immanence

The big question around these back-to-back hurricanes in the southeast U.S. is not why they are happening (that’s easy enough to answer), but why so many people find it easier to believe they were artificially generated by the U.S. government, the “deep state,” FEMA, industry, or some euphemistic “they” (and we know who “they” are) for some nefarious purpose, such as harming Republicans before the election, seizing people’s land to access lithium deposits, testing out their space lasers, falsely convincing us that climate change is real, and so on — than it is to believe in the science of anthropogenic climate change.

Conspiracy theories have flourished in the last few weeks, and they follow in the grooves of longerstanding theories about chemtrails, geoengineering, the deep state, the climate change “hoax,” and so on (see here, here, here, here, and in my earlier series of posts for some background on this).

The question, then, is why some people fall for theories that are so much less congruent with known facts than the more obvious, empirically parsimonious answer — that climate change is real and getting worse, and that scientists have known and demonstrated that for years. But this isn’t just about knowledge versus ignorance. It reflects a deep failure of trust in public institutions.

What are the causes of that failure? In the U.S. (and in what we could call “Greater America,” which like a “long twentieth [or any] century,” is the world beyond the U.S. that is most influenced by U.S. media discourses), I would suggest that there are three main causes, all of them quite real.

(1) Real political corruption and government overreach: That there has been a “revolving door” between power and money in U.S. politics is no secret; it’s a feature of the system. And the history of U.S. governmental organizations engaging in covert practices — as with Watergate, CIA activity to overthrow democratically elected governments or to conduct secret experiments on people in the 1950s and 1960s, and so on — or simply lying to the public, as with the Bush administration’s arguments preceding the second Iraq War, is long and undeniable. If it doesn’t make you naturally skeptical of government claims, it should. That it has done so on the political left and on the political right makes this an “equal-opportunity” cause, and a historically deep one.

(2) Real right-wing efforts to undercut public institutions and public trust in those institutions: The five-decade long program to discredit “big government,” initiated by right-wing think tanks in the 1970s, institutionalized under Reaganism (and Thatcherism in the U.K.), and accompanied by deregulation of media industries and declining funding for public education, public media, public science, and consumer protection, is similarly undeniable. It has borne its fruit to the extent that many Americans today live in a world shaped not by critically informed consumption of accountable media reporting on accountable politicians and accountable scientists, but by the skewed worldview of Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, OAN, Sinclair Media, Donald Trump, and now X/Elon Musk.

It’s not that left-wing organizations are immune to skewing the news or misperceiving causes. It’s just that the right is much better funded (because it represents more billionaires, whose class interest is to keep their wealth rather than share it), has been more unified in its goals (since the socially and politically “redistributive” 1960s, against which they have been reacting), and has more to lose. (Well, we all have a planet to lose, but that’s something they prefer to ignore.)

And in the last ten years, the work of foreign media agents has contributed dramatically to the spread of disinformation. Those foreign media agents aren’t necessarily “right-wing,” but their interests happen to converge today with the right, as we see in Russian funding of right-wing political parties in numerous countries, the Epoch Times’ support for Trumpism, and many other examples.

(3) Real and, at times, growing inequalities between the beneficiaries and the victims of the neoliberal policies that have dominated U.S. and global politics since the 1980s: Neoliberal economic policies (deregulation, trade agreements lacking in labor or environmental standards, et al.) have resulted in the loss of millions of working-class jobs, with employers often moving to other countries. Losing a job is no trivial thing; it is in many ways like losing a life. Meanwhile, neoliberal policies have also generated economic growth, with its benefits going more to those who participate more in the global economy.

While they are hardly its prime beneficiaries, university-educated people (alongside Hollywood stars and cultural figures) have come to be seen as the “liberal elites” who’ve benefited from this top-down redistribution of wealth. (That’s where cause #2 has fed strongly into cause #3.) Prominent among those perceived “elites” are scientists, especially those whose research confirms things — like climate change — that can only be addressed through government intervention. Alongside them are the representatives of “woke culture” so demonized by right-wing political actors. The idea that these groups constitute a “globalist elite” is a perception, not exactly a reality. But the wealth gap between rural or rust belt communities decimated by neoliberal policies and well-off urbanites is real.

These three causes have interacted to create the mistrust in public institutions that we have today. That includes the institutions of government (especially by Republicans when Democrats are in power), of media, of science, and of public health. The right’s (#2) shift to populism has taken full advantage of trend #3.

The second part of the “big question,” then, is how to combat these misperceptions and regain public trust in the institutions we need to address today’s very real challenges. In a political environment already poisoned by polarization between mutually incompatible worldviews, that’s not easy. But explicitly acknowledging each of the above factors would be a good start.