Almost exactly two years ago, when I was in Florida helping care for my mom who had terminal cancer, I tweeted a photo of myself wearing a Stand Up for Science T-shirt. Cape Coral, Florida is antivax central, ground zero of the know-nothing Ron Desantist anti-intellectual craze, so I made a point of wearing that shirt around town.

Three days ago, that two-year-old tweet went viral, which was weird. Retweeted and commented on all over the place. So, curious, I took a look, and apparently it got picked up by the antivax/moon landing deniar/flat earth crowd. Here’s but one of the threads of retweets and comments, posted by a person who’s a moon landing denier, antivaxxer, and Reptilian conspiracy nutter:

The US has a long history of weird anti-intellectualism, going all the way back to the vicious streak of religious Puritanism that runs through American society. We’re so used to it we don’t even see it, but my European friends who visit are always a little shocked by how deep know-nothing, Fundamentalist Protestantism runs in US culture.

Evangelical religion is inherently incompatible with science. A lot, a lot of Americans truly, sincerely believe that the world is 6,000 years old, all the animals were made exactly as they are now, and people and dinosaurs once lived side by side. This is not in the least bit unusual in US society.

This has led to an ongoing, generations-long war against science education in the United States. The Scopes monkey trials are just the tip of the iceberg.

In the last 40 years, that war on education has been joined by American populist political conservatives, who see value in an uneducated population. It used to be that American conservatives, all the way up through Ronald Reagan, were 100% behind cold-eyed, factual science education; this fit with their idea that the US should lead the world in science and technology, because you can’t do that without an educated population.

It took a liberal in the form of JFK to promise to get us to the moon, but the engineers and rocket scientists who made it happen were overwhelmingly conservatives. Not in the current “populist know-nothing party” sense of conservatives, but old-school, pre-Reagan conservatives.

Nowadays, what passes for a “conservative party” in the US is isolationist populists. They want to withdraw from the world stage, so American technical and scientific leadership doesn’t matter to them. They openly embrace the most extreme Evangelical Christians, the Prosperity Gospel, Christian Dominionist movement that seeks to create a theocracy to replace the US government. Their goals are aligned: Education has got to go.

That’s created a huge backlash against science education. Educated people are “elitist.” Universities are “liberal indoctrination centers.”

This isn’t new, of course. What’s new is the alliance between political conservatives and the Evangelical right on opposition to science and knowledge, an unholy union where each of the two sides sincerely believes it is using the other for opportunistic gain.

It exists at least in part because we live in a time of prosperity and unprecedented safety. Very few people alive today remember a time when children weren’t expected to live to be adults, even though that was a frighteningly short time ago.

One of the people in my polycule, who wishes to remain nameless, rather brilliantly calls conspiracy thinking “idiot mantras for dopamine mining” and puts it like this:

It’s literally: Step 1: Confusion about actual science Step 2: read/hear confident idiot talk about how everyone is wrong except you, because you are listening to him so you must be smart Step 3: think “I don’t want to believe I’m stupid so I’ll believe stupid things to feel smart” Step 4: I are smart! I’ll just repeat the same things over and over like some sort of argument cheat code, and anyone who disagrees must be stupid, so I will ignore them”

This enshrinement of the idiocracy, this reflexive anti-intellectualism that has its roots deep in the fertile soil of the American ideals of exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism™, is fundamentally at odds with a post-industrial society in an interconnected economy.

As we turn away from learning and knowledge, craving the certainty of the Age of Superstition, we cede our role in the world. But not to worry, someone else will take over. I’m guessing China.