Opinion | The Rotting of the Republican Mind - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...republican-disinformation.html
gop paranoia conspiracy theory polarization divergence epistemic crisis politics history culture
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In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
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We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality
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Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?
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My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real.
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In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.
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This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny.
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We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
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While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities.
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In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.
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In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending.
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Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
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People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers.
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The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.
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conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.
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For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools
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For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have
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For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals
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Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set
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He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source.
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That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it