 
government could remedy the failures of capitalism.

The myth had three parts. The first is that free enterprise is one of the 
foundations of American government, on par with representative democracy 
and the civic rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Government action in 
the marketplace, the myth insisted, threatens these foundations. The second 
is that any compromise to economic freedom risks political freedom. The 
third is the claim that government is not the solution to the country's 
problems; it is the cause of them. To generate prosperity, government has 
to get out of the way, “get off our backs,” and let “the market do its 
magic.”

Their efforts worked. By the end of the century, public opinion had 
flipped: many Americans now admired business leaders as “entrepreneurs” and 
“job creators,” and believed that it made more sense to count on markets to 
solve problems than to engage government.22 Many Americans saw government 
as dead weight, taxation as unfair or even a form of theft, and chuckled 
knowingly when Reagan insisted that the scariest nine words in the English 
language were, “I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”23

The people involved in the project to change how Americans viewed 
government were diverse and dispersed, but they were also interconnected in 
important and sometimes startling ways. They included trade organizations 
and corporations; industrialists, writers, intellectuals, and economists; 
Protestant religious organizations beginning with Spiritual Mobilization in 
the late 1930s; and influential foundations and think tanks, like the 
Foundation for Economic Education, which drew personnel from the Chamber of 
Commerce and from Spiritual Mobilization.24 Theirs was not a conspiracy, 
but it was a network of people who knew each other, supported each other 
intellectually and financially, and used this mutual support to expand 
their influence.

In this essay, we identify four instances when conservative businessmen and 
intellectuals purposefully advanced distrust in government to influence 
public opinion: a propaganda campaign launched in the 1920s by leaders in 
the electricity industry to fight government involvement in electricity 
markets, and continued in the 1930s and 1940s by the National Association 
of Manufacturers to fight the New Deal; the promotion by private 
philanthropists of pro-market, anti-government ideology at the University 
of Chicago; the transmogrification of Ronald Reagan from New Deal Democrat 
to anti-government Republican under the influence of General Electric 
executives, and the launch of his political career with the financial 
support of those executives; and, crucially, the Reagan presidency, during 
which science became collateral damage of this anti-government ideology.

In the early twentieth century, electricity was mostly monopolized by the 
entrepreneurs whose for-profit business made the required machinery-
famously, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse-and the private utilities 
that exploited that machinery, including Edison Electric. Their companies 
and utilities were extraordinarily successful: Edison and Westinghouse 
became household names as electricity lit up cities and urban homes across 
the country.25

Rural customers wanted electricity as much as their urban counterparts-and 
many observers argued that they needed it more-but electrical utilities had 
neglected them. In Pennsylvania in the 1920s, only about 10 percent of 
rural residents had access to an electricity grid.26 Moreover, country 
folks who were fortunate enough to have access paid much higher rates-often 
double their urban counterparts’-leaving many farmers unable to afford 
electricity even when it was offered.27

Outside the United States, electricity was generally not viewed as a 
commodity like corn or pork bellies to be bought and sold at a profit, but 
as a public good like water or sewers that demanded government engagement 
to ensure equitable distribution. In Germany and France, electricity 
generation was developed as a public utility; in the United Kingdom, 
Parliament nationalized electricity generation.28 The contrast in outcome 
was stark: by the 1920s, nearly 70 percent of Northern European farmers had 
electricity, but fewer than 10 percent of U.S. farmers did.29

Against this backdrop, reformers such as Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pin-
chot argued the need for greater government involvement in electricity 
markets. In response, the National Electric Light Association (nela) 
launched a massive propaganda campaign that included, among other things, 
the hiring of academics to rewrite textbooks and develop curricula to 
promote pro-market, anti-government perspectives in emerging business 
schools and economics programs across the country. They also recruited 
experts to write reports “proving” that private electricity was cheaper 
than public electricity, despite available facts that showed otherwise.

nela also promoted the larger argument that private property was the 
foundation of the American life, so any attempt to interfere with the 
private electricity industry threatened to undermine that way of life. 
Opinions to the contrary (they claimed) were unsound, socialistic, and 
fundamentally un-American.

When the Federal Trade Commission later investigated nela's activities, 
they concluded that “private utilities, led by [their] industry trade 
group, the National Electric Light Association” had “mounted a large and 
sophisticated propaganda campaign that placed particular emphasis on making 
the case for private ownership to the press and in schools and 
universities.”30 Historian David Nye concurs: “The thousands of pages of 
testimony revealed a systematic covert attempt to shape opinion in favor of 
private utilities, in which half-truths and at times outright lies 
presented municipal utilities in a consistently bad light” and private 
utilities in a good light.31 Historian Ronald Kline calls the campaign 
“underhanded” and “unethical.”32

The Federal Trade Commission found that the “character and objective of 
these activities was fully recognized by nela and its sponsors as 
propaganda,” and that, in their internal correspondence, they “boasted that 
the ‘public pays’ the expense.”33 Ernest Gruening, a journalist at the time 
who later served as the territorial governor of Alaska and then as U.S. 
Senator, noted that when the presiding judge in the hearings asked if nela 
had neglected any form of publicity, its Director of Public Information 
replied: “Only one, and that is sky-writing.”34

In the 1930s, as the Great Depression unfolded and the failures of the 
marketplace seemed to demand government response, the National Association 
of Manufacturers (nam) reprised the nela effort with a multimillion-dollar 
propaganda campaign to convince the American people that-despite all the 
apparent evidence to the contrary-American business and industry were 
working just fine. They argued that the real causes of the Great Depression 
were the unreasonable demands made by unionized labor, coupled with 
excessive government interference in the affairs of business and federal 
taxation that starved industry of the monies it needed to expand productive 
capacity.

Using print media, radio, and film, nam ran a propaganda campaign that 
lasted into the 1940s to influence what newspapers had to say about the 
economy and American life, what teachers taught in the classroom, and what 
the American people came to believe about the federal government. nam's 
president cited the famed tobacco industry strategist Edward Bernays as the 
sort of authority whose help nam should (and later would) seek.35nam sent 
pamphlets, leaflets, comic strips, and push surveys to newspaper editors 
and radio stations across the country, as well as materials to member 
companies to help them persuade their workers not to unionize. They 
published magazines and organized lecture series aimed at teachers, clergy, 
and youth. They produced and distributed free of charge radio programs, 
short films, feature films, and “documentaries.” Like nela, nam also 
attempted to influence and censor textbooks.

The budget for these efforts matched their ambitions.36 In 1937 alone, nam 
spent over $793,000 (the equivalent of about $14 million today) on “public 
information” designed to work as integration propaganda.37 These 
expenditures constituted more than 55 percent of the organization's total 
income and continued to rise in subsequent years.38 In 1946, its public 
relations budget was $3 million.39

nam leaders had concluded that a strictly economic defense of business was 
insufficient to turn the American people against government and toward 
business. They needed to link their cause to something “all Americans held 
dear,” not free enterprise, but freedom itself: “Free enterprise [will not] 
be saved as the result of appeals in the name of free enterprise alone,” 
one nam memo argued. “The public must be convinced that free enterprise is 
as much an indivisible part of our democracy and the source of as many 
blessings and benefits as are our other freedoms of speech, press, and 
religion.”40 If they could “emphasize effectively the inseparability of 
‘democracy’ and ‘free enterprise,’” enthusiasm and support for the former 
could carry the latter.41

This led to the insistence on the inseparability or indivisibility of 
democracy, political freedom, and free enterprise capitalism, what we have 
labeled the indivisibility thesis. “Representative political democracy, 
religious and social liberties and free enterprise are inseparable and with 
one lost, all are lost,” nam declared in 1938.42 Economic freedom was one 
of the three legs in a tripod of freedom that kept America standing.43 The 
New Deal, with its alphabet-soup of regulatory agencies, was a threat to 
the fabric of American life. Today, rural electrification; tomorrow, 
goodbye to the Bill of Rights.44

nam messages denied the federal government's central role in the recovery 
from the Great Depression, attempting instead, in the words of historian 
Burton St. John iii, to bind Americans “to the pre-Depression ideal of the 
supremacy of the markets.”45nam would try to shift Americans’ view of 
government from a “friend” offering a “helping hand during the Depression” 
to something that stood in the way of prosperity.46 Above all, nam 
insisted, the people who should be trusted to guide the ship were the 
captains of American industry.47 The villain in the American story was not 
Big Business but Big Government.48

As the economy began to recover from the Great Depression, the nam message 
began to take hold. In 1941, a nam survey found that 71 percent of 
respondents believed the disappearance of the free enterprise system would 
harm their personal liberty.49 Later that year, nam polling found a 
majority of Americans believing that industry-not government-could best 
protect against the threats posed by the conflicts overseas.50

Despite these exceptional efforts, and despite nam's advancing steps toward 
their goal, some American businessmen thought nam had not been aggressive 
enough in fighting government encroachment in the affairs of business. One 
was Harold Luhnow, a businessman from Missouri and head of the libertarian 
Volker Foundation. Another was Jasper Crane, a former DuPont executive. 
Crane felt that nam focused too much on the details of commerce and not 
enough on the vision of the society they wanted to build and sustain. They 
were also too willing to compromise. The battle for a free society needed 
to be carried forward by “a cadre of intellectuals and businessmen that 
would be absolutely committed to the market.”51 Historian Kim Phillips-Fein 
quotes Crane: “I have been wondering whether we ought to attempt to 
mobilize a few men who are absolutely sound in the faith and will not 
compromise, who are earnest in thinking, talking and writing for freedom, 
and who are resolved to uphold it at any personal sacrifice.”52

Crane and Luhnow decided to develop and fund a project to move the public 
conversation-and thereby American society-in the spirit of Karl Marx, but 
in the opposite direction. They despised Marx, but thought that he was 
correct about one thing: that the point of philosophy should not be to 
study the world, but to change it.53 The successful outcome of their 
project would be an altered social contract, in a society that valorized 
and protected economic freedom above other considerations. But how would 
they do that? Marx had written a book that had changed the world; maybe 
they could find someone to do the same on their side. What they needed, 
then, was not just a book, but the book-”the New Testament of capitalism,” 
the “bible” of free enterprise, written by a man who would take no 
intellectual prisoners.54 Crane and Luhnow found him in the Austrian 
neoliberal economist Fredrich von Hayek.

Hayek's manifesto, The Road to Serfdom, had been published in 1944, and its 
argument was the indivisibility thesis: that any compromise to economic 
freedom threatened political freedom. For Hayek, there could be no such 
thing as democratic socialism or even social democracy, because the 
“unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning is to create 
a state of affairs in which if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian 
forces will get the upper hand.”55 In 1945, Luhnow funded Hayek's American 
book tour, but wanted much more than just a book tour. He wanted social 
change. But he worried that Hayek's approach was too intellectual and too 
European. The best way to get the book that America needed, Luhnow and 
Crane concluded, was to finance a project at a reputable American 
institution where the arguments could be developed in an American register 
with an American audience in mind. Their chosen institution was the 
University of Chicago. The operation would be named the “Free Market 
Project.”

Over the objections of the economics department, Luhnow provided the money 
for Hayek to be hired, and also funded the launch of the Free Market 
Project, bringing together several economists who shared their vision. One 
of these like-minded economists was George Stigler, who would produce an 
edited version of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations that expunged nearly 
all of Smith's caveats, including his discussion of the need for bank 
regulation, for adequate wages for workers, and for taxation for public 
goods, like roads and bridges. Another was Aaron Director, who developed a 
project making the case against anti-trust enforcement.56 A third was 
Milton Friedman.

Hayek never wrote the American Road to Serfdom, but Milton Friedman did. 
His best-selling book Capitalism and Freedom laid out the indivisibility 
thesis in language that any educated person could understand, and achieved 
Luhnow's goal of accessibility and impact. First published in 1962, it 
would sell over half a million copies, see numerous editions, be translated 
into eighteen languages, and be adapted into a ten-part pbs television 
series, Free to Choose. The book appears on virtually every list of the top 
100 or even the top 10 books by conservatives. It was named a top 100 book 
by Time magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, and others. Friedman would 
become not only the most influential economist of his generation, but one 
of the most influential public intellectuals. In 1966, he became a regular 
columnist at Newsweek, and went on to write hundreds of opinion pieces for 
mass media publications.57 In the 1970s, he was a frequent speaker at the 
uk Institute of Economic Affairs, credited with shaping Margaret Thatcher's 
policies, which in turn influenced Ronald Reagan. Friedman became an 
advisor to both, as well as to Chilean economists associated with the 
dictator Augusto Pinochet.58 President Reagan awarded Friedman both the 
National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Freedom.

Reagan raised Friedman's star, but the president had in fact developed his 
anti-government ideas long before he ever met Friedman. Most Americans know 
that Reagan was an actor before he became a politician, but they may not 
know that his flagging acting career was revived by the General Electric 
Corporation (ge), who gave him a job that was crucial both to his 
professional transformation from actor to politician and to his political 
transformation from New Deal Democrat to anti-government Republican.

By the 1960s, corporate leaders, neoliberal economists, libertarian 
intellectuals, and market fundamentalists had for more than thirty years 
been selling a story in which businessmen were the heroes and government 
the villain. It was a story in which markets were efficient; individual 
enterprise was all that was needed to succeed; and racism, discrimination, 
corporate violence, monopolistic practices, and dangerous working 
conditions played only an incidental role. It was a story in which 
“economic freedom” meant the freedom of business owners to run their shops 
as they saw fit, even if that included anticompetitive practices or 
imposing environmental costs on surrounding communities. Above all, it was 
a story in which political and economic freedom were indivisible, so any 
government action in the marketplace-even if well-intentioned and seemingly 
warranted-would put us on the slippery slope to socialism, or worse. In 
effect, American manufacturers had manufactured a myth.

But despite the hard sell, for the most part, Americans weren't buying. fdr 
was the longest serving president in American history, elected and 
reelected four times, and in 1948, his vice president, Harry Truman, had 
won reelection in his own right. When Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 
1952-the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover-it was as a 
centrist seeking to avoid excessive power concentration in either state or 
private hands.59 Eisenhower not only supported Social Security, but 
expanded it. With respect to the New Deal, he famously wrote that “should 
any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment 
insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear 
of that party again. … There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that 
believes you can do these things,” but “their number is negligible and they 
are stupid.”60 Barry Goldwater was one of that small number, and in 1964, 
he had suffered a crushing defeat.61 Ordinary Americans - especially 
working- and middle-class Americans-saw the government as their ally 
because, for most of the twentieth century, it was.62

Twenty years later, however, the picture was different, and the person who 
did the most to change it was Ronald Reagan. The “Gipper” flipped the 
national narrative from one in which government existed to address the 
needs of the people to one in which government blocked people's 
aspirations. In the 1920s, Americans had hated Big Business. Reagan would 
persuade them to hate Big Government. Promising to “get the government off 
our backs,” Reagan encouraged Americans to see government as malevolent, 
not benevolent.63 “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” 
he snickered, “are I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”64 The 
solution was to shrink government, cut it down to size, “starve the beast,” 
and let the market do its “magic.”65

Reagan would ask Americans to love the market and loathe the government, 
but-and perhaps this was the key to his success-he didn't frame it as a 
tale of loathing. He framed it as a love story: loving freedom, loving 
capitalism.66 The late historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot suggested that 
Reagan's brilliance lay in his capacity “to inscribe his presidency into a 
prepackaged narrative about the United States.”67 Trouillot was right: it 
had been packaged by nela, nam, and Milton Friedman, and Reagan learned it 
when he worked for ge.68

Reagan had joined General Electric in the 1950s to jump-start both the 
company's faltering efforts at television production and his own faltering 
acting career.69 As the host of the popular weekly television program GE 
Theatre, Reagan created one of the most successful personas of the century: 
himself. It was not merely a matter of fashioning an image, but a radical 
reconstruction from New Deal Democrat and president of a major union (the 
Screen Actors Guild) to anti-union, pro-management, right-wing Republican. 
Moreover, while the American people knew Reagan as the host of GE Theatre, 
that was only half of his job. The other half was as the public face of a 
massive pr program designed to convince ge's workers and citizens in their 
communities of the greatness of American capitalism and the threat 
represented by Big Government.

Reagan's mentor in this work was ge executive Lemuel Boulware, whose anti-
union tactics were so extreme they earned a name: Boulwarism. (They also 
earned ge several indictments for federal labor law violations.) Boulware's 
politics became Reagan's politics, and ge's vision Reagan's vision.70 
Reagan's political fortunes were transformed as well, as he emerged from ge 
with powerful backers in corporate America who helped him launch his 
political career.

In later years, Reagan would assemble a forceful coalition of business 
leaders, social conservatives, evangelical Protestants, and disaffected 
blue-collar Democrats that would propel him to the presidency, but this was 
not the coalition that launched his political career. Reagan's 1960s 
“kitchen cabinet” was a handful of wealthy business executives assembled by 
a group of ge executives, including Boulware.71 Reagan's victory in his bid 
to become governor of California was in many ways surprising: few people at 
that time had launched a successful career in politics by running first for 
an office as high as governor of one of America's largest states. But while 
Reagan may have been untested in public office, his message and delivery 
had been extensively tested in his years at ge, which had given him a 
public platform, a political ideology, and the opportunity to refine both 
the message and its delivery in the thousands of speeches that he had given 
across the country before he ever ran for office.

As governor of California, Reagan was no liberal, but neither was he 
hostile to science. As president, however, he faced a conundrum: the 
emerging science of a set of issues-acid rain, the ozone hole, and man-made 
climate change-that suggested the need for firm and timely federal action 
to avoid serious, perhaps even catastrophic, damage. Reagan's answer was to 
question the science.

One clear example involves acid rain. In the months before Reagan took 
office, scientists had concluded that air pollution caused acid rain, and 
the Carter administration was moving toward a treaty with Canada that would 
severely limit air pollution from American power plants. But when Reagan 
took office, he reversed course, introducing the idea that the science was 
not sufficient to justify a strong regulatory response, much less a treaty. 
The administration did not merely cast doubt on the existing science, it 
also interfered in the scientific peer review process. In 1984, 
presidential science advisor George Keyworth intervened in the final stages 
of a scientific review, instructing the lead author to make changes that 
made the science seem less certain than the scientific panel had concluded 
it was; the administration then used this to justify inaction.72 When it 
came to the ozone hole, Reagan eventually signed the Montreal Protocol, the 
international treaty that controlled ozone-destroying chemicals, but not 
before some of his advisors and cabinet members disputed the science behind 
stratospheric ozone depletion; later, they would question the emerging 
evidence of global warming.

Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, tried to balance the demands of 
environmental protection and the marketplace. He championed the 1990 Clean 
Air Act amendments that instituted a market mechanism-emissions trading-to 
control the pollution that was causing acid rain. He also established the 
U.S. Global Climate Research program to improve scientific understanding of 
climate change, and agreed to a complete ban on the chemicals responsible 
for stratospheric ozone depletion. But Bush was a one-term president, in 
part because his moderate and fact-based positions were out of step with an 
emerging Republican ideology that took no prisoners when it came to climate 
change. Under Reagan, a precedent had been established: to question science 
that illuminated any problem that invited (or worse, seemed to demand) 
government action.

Conservative resistance to scientific findings emerged originally in 
environmental and public health domains, where markets had created the 
problems, like diseases caused by tobacco use, acid rain caused by electric 
power generation, or the ozone hole caused by chemicals used in 
refrigeration and propellants.73 But it would be wrong to say that the 
trigger was “regulatory” science or impact science, because much of the 
relevant science emerged in the context of basic research, such as the work 
in forest ecology and soil science that established the problem of acid 
precipitation.74 Some of it emerged in the context of applied science that 
conservatives supported, such as the work in the 1950s and 1960s on weather 
modification-much of it funded by the U.S. military-that contributed to 
predicting global warming. But in time, animus toward specific scientific 
findings spilled over into animus toward science, generally. One telling 
example involves the Big Bang theory, which Christian conservatives once 
welcomed, as it seemed (in contrast to steady state theories) to affirm 
that the universe had a beginning. But then Christian conservatives turned 
against the theory.75 From the 1990s onwards, to be an American 
conservative increasingly meant being distrustful of science.

By the 2020s, Republicans leaders were rejecting factual evidence on a host 
of problems that pointed to the need for the government to act in ways that 
could infringe upon business or personal liberty-from gun control and the 
opioid crisis to the safety of vaccination and efficacy of mask mandates. 
They were also attacking scientists-particularly those engaged in climate 
research-subjecting them to hostile congressional inquiries, Freedom of 
Information Act requests, and even subpoenas. Conservative activists used 
lawsuits to try to obtain scientists’ correspondence, hoping to catch them 
in embarrassing statements.76 Climate scientists were also subject to 
attacks in conservative media. The message was not that particular policy 
approaches to climate change were undesirable, but that climate scientists 
were untrustworthy.77

What began as an ideological argument had become a cultural pathology. A 
commitment to “limited government” caused conservative leaders not merely 
to drag their feet on responses to climate change, health care, opioid 
addiction, and other problems that the private sector has been unable to 
solve-and that are too big for individuals or even the states to fix on 
their own-it also led them to attack scientific findings related to these 
issues, and the scientists responsible for those findings. And, when COVID-
19 hit in 2019, it caused conservative leaders to encourage their 
constituents to distrust science and defy scientists’ guidance, even when 
their lives were at stake.

In April 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci called for a nationwide stay-at-home order 
to slow the spread of COVID-19. “I don't understand why that's not 
happening,” said the country's leading expert on infectious disease, 
although he did acknowledge “the Trump administration's hesitancy to 
encroach upon local authorities.”78 Many Americans shared the doctor's 
confusion. Why wouldn't President Trump use his authority to issue a 
national stay-at-home order? Or use his influence to persuade governors to 
do so? Above all, why did the president downplay the threat and refuse to 
act on the advice of his experts while there was still a chance of 
containing the virus and saving hundreds of thousands of American lives?79

To many people, the president's actions were inexplicable. To us, they 
seemed all too familiar. Trump's response was, in fact, almost inevitable 
given three things we know about his administration and the policies it 
represented: a habit of hostility toward science and other forms of 
expertise, a worldview that prioritizes the economy above all else, and the 
adherence to the ideology of “limited government” that has made 
conservatives belligerent toward the federal government even when they are 
running it. The president's response to COVID-19 was consistent with the 
world-view that American business conservatives began to develop a century 
ago and that, with persistent repetition, took root in conservative 
circles. Three years ago, few observers would have viewed virology or 
immunology as impact sciences, yet both have come under attack during the 
COVID-19 pandemic for the evidence they have offered on the benefits of 
social distancing, masking, and vaccination mandates.

Distrust is a complex social and psychological problem, and is unlikely to 
be explained by any single factor. But the distinctly partisan pattern of 
American distrust in science suggests that its origins are likely to lie 
more in political beliefs and commitments than in anything that scientists 
themselves have done or failed to do. To be sure, poor communication by 
scientists does not help their cause, but-absent other factors-missteps by 
scientists would likely generate skepticism across the political spectrum 
rather than in one part of it.

Evidence compiled by sociologist Gordon Gauchat in 2012 confirms that 
conservative trust in science has dropped dramatically since the 1980s, as 
our argument suggests it should have. In 1974, there was no statistically 
significant difference between liberals and conservatives in their level of 
trust in science. In the 2000s, the gap between liberal and conservative 
trust in science had reached 14.1 percentage points, according to General 
Social Survey data captured in Figure 1. (Moderates began with the lowest 
levels, ending the period with levels comparable to conservatives, a 
finding for which we have no ready explanation.) By the 2010s, 
conservatives’ trust in science had steadily declined, while liberals’ 
trust remained roughly constant. The most recent data, for 2021, suggest a 
further dramatic increase in the partisan divide, with the gap widening to 
33.6 percentage points. The data collection methodology changed in this 
plague year, and it represents one year, not a decadal average, so the 
result is not directly comparable to the older data. But the 2021 result is 
similar to the dramatic drop in the Republican belief that science was 
generally good for society, which Pew Research Center found in their polls 
the same year.80
Figure 1
Level of Confidence in Science by Political Party, 1974–2021
View largeDownload slide

Level of Confidence in Science by Political Party, 1974–2021
Source: The General Social Survey, the latest conducted from December 1, 
2020-May 3, 2021. Auditors asked, “I am going to name some institutions in 
this country. As far as the people running these institutions are 
concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some 
confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them?” Figure by Alexander 
Kaurov.

This pattern, Gauchat notes, is long-term rather than abrupt, and cannot be 
pinned on who held the White House at any interval during this period. It 
is also distinctive in comparison to trust in other secular institutions. 
He finds that “the politicization patterns observed for science are unique 
and do not reflect a parallel decline across institutions.”81

Gauchat calls this divergence of trust in science “a breakdown of this 
postwar consensus [about science] along sociopolitical lines.”82 He 
interprets this breakdown in ideological terms: conservatives turned 
against science while liberals did not. Gauchat concludes that the source 
of this divergence is “empirically underdetermined,” but that 
“conservatives’ distrust is [likely] attributable to the… increased 
connection between scientific knowledge and regulatory regimes in the 
United States, the latter of which conservatives generally oppose.”83 A 
2021 study by sociologist John J. Lee expanding on Gauchat's work examines 
the matter in terms of party affiliation, finding that Republican trust in 
science has decreased, and Democratic trust has increased. Lee attributes 
this to elite messaging such as the anti-government propaganda campaign we 
have summarized here.84

The General Social Survey asks respondents about their level of confidence 
in major American institutions, including science. Examining the survey 
data, we see that there is both a major ideological shift and a partisan 
change of attitudes toward science since the 1970s, and that the 
substantive changes have mostly occurred since the 1990s. In the 1970s, 
there was little difference in the response between liberals and 
conservatives: on average, 45 percent of all respondents had a great deal 
of confidence in science; the figure for liberals was 47 percent and for 
conservatives it was 45 percent. To the extent that there was a partisan 
divide at that time, Republicans expressed more confidence in the 
scientific community than Democrats did. This began to change, however, in 
the 1990s. In 1995, 48 percent of liberal respondents expressed a great 
deal of confidence in science versus only 40 percent of conservatives. 
Figure 1 shows that this ideological shift was followed by a partisan 
shift: between 2000 and 2008, Republicans became less likely to trust 
science than Democrats. Figure 1 also shows that the shift in Republicans’ 
attitudes away from trusting science precedes a shift toward trusting 
science among Democrats. The decreasing Republican confidence in the 
scientific community begins in the 1990s, but increasing Democratic 
confidence does not get underway until the 2010s, with a dramatic increase 
after the election of Donald Trump. This suggests that Democrats reacted to 
President Trump's antiscience positions by further embracing science.

Sociologists Timothy L. O’Brien and Shiri Noy argue that the partisan 
divide over science can be traced to the partisan divide in religious 
identity that has grown in parallel.85 As the Republican Party has become 
identified with conservative religiosity-in particular, evangelical 
Protestantism-religious and political skepticism of science have become 
mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing. Meanwhile, individuals who are 
comfortable with secularism, and thus secular science, concentrate in the 
Democratic Party.86 The process of party-sorting along religious lines has 
helped turned an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.

We agree but underscore that the alignment of conservative Protestant 
religious identity with free-market political ideology is no coincidence. 
The business leaders and intellectuals we have discussed here worked to 
create this alignment. From the 1940s to the 1990s, they worked to embed 
free-market economic thought into the curricula of Protestant seminaries, 
and placed it in the hands of individual ministers and lay readers, so that 
market fundamentalism became part of the identity of American religious 
fundamentalism. The rise of market fundamentalism in America is directly 
tied to the rise of conservative religion to political power in the late 
twentieth century, and vice versa.87 The timing of the observed changes in 
public opinion are consistent with this interpretation.

Because regulatory regimes are located in secular government-and, in the 
United States, typically in the federal government-conservatives encouraged 
by dominant ideologies of the past half-century express broad animus toward 
“the government,” and not just toward specific regulatory regimes or policy 
instruments. Yet this does not necessarily imply animus toward science. 
After all, it is logically possible to accept scientific claims-for 
example, about the threat of climate change or the efficacy of masking-and 
still believe that the government should not do anything about it. And it 
is logically possible to accept the reality of problems identified by 
scientists, and accept market-based mechanisms to address them, as 
President George H.W. Bush did with acid rain. Thus, conservative distrust 
of science requires additional explanation, and we find that explanation in 
the efforts of American business leaders to turn Americans against 
government regulations, efforts that met success in the Reagan 
administration and have informed conservative thinking since. In short, 
contemporary conservative distrust of science is not really about science. 
It is collateral damage, a spillover effect of distrust in government. 
Therefore, to rebuild trust in science, we cannot simply defend science as 
an enterprise or demonstrate the integrity of scientists. We must address-
and counter-prevailing conservative narratives of a government that 
smothers prosperity and threatens the liberties of its people, when it is 
in fact working to sustain and equitably distribute prosperity and protect 
its people from grave threats like climate change.