It is rare when my thoughts about America’s divided political citizenry are so clear to me. Today, yet again, has me ruminating on the American Right or more specifically, the modern conservative or neoconservative.
There are many discrete ideas and positions embraced by American neoconservatives, in fact, too many to tackle in this short post. My larger point, however, intends to concisely describe what divides the American Left from the American Right, and that is the the Left’s embrace of and trust in the University institution, and the Right’s dismissal and frankly, glib skepticism of that institution. Furthermore, the Right seems equally skeptical of the idea of detrimental multinational corporations, conglomerates, monopolies and oligopolies pushing their way to the center of American discourse and engaging in financed skepticism and disinformation.
This divide largely explains why the average neoconservative one might run into (probably at least one in every family, and most likely to refer to his or herself as a “conservative”) dismisses the scientific consensus on global warming. Neoconservatives tend to mistake a political dispute for a scientific one. If the Right believed in the University institution, the Right would turn to the scientists and climatologists and discover there is in fact a verifiable consensus: global warming is occurring and industrial carbons (a human cause) are culpable. Being capable of matching a climate change denial article for every article warning of the imminent global threat doesn’t mitigate or undermine the consensus. It merely illustrates the aggressive and pernicious nature of financed skepticism and disinformation.
But a neoconservative is unlikely to remove himself from his long relied upon, comforting world view. He will continue to believe electricity provided by coal-fired power plants is so cheap, and either fail to appreciate or remain ignorant about the fact that American subsidization is responsible for his lighter electric bill. On the other hand (no pun intended), the woman from the Left will continue to dig up verifiable fact and research data provided by the University institution.