Drop what you’re doing and read Peter Daou’s impassioned response to the news that nearly half of Americans now have bought into the idea that global warming is an exaggerated and quite possibly made up problem. That’s the sort of thing that really makes you want to throw your hands up in the air and give up, but of course, we can’t do that. Pro-science people feeling overwhelmed by the problem is half the reason denialists are getting an edge.
It’s time to take a serious look at why anti-science arguments are gaining an edge in our society and think very hard about what it’s going to take to fight back. I think part of the problem is that pro-science people feel that the twin pillars of evidence and moral responsibility to not ruin the only planet we have is argument enough, and we just keep running on this hamster wheel of pointing to the evidence and thinking that settles it. Why on earth are conservatives winning this rhetorical battle? Peter:
Green-bashers have had a banner year—they found a couple of openings, some hacked emails, a few scientists being flawed humans rather than data-processing automatons, and they went ballistic. With funding from big oil, they’ve engaged in an all-out assault on science and reason, and this assault has been tepidly rebutted, if at all. The rightwing message machine has been in high gear, blasting out misinformation and pseudo-science, cynically sowing doubt.
He then goes on to talk about the baffling effectiveness of beating up on Al Gore as an “argument” against global warming. It’s so fucking disturbed. Every fucking Republican I know melts into giggles at the very sound of Gore’s name. I tend to take it personally, too, not because I’m in love with Al Gore or anything, but because the “joke” is that he’s a smarty-pants that has the audacity to educate himself thoroughly on topics and then share what he knows with the world. And as someone who makes her living doing something similar, I find that incredibly offensive. I remember that he was a punchline even before he was Vice President, probably because the nascent right wing media of the 80s already had him pegged as a threat, and they trained their followbots to hate Gore. I’ve made it a minor life mission to swiftly correct anyone who makes jokes about inventing the internet. “Al Gore is a nerd” doesn’t disprove fucking global warming.
But this all does show exactly how we’ve come to this place. The global warming denialist industry intuitively (or perhaps not intuitively—-I’m sure they’ve spent their money on collecting thorough cognitive research on how to persuade) understands that playing on people’s prejudices tends to be a lot more effective than a straightforward facts-based argument. And the Gore thing isn’t logical, but it plays on people’s childish desire to resent someone for being better than they are—-oooooh, Gore thinks he’s so smart and noble, just because he cares about the planet! Well, we’ll show him. We’ll take a big ol’ crap on this planet to show him who’s boss! We hope that people get over this by the time they reach the 3rd grade, but apparently not.
It’s arguable, however, that the Gore thing is only a minor issue in selling denialism to the general public. Where the right wing is really making inroads is convincing people they know better than the scientists, because they have “common sense”. Americans eat that shit up. It’s not just when it comes to global warming, either. Americans enjoy feeling like they’re smarter than the people who invented vaccines, smarter than the scientists that put a man on the moon, and smart enough to think that random herbal crap you picked up off the shelf will work better than a thoroughly tested medication.* Now they get to feel smarter than those number-crunching climate scientists.