The Unbearable Lightness of Politics: Climate Change Denial and Political Polarization

¹ These concepts parallel what McCright and Dunlap call “conservative” and “liberal.”

² CitationKevin Phillips (2002:293–316, 340–43) has stressed that Democrats have converged strongly with Republican market liberalism in “Capitalist Heyday” periods (i.e., the Gilded Age, Roaring Twenties, and the “Great Bull Market” of the 1980s and 1990s).

³ Neoliberal globalization, financialization, deregulation, and privatization spurred unparalleled growth of the stock market, boosted corporate profits, and enriched big investors (CitationHarvey 2005).

⁴ Neoliberals' jeremiads about “big government” threats to free enterprise are contradicted by their widespread, often-successful efforts to secure state support for shifts of public goods to private ownership or usage, “public–private partnerships” that subsidize big business, public bailouts for finance capital, and other policies that serve corporate and rich investor interests.

⁵ Between April 2008 and October 2009, Republicans identifying as moderate or liberal showed the sharpest drop in belief in warming evidence (−28 percent), and Independents also shifted similarly (−22 percent) (CitationPew Center 2009). Moreover, 30 percent more American liberals than conservatives surveyed consider warming a “very serious problem,” a substantially sharper divide than the parallel left–right splits than in the European countries surveyed (CitationPew Center 2010a).

⁶ Someone hacked into computers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, and leaked thousands of e-mails and documents. Conservative activists charged that they revealed efforts to manipulate data and block contrary findings. Investigations, in the United Kingdom, cleared the scientists of misconduct charges, but have not stemmed conservative talk of malfeasance.

⁷ In another recent essay, CitationMcCright and Dunlap (2010) focus in more detail on antireflexive countermovement strategies aimed to thwart climate science findings.

⁸ Dewey's conception of science as “inquiry” attacked technocratic ideas and stressed emphatically “uncertainty” and uncoerced, open conversation.

⁹ CitationLarry M. Bartels's (2008) Unequal Democracy demonstrated partisan splits over sharply increased economic inequality and plutocratic tendencies, which he described as a “New Gilded Age.” In roll call votes, he found the split between parties was greater on class-related legislation than on cultural issues. He also showed that Republicans have been much more receptive to high-income voters, but neither party has been receptive to the lower third of the income scale. He found that well-informed conservatives were more likely to deny the increased inequality and to deny that it would be a bad thing. Bartels found that divergence in empirical and normative beliefs about inequality was sharpest among well-informed conservatives and well-informed liberals and that poorly informed members of both groups converged (CitationBartels 2008:155–61, 263–82). For related material, see CitationNoah (2010).