Yeah, it certainly seems like there are groups pushing to make everything political.
Or perhaps by politics you really mean culture war leanings.
To clarify: I am talking about the reception of authority, not the innate linkage of authority itself to the authority figure's politics, but the linkage of the authority figure's politics to the politics of the people deciding whether to be receptive or not to that authority.
> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.
This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that.
In the past, I think we probably had more "norming," where people were guided into trusting certain common authorities. I feel that's degraded, probably for a whole host of reasons (e.g. erosion of community by technology, intensification of individualist ideology, discovery by some actors that fomenting division is a short-term winning strategy for them, etc.), and the result is what you describe.
Policing misinformation is also kind of norming, but the way it's been done seems kind of ham-fisted due to the demands of technopoly [1].
The failures of too-centralized authority are pretty well known and understood (e.g. through the example of the Soviet Union). Honestly, I feel like our current era may end up being the example of the failures of too-decentralized/too-fragmented authority.
> This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that.
Never have people always gone to first principles on all of the evidence. They have always looked towards people they trust to prime their beliefs. There were times when experts were that trusted authority.
Sadly it’s more common that your crazy conspiracy uncle is now trusted by more people than in the past and authorities are trusted by fewer than in my lifetime.
Far more complicated than this, sorry. I agree with that observation if you gleen your evidence from portrayals in the media...and to some extent this is true but the populist power base in aggregate is far smarter and more purposed than this. What you described in the above quote could also be attributed to flatly thumbing their noses at the evidence because they want a certain outcome and they know they can get it by chaos. You create chaos by appearing to believe outrageous bullshit and acting on it within an approved political arena. It's protected chaotic behavior that serves the populist agenda.
For atleast some of the judges, one can clearly have predicted how they would have voted. The justices might have just taken a vacation on the beach and just call in the vote...
This. The CDC could do well to hire some conservatives to help with their outreach. Put them in positions of power.
Both political parties should do this rather than engage in destructive and polarizing brinkmanship.
I'm afraid focus on the short term and on "winning" makes this impossible, though.
No, hiring more “conservatives” in a bureaucracy doesn’t balance the political polarity. Our current authority trust problems aren’t fixed by political stance (eg. Trump advocating the COVID vaccine, Fauci is a Republican). There is a strong anti-science, anti-academic, anti-government, anti-expert streak in the US political right. It is not exclusive to the right, but the right massively outranks the left in these characteristics. And pro-conspiracy/paranoia propensity is high, so I suspect facts simply won’t break through to some people.
The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics. It:
- failed to build a test for COVID in the critical first weeks,
- failed to allow many US labs to import and work with COVID samples, and
- has continuously given dictates (eg. about masks) which were too simple.
Also, the problem I see isn’t that the CDC doesn’t hire conservatives. It’s more that conservatives don’t enter lots of fields in large numbers. Academia, journalism, science, art are dominated by liberals because conservatives don’t encourage their kids into those fields because modern conservatives don’t value these jobs. That and training for these jobs can easily disabuse people of several tribal attributes of conservatism (eg. It’s hard to be a biologist, geologist, or evolutionist and remain a Young Earth Creationist). It’s hard to retain a literal interpretation of the Bible after learning about other religions and myth stories.
Some of them were certainly related to politics. The trump administration sidelined the CDC, pressured the CDC to change their recommendations, suppressed reports, publicly contradicted their statements etc. Biden has managed to influence their recommendations as well. The shortened isolation times were the result of a direct request governors made to Biden. At first the CDC said it was changed because of the science, then they backpedaled and said it was just what they thought Americans would tolerate. Political interference in the CDC has been weakening our faith in them.
I agree it'd be a terrible idea for the CDC to try to "balance things out" by adding more variation in the political influences. They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible.
It's worth noting that, for public health measures, social considerations like effects of planned enforcement measures and expected public response given those measures, including both compliance, failure to alter behavior to comply, and altering behavior directly against the policy (rather than what the policy would do if there was magic perfect compliance with no enforcement effort) is a key set of facts. (And, in the CDCs case, also includes expected enforcement, resistance, nonenforcement, and outright hostile policy responses by State governments, which the CDC does not control but are structurally going to be responsible, realistic, for much of the concrete implementation of CDC guidance.)
The CDC can't both stick to relevant facts and science and ignore politics, because public health has an enormous social component, of which politics is a central part.
Keep to hard science and let politicians use that information to make less than perfect policy decisions. That way, people can at least trust the CDC to always tell us what we should be doing and we can blame or sympathize with politicians for making less than ideal choices to satisfy corporate interests or out of a lack of faith in the American people.
That's much better than the CDC saying "The science says do Y" and then facing a massive amount of backlash as groups of experts say "That's a lie. The science says X" while advocates for Y say "See everybody! We were right!" and many people are left wondering who to trust. As a bonus, those who can do X, could choose to do the best thing no matter what the government policies are, including other nations with less petulant citizens who look to the CDC as a trustworthy source of information.
This is what Roger Stone and Steve Bannon we're looking to do with Trump. Slam dunk.
This all arises from deep, deep mistrust and a perceived lack of representation on the part of the establishment toward the unwashed.
The establishment is on the ropes right now.
I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is:
People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.