A Liberal Dose
July 1, 2021
Troy D. Smith
“The Gradual Conservative Slide
from Reality, Part 1”
Last week I addressed a
question raised by a reader: why do Southerners not believe in science? I asked
my TTU colleague Laura Smith, an expert in the history of medicine, what she
thought. She basically said that, historically, Southerners have been no more
or less likely than anyone else to believe in science, but that there is an
enduring stereotype that they do not –in large part because of the Scopes
“Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee a century ago. I agree with that
assessment. I would also argue that the religious fundamentalism that led to
Tennessee’s state law against teaching evolution at that time, and the furor
that arose when someone did, was not specifically Southern. There was a
fundamentalist wave sweeping the whole country in the 1920s, largely as a
reaction against the rapid post-WWI social changes of the “Jazz Age,” as
evidenced by the extraordinary popularity of evangelists like Billy Sunday. And
remember, the prominent retired politician who volunteered to serve as
prosecutor in the Scopes case, William Jennings Bryan, was not a Southerner. He
was from the Midwest. Nevertheless, journalists from other regions (most
significantly, H. L. Mencken of New York) used the Scopes Trial to portray
Southerners as backwards, superstitious idiots and to reinforce the “hillbilly”
stereotype.
However, it is true that there
has been a slow, yet dramatic, shift among conservatives in recent decades to
disbelieve, not only science, but facts in general. This is a relatively new
phenomenon in its present form. Since a large majority of Southerners are
conservative, this can initially make it seem like a Southern thing –but it is
just as true in every region of the country nowadays. And it was not always the
case. Throughout most of the 20th century, liberals and conservatives –while
they might disagree strenuously on policy matters –at least agreed on what the
empirical facts were. The big question is, when and how did that change?
I think a few factors got the
ball rolling, one as early as the 1960s, but I’m going to save that one and
focus first on a couple from the 1990s. The first of those was the
proliferation of hyper-partisan news and opinion outlets on talk radio and
cable television, due to the fact Reagan ended the FCC Fairness Doctrine in 1987.
This meant that, for the first time in most people’s lifetime, you could tune
in to political news that was tailored solely to your belief system, without
hearing an opposing view. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh benefited from this
a lot more than any liberal pundits did. By the end of the 90s, most people
were on the internet, where there was even more opportunity to be isolated in
your own chosen bubble of perceived reality. Bill Clinton’s sex scandal in the
late 90s drove more people than ever to cable news channels, and Fox in
particular flourished. Clinton did not help, by the way, with his metaphysical
attempts to writhe out of his scandal by saying, under oath, “It depends on
what the word ‘is’ means.” However, no one then supported that excuse. By which
I mean, you didn’t find huge numbers of Clinton supporters saying things like “Hey,
he's right, no one even knows what ‘is’ means! I don’t even think it’s a word!”
The 1960s factor I mentioned
earlier was the Nixon strategy, crafted by aides like Lee Atwater and Pat
Buchanan, which historians call the “Southern Strategy.” This was the effort to
reach out to racists angry about civil rights progress –without seeming to be
reaching out to them, but rather by “dogwhistles”… phrases that the intended
audience clearly understands, but which offer “plausible deniability” and
saying that the reality of their meaning isn’t “real” at all. We’ll come back
to that soon.
Cable news, the internet,
Nixon, Clinton. It really sounds, so far, like either side was as inclined to
move away from objective facts as the other. So why do I argue that it was
ultimately conservatives who did so? What was the tipping factor? Turns out, it
was science.
Stay tuned.
--Troy D. Smith, a White County
native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do
not necessarily represent TTU.
A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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