The anti-science political movement was in effect long before Carter. He tried to switch to the metric system and was opposed on cultural grounds as one example. But look back to Darwin and Galileo and you’ll see a long standing pattern. Sadly, at this point it looks like it will doom us.
I’m not saying it wasn’t there – Scopes, for example – but pumping many billions of dollars into it really amped it up, especially when it turned opposition to science into a Republican primary filter. While the southern realignment was unfolding, science denial was visible in both parties (e.g. William Proxmire, D-WI) but that was not as pronounced in the age of the space race and the science-dependent Cold War. That changed between the tobacco and fossil fuel companies’ enormous lobbying efforts, and you’ll recognize many of the same “experts” trotted out to explain why environmentalism, public health, or anything else which affects those companies’ bottom lines.
Well said; I was thinking of Scopes when I said Darwin. It’s hard to really get a feel for history that I didn’t live through and I’m talking about things a bit before my time which began in the Reagan era. I mostly look at the work of Carl Sagan and I get the feeling he really got going in the 70’s and 80’s. Agreed that it seems like tobacco companies wrote the original playbook for weaponizing disinformation for commercial purposes, but it’s fair to say that America’s issues with science denial preceded that as well.
I think the fight over the metric system is instructive - Im not aware of any huge lobbying effort to defeat it, but it became a culture war anyway, and now we have a strange mixed system in the US.
To be fair one of the reasons his ideas were rejected is because he wrote a book portraying the pope as an idiot. Heliocentrism/his books were banned earlier but a few years later one of his friends and supporters during the initial trial was elected pope. So there was a non insignificant chance that the Catholic church would have accepted heliocentrism a few hundred years sooner had he managed to be a bit more subtle and no alienate him.
Also I'm not trying to downplay the anti scientific attitude which was quite prevalent back in those days (when science couldn't be balanced with religious truths etc. otherwise I don't think it was that bad) but one of the main issues with his theory is that he couldn't really prove it conclusively (e.g. the issue with stellar parallax).
e.g. While the Roman inquisition did ban his theory and books but first they organized a public debate between Galileo and one of their lawyers which which was primarily based on scientific rather than religous arguments
