​On a recent and especially thought-provoking episode of the Straight White American Jesus podcast (#59), "Why Don't They Care", Daniel Miller Swaj, Professor of Humanities at Landmark College, proposed the theory that a key to right wing thought is the defining of one's identity outward, towards what one is not, rather than inwardly, towards what one is, as is more common on the left.  Because of a narrow assumption of what is correct - through an unquestioning of tradition and authority - the identity is highly fixed, and defined by what it is not.  This then leads to not only a lack of empathy, but active antipathy, in which one is always on the lookout for out-group "enemies", or those in whom to find evidence of the righteousness of the in-group.  In a vicious cycle, the lack of empathy inhibits the learning about out-group experiences, which inoculates one from feeling further empathy.  Swaj then develops this further, arguing that this leads to perpetual insecurity:
 
If that's all that one's identity is [attacking others], it's a highly insecure identity, and the more that those who undertake all of these efforts to attack others, insist that they're doing so because they're secure and who they are, the more pronounced that insecurity is.
 
 
I find this line of thought compelling.  However, a couple things might be teased out as well.  To start, this aligns with political values research that finds differences between the left and right in what valence environmental events have.  Conservatives are found to be more reactive (psychologically and physiologically) to negative environmental events, and especially threats to their in-group.  This contributes to caution and avoidance towards novelty, and a hewing to remain closer to social order.
 
It seems clear that conservative thinking reinforces more conservative thinking.  In behavioral terms, advanced social responses are defined as rule-following.  Immediate or local stimuli do not need to be present to occasion reinforced responses (e.g. delicious flavor reinforces licking candy) if the behavior of rule following has been reinforced and a rule is developed out of combinations of responses to stimuli.  From Daniel Cerutti (1989, Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior),

In rule-governed behavior, previously established elementary discriminations are combined in complex instructions and thus result in complex behavior. Discriminative combining and recombining of responses produce behavior with characteristics differing from those of behavior that is established through the effects of its direct consequences. For example, responding in instructed discrimination may be occasioned by discriminative stimuli that are temporally and situationally removed from the circumstances under which the discrimination is instructed.
​
 While there do appear to be phenotypic dispositions that correlate with political ideology, they would seem to be sets of weak complex sensory tendencies that on their own do not form political thought, but could push certain individuals towards or away from certain idiosyncratic tendencies of behavior that fall along various points of the left-right spectrum.  Rather, one's political ideology is far more a product of a learning history that has reinforced sets of behaviors towards particular environmental stimuli and subsequent formation of rule sets.   For example, if I grow up in a house in which immigrants, democrats, the government, etc. are pointed to and spoke of in negative terms, and related rule following thoughts and behaviors are reinforced, then I will likely be shaped into a conservative.  The environment one is raised in will condition this identity.
 
But if conservatism is self-reinforcing through avoidance of novelty (negative reinforcement)  and preference for in-group or sameness (positive reinforcement), what is the internal logic of conservatism that drives this avoidance and in-group preference?  Human story-telling can be powerful reinforcers of rule-governed behaviors. 
 
At the highest level, this has always been the role of religion and myth, as well as archetypal symbolism throughout the arts, political rhetoric and family and local cultural narratives - each working together to reinforce basic sets of moral and value directions.  It is a defining feature of human society that we use these shorthand heuristics to guide our lives.  Because it is a mentally taxing effort to evaluate and process daily social situations, placing our "faith" in a set of core moral values allows us to give over to them some portion of our personal operational control, freeing ourselves up to either investigate these complex situations at our leisure or ignore them entirely and focus on other, more immediate and often simpler stimuli.
 
The term Prompt Dependency, from Applied Behavior Analysis, might provide useful additional insight here.  It refers to the process by which the independent performance of a behavior has not been reinforced as much as a behavior that has followed a prompt in the environment.  For instance, if I only take out the trash after being told, and when I take it out on my own I don't receive adequate reinforcement, I will be considered "prompt dependent" to a degree.  Prompt dependency is in direct conflict with most of our moral values: independence, courage, hard work, self-control, etc.
 
In a way, the conservative emphasis on tradition and status quo operates as a form of prompting for rule-governed identity to a greater degree than does the liberal openness to novelty.  For the conservative, the rule-set is simpler, more narrow, and less in need of questioning.  For the liberal, the rule set is always been challenged by novelty.  With each new experience, the behavior of learning something new, imagining the thoughts and experiences of another, understanding the history and context becomes reinforced.  Novel experiences, without as rigid an identity rule set to fall back on, must be responded to by the liberal without relying on the availability of social prompts that provide security and safety.  It is precisely this process, though, that reinforce the behaviors that forego the need to adhere to rigid-rule prompting and allay the aversiveness of new experiences. 
 
To illustrate, if a liberal does not believe all moral rectitude is to be found in a specific interpretation of a particular religious text, then a repertoire of alternative moral rule-sets must be learned.  To a conservative, homosexuality might be wrong because it says so in a bible.  However, a liberal who has forgone the ultimate authority of the bible (or at least that interpretation), must begin to apply different calculations.  Does the behavior cause individual or social harm, and why or why not?  Where does the behavior come from?  What have other societies thought about it?  What does the individual think about it?    Or, if the liberal is religious and seeks authority in the same bible, they may have developed meta-critique such as what was the historical context of the passage?  How has it been interpreted?  Are there internal contradictions between that particular piece of text and other themes in the bible? 
 
The history of human thought can be traced by the development of frameworks of inquisition and truth seeking with great, if not central, import to morality.   Philosophy looks deeply at things like epistemology or reason.  History examines what has happened in the past and science examines what can and cannot be observed as true facts about the reality.  Journalism reports on how people are living their lives and the systems in which they live them. 
 
All of this can be so much work!  But liberal rule-following reinforces greater fluency in utilizing these frameworks.  As such, this makes encountering novelty and adjusting one's moral perceptions more manageable. 
 
In 2023, with the mainstreaming of conspiracy theorizing and the seeming inconsequence of evidence and fact, this high-level rule-following seems to have been drawn into greater relief.  How do we know what we know and why do we believe what we do? 
 
I will end here for now, but a topic I would like to explore further is the importance of belief in free-will versus determinism, and how the belief reinforces one's rule-governed behavior, specifically in regard to political ideology.  As an epistemological matter, determining one's beliefs about the causality of human actions would seem greatly impactful to their moral stance on a given behavior, as well as what moral stance they believe a society should take.  This would seem relevant to variety of central ideas as widely ranging as criminal justice, economics, education, religion, and much more.
 
 
 
 
Discrimination theory of rule‐governed behavior, The Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Daniel Cerutti, 1989

Apparently, here's this techno-utopian thing going on in Silicon Valley.  Something happened that went from maybe benignly libertarian-left seeming, to all these far-right monarchist technocracists like Mencius Moldbug, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and a whole coterie of permanently online neo-fascists.
 
They seem to basically believe in their genetic and cultural superiority, being that culture as it may a weirdo ironic nihilism.  I've never quite gone to deeply into it, but I felt I've learned about it from the edges.  Something in the past two decades erupted as an old-guard blood and soil paleo conservatism began to crawl out from under the depths of neoliberal economic policy and social justice awareness breathed out into the academy and orbiting spheres of cultural creation and left political activism. 
 
As Clinton played nice with Gingrich to weaken the welfare state and deregulate, dreaming of a future in which everyone was a PMC, and no one did manual labor.  Murphy Brown took swings from Dan Quail and the AIDS crisis faded into a strange sunset.  Homosexuality finally spread from the metropolitan ghettos to some level mainstream acceptance.  Right wing radio boiled and seethed, as Bush Jr. talked about "compassionate conservatism" and welcoming immigrants.  But then 9/11, and the fear it inspired, melted into the impotence of Iraq and Afghanistan, and when the country turned away from a jingoism-rung-hollow, towards Barack Hussein Obama, the Tea Party movement erupted from the great recession like a bare-chested drunken biker and violently puked on America's front lawn, chunks of racist memes and violent rhetoric sopping in an inchoate stew of economic and social displeasure.
 
When the GOP could do no better than Romney/Mc Cain, who trucked no conspiratorial nonsense or overt racism, Trump stepped (escalated) in with his golden shoes of shit and began shucking his confidence games to an audience primed and eager to suckle his hate and dumb machismo.  "They hate you and they hate me, so I'll fight for you" were the words they needed to hear.  They had become outsiders.  It was clear who they had lost the culture war to (Hollyweird and Colleges).  And while they were no worse off than the left financially, they were too afraid to go to college anymore because their kids were coming home Woke for the holidays and insulting the family.  Their towns were filling with immigrants.  You had to press 1 for English.  Girls were kissing on TV. 
 
They seemed to have two choices: fall back into the safety of the Benedict option of homeschooling and further public retreat with the world fell further into sin; or the more dangerous but glorious Flight 93 option of taking the school boards, courts and capitol building by force.  Covid 19 made that choice for them.  The shutdowns were cinematic - like something straight out of a movie, a Hollyweird zombie apocalypse.  This is what they had all been preparing for: the gays and PMC elites injecting them with gay microchips and harvesting their souls.  Trump pulled hard on the truck horn and blasted his nonsensical clown suit flower in everyone's face, standing with his comically long red tie and surrounded by cheeseburgers.  Rush Limbaugh peed himself a little in excitement, "He's really doing it!"
 
Michael Anton, of the far-right Claremont institute, analogized the passenger revolt that stormed the cockpit and diverted Flight 93 from hitting the Pentagon as the crucible faced by the GOP in stopping the Democrats from destroying the country with their progressivism.  The analogy was a call for vigilante violence: when faced with an existential threat, extreme measures were justified.  The bedrock assumption was hyperbolic and conspiratorial, assuming Democratic governance as illegitimate and corrupt, and so justified extrajudicial and authoritarian measures.  As John Ganz pointed out in a recent column, historical fascism is best understood as a heterogenous amalgam of various interests, each seeing the same enemy in its sights, but with their own unique fear of victimization:
 
"It’s important to remember that fascism, especially in its original incarnation in Italy, was never a fully coherent ideology. Like the symbol of the fasces itself, it’s a bundle of things bound together, a syncretic and cobbled-together system of politics that encompassed several ideological tendencies. As the Madonna song goes, it brought together the bourgeoisie and the rebel. Mussolini’s party began with avant-garde futurists and radical syndicalists in the cities, but within a couple years attracted the most conservative sections of the bourgeoisie in the countryside. The historian Alexander de Grand calls this intrinsic fragmentation hiding behind consensus “hyphenated fascism”: so, you had conservative-fascism, nationalist-fascism, technocratic-fascism, syndicalist-fascism, Catholic-fascism etc. Each saw in the fascist movement and state the possibility of realizing their own program. This was made possible because of the excessively abstract terms of fascist pronouncements and the political skill and mercurial nature of fascist leaders: it was about being opposed to common enemies like liberalism and Marxism while at the same time “restoring national greatness.” Everybody had their own idea about what that looked like. But all would replace tiresome and frustrating regime of democratic political contestation with the rule of competence, or, what the sociologist of fascism Dylan Riley calls the “a technocratic rejection of politics as such.”
 
In the contemporary US you have the business-cranks opposed to taxes and regulations, the religious-cranks wanting Christian Theocracy, the race-cranks opposed to multiculturalism, the sex-cranks advocating patriarchy and heteronormativity, and the techno-cranks, convinced of their own superiority in guaranteeing economic and cultural excellence through a regime of top-down technocratic governance.
 
But the one central, reactionary throughline in all these groups is their deep sense of existential threat to traditional hierarchies of power that they see as essential to sustaining their own particular freedom - that is (whether consciously or not) their own position of comfort.  The supremacy of the White Christian Heterosexual Male is seen as required for human flourishing.  Each group comes at this from their own idiosyncratic angle, arguing from economic, social, religious or historical evidence that inevitably reaches back to better times, the before-woke.  The common feeling is one of personal resentment, a feeling of an identity that has been excluded from its rightful place of superiority.  The thinking is Manichean and zero-sum.  A cosmopolitan pluralism in which all groups share power is dismissed as contrary to the Natural Order in which hierarchy is unavoidable.  A loss of status for the traditionally dominant group can only lead to it subservience.  No matter how loud the naive rhetoric of DEI claims otherwise, not only is pluralism impossible, but its proponents know it - even if only at the unconscious level - and are thus driven by a mendacious lust for power.
 
This all may smack of projection, but it's a logical outcome of a coherent worldview.  The reactionary mind, motivated by its own lust to safeguard its comfort by maintaining power over other groups, assumes attempts at equality as attempts at replacement.  If true freedom is only ever held by wielding power over others, then it is all a game of dominance.  The trick then is in determining which group, which set of values and norms is best.  This is where the reactionary turns to history - albeit always a carefully curated perspective designed to emphasize the natural supremacy of their particular group. 
 
This historical reading is fundamentally tautological: since dominance is part of the natural order, evidence of a group's dominance is evidence of their right to dominate.  Just as the animal kingdom has a natural energy pyramid, so do does the society of man.  The idea of a man sharing power with a woman, a white man sharing power with a black man, a heterosexual with a homosexual, a Christian with a Muslim, an owner with his workers, etc. is akin to lion sharing the savannah with a gazelle.
 
Traditional centrist conservatism has always made a sort of deal on this point.  It will concede pluralism and equality as morally correct, just as long as traditional structures are left unassailed.  The leap it makes to bridge these seemingly contradictory premises is to assume that every individual has the power within them to transcend the degradations of these structures, either by assimilating to the dominant group, or by accepting a second-class status as a sort of freedom in its own right, owing to the beneficence of the dominant.  A worker can start his own business and be his own boss, or he can stay within his rank and enjoy the privileges bestowed upon him by the flourishing of a subsequently growing economy.  A woman can enjoy the privileges of bestowed by a flourishing patriarchal society.  A homosexual can still go to church and get to heaven by suppressing their urges.  People of color and immigrants can learn to speak English correctly and otherwise act white.
 
If all of that sounds like a raw deal, well, conservatism was never about your feelings.  If it sounds dishonest and incoherent, well, a thriving ideology is never required to be coherent.  Magical thinking can be a powerful tool to avoid contradictions, especially if the promise is nothing less than absolute safety and comfort.  To look more deeply at the incompatibilities in this line of thinking, to critically deconstruct and analyze social science and data on actual safety and comfort - things like the availability of human rights, access to power, economic mobility or equity, rates of suicide and despair in populations oppressed by traditional hierarchies - is to confront discomfort and loss of status among the dominant.  This is why conservatism has always been appealing to those whose status is threatened by progressive ideology.
 
The gauzy thinking of centrist conservatism took a big hit in recent decades.  The election of the first black president, the legalization of gay marriage, the consecutives failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to establish functioning democracies despite over a trillion dollars spent, and the psychic toll taken by American military prowess appearing flaccid, and more recently the nationwide BLM protesting against police brutality and the literal shutting down of American cities in Covid Lockdowns at the behest of eggheads, all reported on by a mainstream media which gave neither sufficient justification nor succor to the wounded pride and deep existential angst of conservative paranoia. 
 
In this vacuum, conspiracies festered and frothed.  An entirely alternate reality took form in right wing media and think tanks such as Fox News, Breitbart and the Claremont institute.  The old centrism was untenable, ineffective as it was in stopping the march of what an increasingly warped world view perceived as enemies on all sides.
 
So, fascism - maybe ugly but necessary.  In Silicon Valley, what has been seen as the best of us came to be seen as possibly the worst of us - contributing as it seemed to be to ever-extreme wealth inequality, the datification and algorhythmic exploitation of society through social media, and an increasingly uneasy realization that the internet future was making us more dependent and thus less free.  What's more it seemed to be providing a seed bed for our darkest social impulses.  The bigotry that centrist conservatism had always been able to hand-wave away was being pushed back against in terse online exchanges fed by monetization.  The incoherence between the valorization of hierarchy and promise of equality was being tested.  Reactionaries, unable to square the circle, chose hierarchy and began to give up on equality.  Because equality was only ever given lip-service, they had no real understanding of what it meant - especially in relation to the lived experience of non-dominant groups. 
 
For decades, conservatives had adopted "colorblindness" and a superficial understanding that bigotry was wrong - despite their policies always seeming to promote its deleterious effects.  Not interested in understanding what it was, where it came from, or what perpetuates it, they were ill-equipped to answer those who pointed to bigotry's existence.  They spent their time denying, downplaying, or misdirecting - anything to acknowledge the fact that it lived in the very ideological vacuum they had created between hierarchy and equality.  White, male, heterosexual, Christian supremacy leads inexorably to bigotry.  To acknowledge its continued existence was to acknowledge the incoherence core to their ideology. 
 
The flight 93 position meant they had to go on the attack.  Pointing out bigotry was met with rhetorical violence: a bad-faith mendacity in which defeating one's opponent meant you could use any tools at your disposal, as long as the threat to your identity was neutralized.  You were in fact the bigot, and furthermore were unpatriotically opposed to free speech.   Your science and academic studies were corrupt, your policies merely those of a deep-state, globalist agenda.  Truth was no longer possible, and words no longer had meaning.  Every critique could be dismissed as merely part of a Marxist Woke agenda.  Just as the passengers couldn't stop the terrorism through negotiation, and instead had to storm the cockpit and crash the plane, Trump was in his rights to call for mass deportations, flight restrictions from Muslim countries, pushing radical judges through congress, and the storming of the capital to overturn his electoral defeat.  The legal consequences for Trumps repeatedly flagrant disregard for the rule of law were seen as more evidence of political persecution.
 
Having stepped outside of democratic norms, it is only logical to begin to ponder what might be put in its place.  To the reactionary traditionalist, the obvious answer is Monarchy.  There is much to appreciate in how hierarchical structures were maintained by kings, especially if one is more interested in order than equality and the rights of man.  If you squint just right, a benevolent vision can be seen. 
 
As Moldbug himself writes, reading the racist apologist for imperialism, James Froude:
 
"Froude describes a Tudor society which is completely ordered—which consists, from top to bottom, king to knave, of these relationships of mutual obligation. They are relationships of family, of feudalism, of guild traditions such as apprenticeship, of the Church, of political patronage, of commercial patronage and monopoly, and of course of law and government. It was impossible to live a normal human life outside this tapestry, and nor is it at all clear why anyone would have wanted to."
 
Misfits, screwups and parasites constantly fell out of the fabric, the era being after all primitive, and every arm of government was charged with eradicating this human bilge. If Tudor England, or any European sovereign of the era, had tolerated vagrants, beggars and the idle, it would have been inundated with a mountain of them in a second. As it was, it seems there were quite a few. The difficulty of operating in these primitive conditions demanded a social fabric at which the 21st century can only stare in amazement, like a general contractor contemplating a cathedral. And these people, indeed, built cathedrals. They were not libertarian cathedrals."
 
Dominant thus hierarchy may not be pretty, but it works.  The same cannot be said for democracy, which Moldbug and post-centrist conservative fascists have deluded themselves into believing through multitudinous fever-readings of current end historical events, always with an eye to the protection of their own self-assumed supremacy and legitimate privilege, is cancerous.  Moldbug again:
"the true spirit of democracy is anarchy, dissolution of hierarchical authority. To the radical, this flame, if not snuffed out, cannot be withstood. To the reactionary, the cancer will either kill the patient or be eradicated. To both, no stable compromise is possible or desirable."
 
In their high Silicon Towers, IQs checked at the elevator doors, a vision of post-democratic society is beginning to take shape, and it is enticing.  Shamed and shunned, this is their chance to storm the captain's chair.  But in this telling, not only will the barbarian (probably low-IQ) terrorists be vanquished, and national disaster averted, but these insurgents know how to fly the plane.  Upwards they will pull the yoke, into the golden clouds of benevolent rule, order once again restored to its rightful, natural position.

Todays thoughts have included...


- Winning big in the lottery and employing teams of people on giant art projects.

- A literal conspiracy amongst mathematicians to take all students in post-calculous and initiate them into a giant bullshit hoax that all these equations we see written everywhere are in fact made up by a team in Geneva that sends out example "figures" to all members to use when in public.

- Reading John Ganz on the conspiratorial mind and thinking about the effects on one's political assumptions of the degree to which they believe in libertarian free will.

Thinking reading this about how much one's belief in free will might correlate with their political assumptions.  If person X believes in libertarian free will, there's a sort of epistemological  black hole located in man's homunculus from which no inference of causality can emerge.  What does this do to their notions of systems and power and cultural and other external forces that shape us?  

OK, granted this is maybe an extreme view, and most people Y believe in a compatibilist idea that we have some ultimate internal causality, yet also experience the various forces within tugged by interactions between our genetically programmed phenotype and our history of learning (I'm a bad Behavioral Analyst - trying to the complimentary term to phenotype but for behavioral selection.  If one inherits a genetic phenotype that allows them it interact with the world, what is the term for the environmental-behavioral pro​gramming that continuously shapes them as they move through life?  I've been working clinically for too long!)

But the problem there is where do you draw the line between learning and the homunculous?  This seems an awfully convenient "trap door" that allows you to place responsibility/blame however or however much you'd like to on a guy.  "Oh, he was a real product of his upbringing... but in the end he knew right from wrong", etc.  In politics, it might look like, "Sure, there is XXXXX problem facing that group, but each of them can make a choice to do XXXXX."  How much is view now able discount the effects of systems, structures and power?

Then person Z is a determinist through and through and sees only systems - from the macro to micro, all behavior caught in an endless sea of environmental responding.  They are required to see nothing but the systems.  How much weight to give to any one system is also an assumption to make, which complicates things.  But I'm curious as to whether one's free will position correlates in some way with one's politics.  

I've know more than one conservative who has leaned on "personal responsibility" when speaking of economic, criminal justice, or social justice issues.  If one tends to embrace tradition and eschew the "unintended consequences " of progress, the epistemological black hole of appealling to tradition might collide easily with the black hole of homuncular action.  Talk of upending hierarchies or other power structures, said to built from systemic inequalities, becomes irrelevant if man is free from their grip.  The conservative tradition of eschewing effeminate (read: socially bonded and high EQ) "eggheadedness" and  "nuance" in favor of Manichean, manly (read: individualist, gut-oriented) action bears this out.

But homuncular belief is found by many on the left as well.  My guess is they simply turn up the dial on structural learning, pointing not to the unequal individual but to the extent to which the system has them caught.  As a determinist, this seems very slippery and ultimately paradoxical.  Sociological analysis, however each of us come to it, is the bedrock of our political philosophy.  Whether we want more or less government has a great deal to do with what effects it may have, but a compatibilist can move the sliders every which way to make a particular case.  The right says government would limit freedom for personal action, but then decries the myriad ways it teaches people to be lazy, dependent, etc.   If we could find a correlation here, between our most basic assumptions about man's behavior, it might strengthen the case that there is indeed a link between politics and belief in free will.*

Ganz notes, in regard to what is said of the conspiracy minded, that complexity becomes simplified.  And who doesn't like simplicity?  A Paper in Nature and Human Behavior (Imhoff, et al 2022) finds:  "We conclude that conspiracy mentality is associated with extreme left- and especially extreme right-wing beliefs, and that this non-linear relation may be strengthened by, but is not reducible to, deprivation of political control." Are the extreme right and left (but maybe more on the right) craving simplicity?  

And what of the cravings that might drive persons X, Y or Z?  A case could be made that either the homuncular view or the determinist view is either simple or complex.  A free individual is infinitely complex, but in a way simple too:  the complex effects on man of systems and structures evaporates. 
 FREEDOM!  If right wing thought comforts the privileged who don't want to lose their status,  the simplicity of a world that doesn't need fancy social programs or new pronouns, or ponderous abstract art is there for the taking.

* I admit here as a leftist behavior analyst, I am rubbing my palms feverishly at the thought that the connection not only exists but bends toward my own ideological favor.

The left understands systemic issues very well in an academic sense, but seemingly less often in a practical sense.  This may partly have to do with how left-wing critiques can go so deep that an almost bottomless pit opens beneath the dismantling of moral, economic and political structures and it becomes overwhelming and much easier to fall back into a liberalism that is in many ways conservative.  So too it is likely the case that older generations of progressive thought solidify into tradition. Social and political thought can in this way be thought of as a cresting wave, with the vanguard breaker progressively pushing at the Overton window while the swell deeper back hides as a leviathan of conservative tradition.  

Yet an impactful progressivism requires not merely the wispy sea foam of rhetoric but so too the pragmatic force of action that builds out structures into society.  The left in the past half century seems to have slid from new deal economic populism and aggressive civil rights era social moral imperative into a naive and self-satisfied complacency.  The ideas had seemed to have been won - at least on the social and cultural front, if much less so on the economic front as progressive tax rates plummeted, unions nearly died out completely and a neoliberal bargain was struck in which avenues towards equity for all social groups were paved with promises that college-trained jobs would somehow lift all boats.

But in the meantime conservatives, who rhetorically speaking are bitter foes of the notions of structural forces and systems of power and all the subversion that line of thinking creates beneath its foundations built to hold the glory of  hierarchy and status quo, were actually thinking structurally.  Well, is thinking the right term?  They wouldn't use such terms.  They would prefer to talk about "cultural decay" and a "culture of victimhood" and "those seeking to tear down and destroy the county" and - certainly the religiously zealous among them - literal demonic forces doing the work of Satan.

Yet all of that it structural, even if they would not admit.  When pointing to the supposed effects progressive change they speak in entirely structural terms.  When the institutions they decry as being taken over, or made to crumble, it is the insidiousness of cultural modeling and pathways of access to power that they describe.  But rather than merely be content with spreading the message through academic study or journalistic inquiry, they've spent the decades building out non-governmental think tanks, mega churches and media monopolies with an incredibly narrow-minded focus.  Not on scientific inquiry.  Not on uncovering relationships between power structures or with a mind to level the playing field for all, but rather with an obsessive and scrupulous mission to craft the institutions of democracy to their very specific (usually white, western chauvinist, capitalist and socially conservative) specifications.

When the left talks about structural oppression, conservatives scoff and bemoan it as absurd - what about personal responsibility? they ask, usually followed about tales of rags to riches and how everything is possible if one is not lazy, pointing to the throngs of immigrants who surely would not be advancing on our shores by the tens of thousands if not for our American exceptionalism.

In practice, the right are just as much structuralists as the left.  But if they were to admit that white, male, Christian domination was due merely to structural privilege, and not "pluck", "grit", or simply the "way things ought to be done", their ode to personal responsibility and bootstraps would ring hollow.
 

Distrust Everywhere
 
Science, academia and journalism are critical to a functioning democracy.  But each seems more distrusted than ever by a large portion of Americans.  The common complaints fall into a handful of categories.
 

• Science: pay offs from business interests, ideological bias, pressure from department, lies
• Academia: ideological bias, pressure from department, lies
• Journalism: ideological bias, pressure from organization, lies

 
Let's look at these in isolation.

1. Pay offs from business interests is a thing, and in some fields more than others.  It can take the form of direct payment for research or paying for special conferences or workshops.  Different fields have ethics codes about this but sometimes they aren't followed.  In peer reviewed journals it is standard practice to make a statement up front if any such conflicts of interest are present, and the results are weighed accordingly.
2. Ideological bias affects us all.  This can be difficult to determine and can usually be inferred from similar themes in past research, or a particular theoretical framework adopted.  However, the quality of research should override any such agenda.  This is why the peer review process is so important, as it provides a built-in venue for others with similar expertise to analyze the study for weaknesses.  Also, ideology doesn't equate to truth or falsity.  We all have ideologies, and our best standard of truth it to do the research and put it through a rigorous criterion for quality.  The hope is that any ideological bias won't withstand proper scrutiny.
3. Pressure from departments or organizations can also exist, and is probably most common in the form of "group think" - where an institution or organization attracts/hires people of a particular ideological bent.  This can be avoided through academic tenure, where a researcher does not have to worry about employment repercussions of academic work that is looked down upon in that institution.  The quality of work, however, should not be allowed to be undermined by tenure.  Most academic institutions have publishing requirements, and if work is being accepted by peer review, then the question of quality is being addressed. 
4. Lies might be the most rare form of institutional corruption.  While they have always occurred, the reputation of peer review publications and media outlets depends on a standard of honesty.  Quality news outlets employ editors and fact checkers to provide an extra level of scrutiny.  When falsehoods or discrepancies are discovered, they are investigated and retractions occur, with resultant penalty to the particular researcher or journalist's career (see: Andrew Wakefield, Stephen Glass, etc.).  In addition, journalists and researchers, as part of their investigative mission, compete to find evidence and truth.  A falsified story or study is a prime opportunity for someone else to come along and provide better work that refutes or adds further truth to a subject.

 
While no system is perfect, the scientific method and open journalism are bedrocks of democracy and a properly informed public.  While falsehoods can and do slip through the cracks, there is no better alternative.  While you can dismiss a particular researcher, or sometimes an institution if it shows a clear pattern of continued publishing of incorrect information, the basic system of ethics guidelines and enforcement, peer review, and retractions cannot be thrown out.
 
Unfortunately, as distrust of institutions is epidemic, many people decide (or are exhorted) to "do their own research", which may be the worst possible way of getting at the truth.  Unless you have a particular expertise in a subject, you are unable to properly assess the validity of a scientific or academic paper.  Unless you know the personal details of a story, you are unable to verify if the reporting is incorrect.  For most of us, with most subjects, this means we must rely upon institutional systems to provide for us what is true and what is false.  If we forgo these systems of authority, we are left with a dangerously poor epistemology.  We are then relying on outlier opinions who either have no expertise in the relevant subject material or are presenting perspectives whom the majority of their peers find lacking. 
 
How can we expect ourselves to be better judge of a subject's intricacies than hundreds or even tens of thousands of actual experts who have spent countless hours immersing themselves in the relevant knowledge required to parse what is true from false?  Or we are relying on media institutions who have lower standards for integrity, who do not employ fact-checking procedures or publish retractions.  For the most part, in these scenarios what we are mainly operating from is our own ideological preferences and biases about what makes us feel good because it aligns with our prior assumptions.  In academic institutions this is much less of a problem, as they are far less dependent on income determined by what they publish. However, in media, it is common for an organization to have its income directly related to the type of content it offers.  Ethical guidelines, along with a commitment to fairness and accuracy, as well as a general ideology that places factual reporting above all else, go a long way towards rooting out falsehoods or misrepresentation. However, it is unfortunately the case that many do not follow these standards of objectivity. 
 
Bias is generally most problematic for what it leaves out rather than what it leaves in.  It is very rare for a journalist to outright lie about a source or an event.  However, it is quite common for a story to leave out relevant details or context.  At reputable outlets, this is usually a case not of willful misdirection, but simply the reporter's own biases that lead them to preference some details more than others. 
 
This is a problem that, apart from trying to give what authority we must to the institution (and its reporter's accountability), we have many tools of critical thought at our disposal to deal with.  The first thing we can do is read about a story from multiple outlets, who provide different accounts and angles.  We can also read up on the historical context of an event.  In 2023, we can go even further and access particular experts who post content on social media or blogs.   Though, we must be cautious in this regard, and keep in mind that this is only one source, and the information - while authoritative with respect to the author's credentials and reputation - will not have gone through the more rigorous process required of a published article or study.
 
Finally, we must be self-critical.  We must be aware of our own biases and level of knowledge in a subject.  How much do we know about its history and context?  How much do the findings align with our own beliefs and biases?  If we find ourselves in agreement, is that because it is easier to believe?  Or if we disagree, how much of that is because it is hard to believe?  How aware are we of the different perspectives of the debate around the issue?  Can we provide a good faith account of what the other side might say? 
 
When the internet was in its infancy, I like many others was somewhat drawn to the hope that more information, more sources, fewer gatekeepers would provide a democratizing force in our lives.  We would become more informed citizens.  But after two decades, the internet has taken on an uglier hue.  Misinformation and disinformation have proliferated in many ways.  It has become easier to make any content appear reputable.  Easier access to reporting and information has diluted the ability of smaller, more local news organizations to survive financially.  They have had to lay off reporters or close entirely, meaning an overall decrease in critical information.  Social media and podcasts have celebritized bad actors, many of whose motivations are the age-old confidence grift. 
 
A vicious cycle has arisen in which misinformed or disinformed consumers have increased the demand for more bad actors, often helped along by algorithms that have reinforced their titillated consumption and offered monetization for anyone who can feed their increased appetite.  To be a conscientious, critical information consumer today feels like an almost constant struggle to decipher what is real from what is false.  Previously, most critical information was often dry and required a high response effort to consume, anchored as it was to a more limited number of institutions with real ethical and institutional constraints that "kept them honest".  Consuming the news was like eating your vegetables, while other entertainment options were salty and sweet.  Today's consumer has access to a plethora of options for low-quality, factually challenged "edutainment", which presents itself as containing all the nutritional content of vegetables but in reality, is an appetizing snack with few essential nutrients - or even toxic substances that do damage to one's body of knowledge.   The result is millions of people thinking they are well-informed, but fact have developed worldviews based on corrupted epistemologies.  Their knowledge has not been peer-reviewed, fact-checked, or edited by experts acting in good faith and trying to present the truth.  Instead, it has been delivered by people without expertise, with no process for rigorous quality inspection, on platforms which pay no reputational price for falsehoods as long as it is delivering content that aligns with the priors of the consumers who are paying for its content.

Something called the "Mississippi Miracle" has been recently been promoted as a blueprint for educational reform in the US.  Nikolas Kristoff writes in the NY Times:
.... it’s extraordinary to travel across this state today and find something dazzling: It is lifting education outcomes and soaring in the national rankings. With an all-out effort over the past decade to get all children to read by the end of third grade and by extensive reliance on research and metrics, Mississippi has shown that it is possible to raise standards even in a state ranked dead last in the country in child poverty and hunger and second highest in teen births.

Yet, the "education problem" in the US, to the extent is has one, is entirely about wealth. Educational outcomes cannot be separated from it, as it is wealth that allows a family to provide a child the appropriate academic preparedness, with all that entails in terms of family cohesiveness, time, emotional stability, etc.
Great, one might say, as improving education will allow increased access to wealth by students. But this is exactly backwards, given that our current economy relies upon millions of low-paying jobs that by definition require millions of families to live in poverty.
Educational equality, especially across races, is absolutely necessary. However we won't get there without transforming our economy into one in which all families have enough wealth to provide a stable, loving and supportive home for children.  Pretending we can do otherwise - paying poverty wages, cutting government aid and supports for low-wealth families - is a Neoliberal fantasy rooted in a faulty premise that we can have our cake and eat it too; we can keep taxes and wages low, and with just the right educational policies ensure equal access to opportunity for all.