Nothing strikes as much fear through the establishment’s fact-checkers and hate-vanquishers as the rise of ‘populism’. Democratic backlashes against dominant ideologies and policy agendas are the natural and inevitable reaction to the intransigence of those who advance them. These reactions, which look likely to sweep many populist parties to power in elections this year, are seen by incumbents as the re-emergence of ‘dark historical forces’, but our leaders have no other words for the challenges to their authority than ‘far-Right’. The reason they cannot grasp what’s really going on – indeed, one of the causes of their unpopularity – is that they’ve placed too much faith in what has turned out to be really bad science.
According to the narrative of anointed pundits, tractors on their way to Europe’s capital cities and the EU Parliament are like so many Nazi tanks rolling across the continent. The EU Parliamentary election is at risk of a ‘far-Right takeover’ as polling shows voters beginning to reject the liberal consensus. This paranoid fantasy is not wholly without a basis in fact – the benighted really are changing the political landscape. Following Giorgia Meloni’s 2022 victory in Italy, Geert Wilders’s PVV became the largest party in the Netherlands last year but has been unable to form a Government. Since 2020, AfD has doubled its polling to around 20%, pushing Germany’s SPD and Greens into third and fourth places. The German Government is now contemplating banning the party, so bereft of ideas is it about how to counter its criticisms in the public square. France’s longstanding spectre haunting global blobists, Marine Le Pen’s party, would, according to recent polling, win a majority of seats in the National Assembly if an election were held tomorrow.
According to the establishment view, science is at loggerheads with the populism now sweeping across Europe. But to pit science against ideology in this way is false. Science has been used to legitimise numerous contemporary political agendas, invoked in the same way that God used to be to legitimise a particular political platform. Most notably, ‘climate science’, which is invoked by increasingly remote elites struggling to overcome yawning democratic deficits claim that ‘saving the planet’ is in the best interests of their electorates. Yet, to those being forced to pay the price for these economically ruinous policies, it’s obvious that the Net Zero agenda is, at root, an ideological crusade designed to advance the interests of wealthy elites. And many are now wondering if the ‘climate change’ we’re constantly being warned about will be as devastating as the policies designed to mitigate its effect, which seem to require the suspension of democracy, the transformation of society and the draconian regulation of lifestyles insofar as they require energy.
As politicians and others have met resistance to their agendas based on ‘unimpeachable science’, they have sought an explanation. The answer they found is epitomised by a 2011 article by liberal science warrior Chris Mooney, who helpfully set out ‘The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science’. Neuroscientists and social psychologists, explained Mooney, had identified differences in the structure of brains owned by liberals and conservatives, which made the latter more prone to ‘motivated reasoning’ and therefore to ideology, whereas liberals were biased only towards truth. This explained why Republicans were more sceptical of climate change then their Democrat counterparts who obediently recognised the authority of ‘the scientific consensus’. Mooney’s essay, which followed his 2005 book, The Republican War on Science, was itself worked into a book in 2012, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality.
Mooney’s work, born in the pre-Obama era of ‘muscular atheism’ and a regrouping of Left-of-centre ideas around scientism, though largely inconsequential, marked the completion of cognitive and behavioural scientists’ entry into the political sphere. Only somebody with insufficiently developed neural circuits – a.k.a. Republicans – could disagree with climate propaganda, or they were funded by Big Oil, or both. It didn’t really matter, because Science had spoken.
But Mooney’s confidence was misplaced. Whereas the scientific consensus on climate change had been broadly (and falsely) reported as being as indubitable as ‘basic physics’, the new lab-coated recruits of this political, and increasingly cultural war, could not claim anything so tangible. First, studies confirmed that academic psychology was experiencing a ‘replication crisis’ – barely a third of published science in the field could be reproduced experimentally. Second, psychological science was revealed to be dominated by Left-wing scientists, with measurable impacts on peer-review. Conservative scientists were less likely to be published. A soft science – and perhaps the softest science – was now being used to supposedly explain why more people didn’t believe in hard science, although, to complicate things, the hard science wasn’t that hard after all.
In Britain, where politics was less polarised under a suffocating Blairism, this naked scientism had a much easier ride into the establishment. A consensus on climate change – and pretty much everything else – had formed in Westminster, excluding any inconvenient influences from politics. In a 2010 report, jointly produced by the Cabinet Office and the Institute for Government, Cabinet Secretary, then Sir, now Lord Gus O’Donnell, who had commissioned it, wrote in the foreword:
Many of the biggest policy challenges we are now facing… will only be resolved if we are successful in persuading people to change their behaviour, their lifestyles or their existing habits.
The report, citing “major advances in understanding the influences on our behaviours” argued that “influencing behaviour is central to public policy”, and that in tackling “crime, obesity or environmental sustainability, behavioural approaches offer a potentially powerful new set of tools”.
But there had been no development in the behavioural sciences – they remained mired in the depths of the replication crises and obvious ideological bias. The only change that occurred was a dim view of individuals’ competences had developed and become fashionable within policy circles, displacing a view that had hitherto constrained technocratic paternalism. Barely a year following its publication, Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness had become the British Establishment’s operating manual. The Nudge Unit, properly known as the Behavioural Insights Team, was born.
After all, something had been lacking in public life since before even Blair’s triumphant arrival at Downing Street and politicians struggled to put their finger on it. In the early days of New Labour, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott declared that the state’s performance would now be measured by a ‘quality of life barometer’. Even the amount of birdsong – a metric of ecological sustainability and subjective wellbeing – would be measured. Sadly for Prescott, the plans for happiness were shelved in favour of a ‘War on Terror’, and so it was a touchy-feely David ‘hug-a-husky’ Cameron who finally seized the therapeutic initiative. He had convened a Quality of Life policy group in 2007 to investigate the policies required to make us adjust our behaviour to make life better for everyone, e.g. use less fossil fuels. And having taken office in 2010, the nudgers were the very group to help him make the ‘difficult’ choices required to save the planet.
The coalition ‘greenest Government ever’ brought together the two opposition parties that had convinced themselves they were planet savers. But the strongest constituency in Britain (ever) had a very different idea about what was lacking in politics. Worse, the Leave vote having won, no less an earthquake in the form of Donald Trump sent a second panic through the anointed classes. How could the nudgers, either side of the Atlantic, have got it so wrong? In the wake of these catastrophes, psychologists set to work developing new hypotheses to explain the public’s lack of gratitude.
Then, the most curious intervention from psychologists in the years between the Referendum and the Covid pandemic came from the green quarters. In 2018, an obscure 2016 paper by clinical psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon came to the attention of climate protesters. The paper called for the creation of a “climate emergency movement”, which would “lead the public into emergency mode”. This “mode is the mode of human psychological functioning that occurs when individuals or groups respond optimally to existential or moral emergencies”, claimed the psychologist. Thus, having had the ‘truth’ of the ‘climate emergency’ explained to them, the public would rise up and force governments to act to save the planet. Klein-Salamon’s hypothesis spawned Extinction Rebellion and its franchises, and Greta Thunberg’s Schools Strike movement. But the public, in their millions, stayed at home. Rather than rising up, they became impatient with the failure to clear the mere dozens of protesters from the streets.
A more successful intervention by social psychologists was the infamous survey which claimed that 97% of academic papers on climate change supported the consensus position. Cook et al.’s 2013 study was routinely cited by Obama as representing the “overwhelming judgement of science”. It’s authors believed, like Klein-Salamon, that the public would be more receptive to the ‘climate emergency’ scaremongering if they knew it had the backing of most climate scientists – a contentious hypothesis of science communication known as the Gateway Belief Model. “An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy,” explains the paper’s introduction. The paper was not accurate, but it created an article of faith around which its adherents could organise their arguments. It was political communication, not science communication.
But how effective has this psychological ‘science’ been?
Across the Atlantic, polls suggest that voters will return Donald Trump to the Whitehouse and terminate Justin Trudeau’s hyper-woke regime. Further to the south, the chainsaw-wielding libertarian Javier Milei won 56% of the popular vote in last year’s presidential election in Argentina. One in three Europeans now vote for anti-establishment parties, bleats the Guardian. Its sister paper nervously awaits the results of 40 elections around the planet that threaten to undermine the global order and all life on Earth. The Guardian, again, uncritically reported the words of John Kerry: “The populist backlash against Net Zero around the world is imperilling the fight against climate breakdown and must be countered urgently or we face planetary destruction ‘beyond comprehension’.”
It’s beginning to look like the advice of behavioural ‘scientists’ about how to engage the public on Net Zero and other policies is a bit duff. Big promises are made by these academics about their ability to influence the public. But what are they really capable of achieving?
Extremely limited evidence underpins behavioural scientists’ claims. The classic example of ‘nudge’, for example, is the discovery that the image of a fly painted onto a urinal helps men to take better aim, thereby leaving conveniences in better condition. Away from the toilet, psychologists discoveries are difficult to quantify in wider society. Some psychologists, observe their critics, have used exotic and inappropriate statistical methods to report greater effects than can realistically be detected and expressed in conventional terms. Even in the lab, an attempt to quantify the Gateway Belief Model found that consensus messaging yielded just a +1.7% change in support for climate policies. This result was later disputed by other researchers in the field, who conversely found ‘reactance’ in studies of consensus messaging – an awareness of being manipulated, which increased rather than overcame polarisation.
It is a peculiar debate between academics on the green-Left about how best to manipulate climate-sceptic conservatives, rather than have it out with their enemy in the democratic open. And this cod-science’s hostility to democracy and the hoi polloi, which is conceived of as an unthinking, malleable mass, is reproduced in countless governments’ policies and communications. Perhaps then, they have not merely failed to manufacture consent but have actually helped to turn electorates against their would-be masters.
It would be too much to say that the global ‘populist backlash’ is wholly caused by green blob head-shrinking. But behaviourists’ work seems more intended to legitimise intransigence and to justify draconian policy to politicians than to win over the public, whose reaction to it does not require a PhD to understand. Many millions are poured by governments into research which hasn’t merely produced some ‘reactance’ but ultimately looks set to be near-terminal for the green cause, if progressive governments and politicians suffer the catastrophic defeats at the ballot box that many predict. If the intention was to win over the public, then the psychologists are even more out of touch than their clients. Academic psychology epitomises, rather than rescues, elite intransigence.
People can be hectored and punished into lockdowns and forced by high prices to reduce their energy usage, and democracy can be slowly eroded. But academic psychologists have been unable to turn insight about men peeing on flies into preventing a pissed off public reciprocating official sentiments.
When presented with actual choice, rather than one dictated by ‘choice architects’, the public do not choose either heat pumps or EVs, nor green technocratic globalists. Britain, for the moment, looks set to buck the trend sweeping the rest of the planet. But that’s partly because successive Conservative governments have placed far too much faith in propaganda informed by behavioural science, just like their progressive counterparts abroad. There’s a lesson here for Keir Starmer – but you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll ignore it.
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“Neuroscientists and social psychologists, explained Mooney, had identified differences in the structure of brains owned by liberals and conservatives, which made the latter more likely to apply critical thinking, whereas liberals were more gullible and easily brainwashed.”
That’s more like it.
It’s the kind of reasoning that leads to those phrenology heads.
(Mooney certainly needs his head looking at.)
What a great article – I hope Ben Pile is right.
A wise comparison; phrenology was in vogue for a couple of centuries. At least modern neurology has ripped it up.
Well, sort-of. Politically left “neuroscientists” have measured something they really don’t understand and came up with some wild political theory to explain it.
I’ve had some mushrooms for breaktfast a short while ago. To prepare them, I pealed them, heated them in oil until I could hear them starting to sizzle, added salt and a fairly small quantity of water and then let them simmer for a little over 15 minutes. Nobody on this planet has the slightest idea of the chemical reactions which occurred in this pot and ultimatively transformed the raw mushrooms into something edible and fairly delicious (for my understanding of that) and the chemistry of the human body is way more complicated than that.
Try adding a splash of Worcester sauce. Yum yum.
Thanks for the tip.
It is wrong in principle for the elites to use tax payer funds or access to state resources of any kind to seek to manipulate the public. It should be called out for what it is: propaganda.
Trying to manufacture popular approval of certain policies with psychological tricks is obviously antidemocratic. That “Dave me call” made the attempt exposes him as the morally completely rotten person he is. Same goes for the bumbling blurter who’s – according to a newpaper headline I read in passing – now again campaigning for Brexit freedoms. I hope I won’t have to live in Completely Free Boristain™ ever again. I know how his freedom looks like and I hope the general public hasn’t already forgotten about this, either.
Coercive collectivists will use any and all means at their disposal to impose collectivism on the public. Their weapons of psychological manipulation are not particularly successful because most people are sceptical of jumped-up little Hitlers. That they keep failing will not deter them from trying but will reinforce the view that they need to be even more coercive. Most of what they do fails but the solution is always to do more of the same.
Why do people keep referring to illiberal, coercive collectivists as liberals or progressives when they destroy liberty and retard progress at every opportunity?
Well, “Why is intentionally crippling someone’s body beyond any hope of recovery called affirming care?”
Answer: Because The Science™ states that anything can be sold to the public when using the right labels.
Their weapons of psychological manipulation aren’t successful because they’re going about it entirely the wrong way …. top down authoritarianism, reinforced with threats, penalties, fines and general coercion. And then there’s the “Do as i say, not as I do” example which just infuriates people.
The book The Amazing Power of Positive Reinforcement explains that to get people to change their behaviour they have to be made aware of the behavioural change required and the penalty for transgressing. However, they fail because the desired change has to be within the power of the individual to comply. People who can’t comply won’t even try and will become very resentful at “being asked to do the impossible.” People who can’t afford the Net Zero nonsense (EVs, heat pumps, etc) will dig in and oppose it because they can’t comply with what, to them, is an unreasonable demand.
For the desired change in behaviour to work there has to be both a positive and negative strategy in place, which rewards the desired behaviour and punishes the unwanted. Crucially, the emphasis must be on the positive side: continual rewarding of good behaviour. The overwhelming balance to influence a change in behaviour, should be approval/reward.
They do the complete opposite: bullying; coercing; punishing; fines; taxes; threats; bans etc.
And, with the EV and heat pump fiasco, they’re attempting to sell us a crock of sh1t as well.
Doomed to fail.
Wow. I’m positively impressed by this ‘science’ of To make people do your bidding, hurt those who don’t and reward those who do. That’s how governing people has worked for thousands of years.
At one time the Inquisition came down hard on “science” which back in the 14 and 1500’s was the “populism”. It was a new way of looking at things. Science was a genuine search for truth about the world. But this was a threat to the authority of religion. This new “science” was threatening to expose religion as just a jumble of faith and emotion which was imposed on people and if they refused to accept this truth they were accused of being heretical sinners. ———-Wind forward to the present day and “science” is now the authority that people must accept and if they don’t they are now the sinners. But it is not the science that we have come to know through people like Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Faraday, Curie, Einstein etc . It is the Post Modern kind. It is now consensus science or “official science”, where government and their scientists form a symbiotic relationship to simply declare truth. In the past we followed the Lord, now we “follow the science”. We now have the secular religion of environmentalism and climate change and we must all repent. But as with all religions it is based on faith and emotion rather than fact and reason. But now as in the past people don’t want to simply believe things, they want to know them, and if the facts don’t add up as is the case with climate change dogma then people will revolt against it and that is exactly what they are doing. ——-But there is a very long way to go to overthrow this this scientific dictatorship.
Anthony Fauci:’I am the Science!’
No. It should read:’I am the Nay,the Coof and the Blight.’
I have tended to agree with”nudges” in the past when it is based on real information, such as when the UK “nudge unit” was setup and initiated the auto-enrolment into pensions.
There are also instances where nudging or pushing us towards an outcome is also for our / the greater good, viz; smoking restrictions, seat belts, drink/driving campaigns.
However, we are now nudged (or should I say pushed) towards a particular way of thinking and acting, (Covid lockdowns, masks, vaccines), Climate Change / Net Zero. When anyone challenges the Liberal “science” they are pilloried, shouted down, and/or hounded out their jobs. The proverbial man in the pub sees this, and his only recourse really is to vote with his feet.
The Reform Party may not be the right answer, but the argument that a vote for them is wasted is about to be challenged, as they will likely soon overtake the Conservatives, which will put the Cons in the Libdem /Monster Raving Looney camp of wasted votes. In my opinion this will swing many “anyone but Labour” voters their way.
I’n not sure what this will do to the seat count, but it should be seismic for the Cons, as life under Labour will be!
In all things Green though first comes the nudge, then comes the push.
It may prove that many traditional Labour voters who voted for Brexit will vote for Reform.