A perspective from a Christian socialist scientist...
I grew up surrounded by people convinced the Earth was 6500 years old due to their literal interpretation of the ages and genealogies in the Bible. It would be easy to dismiss these people as stupid or ignorant but that doesn't explain my uncle, who holds a PhD in chemistry from Princeton. Something deeper going on.
The short version of this rant is that as we think about rebuilding our democracy, we will need to think hard about how we build democratically managed information infrastructures that allow us to collectively make better decisions. These include elections, news, lobbying, and advertising. If these can't be managed, we can't maintain a democratic republic.
Longer version... I try to think of our behavior as herd behaviors. Talking about a single person's views or actions is like talking about a single cow's or deer. Or that of a single bee in the hive, fish in the school, etc.
How we create, take in, process and understand information is first and foremost a social process. Which is to say, when we're discussing or debating science and its implications with others, we aren't merely talking to a single rational individual as Descartes might have us think, but rather to an individual that is operating with strong evolutionary cognitive abilities shaped primarily by the need to exist in a tribe or group in the context of larger competing informational infrastructures. IMO, we should spend less time trying convince individuals and more time thinking about how to regain some semblance of democratic control over these infrastructures.
In my lifetime, we've seen the destruction of oversight of the media (Reagan and Cllinton's destruction of the Fairness Doctrine), the legitimation of bribery and corruption by the wealthy (Citizen's United), and the rise of radically new communication and sense making tools (the internet, social media, and AI).
The US is not alone with these changes. Globally speaking, there is a move to the right which can't be explained by the idea that too many individual people are ignorant or uneducated. Better to say that the human species is swimming in fish bowl full of toxic informational water. We would be better served to be thinking about how to change the water so that we can flourish together.
I don't have any near-term hope for those of living the core of our decaying empire. IMO, we've let our democratic organizational muscle atrophy. In my religious circles, you often hear about the need to teach people "how to do church", which means things like paying tithes, maintaining the facilities, serving on boards, engaging with denominations/conferences, running Sunday schools and so on. In a similar manner, we've forgotten how to organize and mobilize. Democracy has been hollowed out to mean nothing more than voting and that is an insufficient understanding of it.
I've concluded that the best and only way for us to fight global warming and all of the other horrors facing us is to turn my attention to local organizing. Unionize the work place, establish tenant unions, join a socialist organization. Yes, these things fall short of addressing global warming. But they help get democratic juices flowing again. They begin to open up the imagination needed to evolve our system to the next stage.
Let me be clear. I accept that significant climate change is baked in, that countless millions of humans will be displaced, that metrics for human thriving (hunger, infant mortality rates, life expectancy) will go backwards and that governments will fall and their constitutions rewritten. This is all a part of the bumpy evolutionary path of the human. The question is, what will come next. For the next thing to be just, durable and democratic, we collectively will need to internalize what that looks and feels like.
