Junk Science Becomes More Professionalized. Meanwhile, Conspiracy Theories Are Being More Associated With The Center-right And Right, Politically. How Does All This Fit Together? I’m Not Sure.

A few years ago I wrote a post, Junk Science Then and Now discussing the movement of junk science from the periphery of elite culture to the core:

The junk science (by which I mean work that has some of the forms of scientific research but is missing key elements such as valid and reliable measurements, transparency, and openness to criticism) of the mid-twentieth century came from cranks and outsiders, often self-educated people with no academic positions, and even those who were in academia were peripheral figures, for example, the ESP researcher J. B. Rhine at Duke University, who according to Wikipedia was trained as a botanist and was not a central figure in the psychology profession. Immanuel “Worlds in Collision” Velikovsky had lots of scientist friends, but he was an outsider to the scientific community. And those guys from the 1970s who wrote books about ancient astronauts and the Bermuda triangle, I don’t think they even claimed to have any scientific backing. Yes, there were some missteps within academic science from N-rays to cold fusion, but these were minor storms that blew up and went away.

Nowadays, though, the pseudoscientists are well ensconced in the academy, they play power games in the field of psychology, and they get to publish in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (air rage, himmicanes, ages ending in 9, etc etc) whenever they want. The call is coming from inside the house, as it were. Many of them are still considered by the news media to be the legitimate representatives of the scientific community. Even absolutely ridiculous ideas like the $100,000 citations. There’s also the related phenomenon of . . . not “junk science” exactly, but bad science: scientific errors that then persist because the scientific community refuses to come to terms with corrections. An example is the contagion-of-obesity story.

When discussing this, I wrote that the above-described shift represents a sort of gentrification of scientific error, mirroring the professionalism that has come into so many other aspects of our intellectual life. Instead of some wacky guy somewhere claiming to have developed a perpetual motion machine or whatever, you’ve got a Stanford professor promoting junk science on cold showers.

I thought about all this recently when reading a post by political journalist Matthew Yglesias on what he calls “the crank realignment”:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transition from semi-prominent Democrat to third party spoiler to Donald Trump endorser is emblematic of a broader, decade-long “crank realignment” in American politics.

Trump himself, of course, used to be a Democrat. He switched parties in a blaze of birther conspiracy theories, and only then came to embrace conservative views on topics like gun control and abortion. And RFK Jr. was into election fraud conspiracy theories long before January 6, but his version was about George W. Bush stealing the 2004 election in Ohio. That wasn’t a mainstream Democratic Party view (there’s a reason there was no Kerry-led insurrection), but it was mainstream enough to be published in Rolling Stone and for Kennedy to continue to be a player in progressive politics.

Twenty years later, that’s no longer the case. Democrats are much more buttoned-up, and the GOP is much more accepting of cranks and know-nothings like Kennedy.

The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics.

I think Yglesias is on to something here. I agree with him that from a logical point of view, there’s no reason why conspiracy theories should be concentrated on the right half of the political spectrum. Indeed, from a logical perspective you might expect conspiracy theories to be more popular on the left, as this would be consistent with a general leftist anti-powerful-people, anti-big-business take.

One thing I’ve noticed in the past is that commentators have been tied to the idea of anti-science leftists even when the data don’t bear that out. Here’s an example from a couple years ago, where political scientist Chris Blattman made the offhanded remark that opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) was “mostly left,” even though actually opposition was about the same on the left and right. It’s a convenient story to pair anti-vaccine attitudes on the right to anti-GMO attitudes on the left and ask why can’t we all get along, but that’s not what public opinion happens to look like. I agree with Yglesias that this is kinda too bad, as it makes it harder to have a bipartisan push against anti-science.

It’s still hard for me to put all this together in my head. One challenge is that I have the impression that most of the prominent purveyors of junk science and bad science in academia are on the left, or the center-left. OK, not Dr. Oz, and maybe not that cold-shower dude at Stanford. And not those covid-minimizers. Or the climate-change denialists being promoted by Freakonomics. But the mainstream NPR/Ted/PNAS world . . . they’re mostly on the left, right? We do hear about right-wing people in science, but they get some attention because they are exceptions.

So the professionalization of bullshit—as exemplified by Gladwell’s prominence at the New Yorker, the UFO’s-as-space-aliens theories promoted by elite journalists, the Association for Psychological Science promotion of superstition, and various wacky stuff coming out of Harvard, Stanford, etc.—runs counter to the movement of conspiracy theorizing from the political fringes to the core of the political right.

I don’t know where this will all lead. It seems kind of unstable.