America's epistemological crisis (reprise)

Polarization, populism, and perspective

Friends,

Next week, I’m publishing a detailed response to the popular argument that focusing on polarization and its pathologies functions as a dangerous kind of both-sidesism that “normalizes” and, hence, enables fascism. I’m on holiday this week, so I’m re-publishing my analysis of American polarization from last year, drawing on the work of one of my favourite philosophers, Jeffrey Friedman:

“Science has been corrupted. We know the media has been corrupted for a long time. Academia has been corrupted. None of what they do is real. It’s all lies!… We really live, folks, in two worlds.… We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap.” - Rush Limbaugh, 2009.

“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” - Barack Obama, 2020

An epistemological crisis

Both political tribes in the USA believe the country is confronting an epistemological crisis. More specifically, they think the other tribe has lost its mind.

The blue tribe observes a Republican Party and conservative media ecosystem poisoned by disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, populism, and post-truth. In their optimistic moments, they aim to address this crisis through various technocratic measures. By censoring, moderating, nudging, fact-checking, and inoculating a public infected with falsehoods and lies, they hope to drag America back to a golden age of objectivity in which people agreed on facts, even when they disagreed on values. In their more pessimistic moments, they treat the red tribe as a dangerous cult, an inexplicably psychotic force in American politics that can, at best, be kept away from power.

The red tribe observes a very different reality: a coalition of smug liberal elites, biased mainstream media outlets, and weak sheeple—so-called “NPCs” (non-player characters)—all infected by wokeism, virtue signalling, and left-wing activism masquerading as “expertise” and “science”. In their optimistic moments, they hope the crisis can be solved by exposing progressive insanity and handing out red pills to converts like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan with the courage to face reality. In their more pessimistic moments, they treat the blue tribe as a sinister fifth column in American society, so deeply embedded in cultural and political institutions that only a radical overhaul of these systems could restore the country to its previous greatness.

Of course, this description is painted with broad brush strokes. Most citizens are not nearly as ideologically polarized as it suggests, and it ignores much complexity, including the existence of other political tribes.

Nevertheless, anyone who pays attention to American politics and its broader culture war will recognize some truth in this stick-figure depiction. Many liberals and conservatives seem to inhabit distinct realities. And within these realities, they have constructed narratives to explain why their ideological enemies are afflicted with ignorance, lies, and delusion.

Understanding the epistemological crisis

Is it possible to step back from this tribal conflict and achieve an objective view of this situation? Although many researchers and pundits have tried, most analyses are highly partisan, affirming and rationalizing one side’s favoured narrative.

In this essay, I will explore a highly original attempt that cannot be accused of this: Jeffrey Friedman’s article, ‘Post-Truth and the Epistemological Crisis’. Friedman’s analysis is as interesting as it is radical. Although I think it is ultimately mistaken, it contains several insights that deserve a bigger audience.

Background

Shortly before Friedman’s tragic death in 2022, he published his magnum opus, ‘Power without Knowledge’. Developing ideas from the early-twentieth century journalist and social theorist Walter Lippmann, the book launches a skeptical challenge to the idea that complex, modern societies can be understood and managed, either by ordinary citizens or credentialed experts.

Three general ideas from Power without Knowledge provide the background for Friedman’s analysis of American’s epistemological crisis.

Naive realism

First, Friedman rejects “naive realism”, the stance that,

“I see entities and events as they are in objective reality… My social attitudes, beliefs, preferences, priorities, and the like follow from a relatively dispassionate, unbiased, and essentially “unmediated” apprehension of the information or evidence at hand.”

Against this, Friedman argues that a person’s access to reality is profoundly mediated.

It is socially mediated because in forming beliefs about reality beyond our immediate environment, we rely almost entirely on information we acquire from others—from community members, teachers, journalists, politicians, pop stars, priests, experts, pundits, academics, media outlets, and so on. For this reason, our lived realities—what Walter Lippmann called our “pseudo-environments”, our mental models of reality—are powerfully shaped by the social information we encounter and the people and institutions we trust.

Our access to reality is interpretively mediated because facts never arrive pre-interpreted or explained. (This is the grain of truth in Nietzsche’s claim that “there are no facts, only interpretations”). To make sense of a vast body of information, we must organise it with what Lippmann called “stereotypes”, simplifying systems of concepts, explanatory frameworks, and narratives that transform reality into a manageable, low-resolution format we can use to understand and explain events. For this reason, people can and do encounter the same facts but interpret them very differently.

Bias

Second, because this mediated access to reality is not just vulnerable to partiality and error but is highly path-dependent—the information we encounter, trust, and interpret depends on the previous information we encountered, trusted, and interpreted—there is an unavoidable sense in which everyone is biased:

“A truly sophisticated epistemology has to recognize that the mix of truths and errors in which each of us believes forms an interconnected web that, as it grows in breadth and depth over a lifetime, comes to function increasingly like an ideology in the neutral sense of the term: a self-perpetuating worldview. The self-perpetuation stems from the fact that we continually screen candidates for entry into each of our webs of belief, and the primary screening criterion is whether the candidates seem plausible in light of what we already believe. Those candidates that do not seem plausible, or even legible, are rejected or ignored.”

For Friedman, this implies that

“everyone is biased, and the only question to be asked of social scientists, journalists, or other political actors in a given time and place is precisely which biases are at work—not whether any biases are at work.

Intellectual charity

Finally, Friedman thinks the radical fallibilism implied by these first two ideas should lead us to approach people’s beliefs with intellectual charity.

Once we appreciate that reality does not sharply constrain how even rational and well-meaning people come to view and understand the world, we should strive to understand people’s worldviews in ways that do justice to their perspective. That is, rather than dismissing those we disagree with as liars or as victims of self-deception, irrationality, or brainwashing, we should try to empathetically “put ourselves into the streams of information and interpretation that shape their webs of belief”. We should identify the genuine reasons that drive sincere, rational individuals to construct specific pseudo-environments.

The analysis

Against this background, Friedman argues that America’s “epistemological crisis stems from the widespread adoption of naive first- and third-person realism”.

Recall that naive realists interpret their beliefs as simple reflections of self-evident truths. Given this, they assume that anyone who rejects these self-evident truths is, at best, delusional and, at worst, deliberately ignoring or misrepresenting the truth.

Nevertheless, naive realism comes in different forms depending on which “truths” are considered self-evident.

According to Friedman,

“Those on the right tend to be first-person naive realists in treating economic and social realities as accessible to the ordinary political participant by simple common sense, while those on the left tend to be third-person naive realists in treating credentialed experts as forming a consensus—a new common sense.”

This is a jargon-heavy way of expressing a familiar truth.

It has long been observed that conservatives value “common sense”, a kind of pre-theoretic body of assumptions, intuitions, and convictions about politics and society that strike many Americans as obvious. And it is a familiar feature of right-wing populism that it rejects attempts by those with fancy degrees from prestigious institutions to overturn this common sense. For such populists—for first-person naive realists—such “experts” in what Rush Limbaugh called “the four corners of deceit” (government, academia, science, and media) wilfully ignore commonsense truths in the service of sinister left-wing agendas.

Similarly, it is hardly news that modern liberals view themselves as the party of science and experts. This is reflected in popular liberal slogans (“I believe in science”, “Follow the science”, “Trust the experts”, etc.), in the willingness of elite scientific and academic institutions to align themselves with liberal politics, and in many liberals’ eager embrace of highly counterintuitive ideas originating within universities—for example, concerning omnipresent but invisible (i.e., implicit and systemic) forms of oppression, or the fluidity and self-construction of gender. Perhaps most tellingly, it is reflected in the blue tribe’s popular “post-truth” analysis that rejecting the authority of credentialed experts amounts to rejecting truth itself.

Post-truth

Before turning to Friedman’s account of the history leading to America’s epistemological crisis, it is helpful to consider this “post-truth” analysis favoured by many experts within the blue tribe first.

Although this analysis comes in different forms, the core idea is that before Trump and his precursors (e.g., the Tea Party) took over the Republican Party and ushered in the “post-truth era”, America inhabited a golden age of objectivity, the truth era.

Of course, there was some disagreement within the truth era, and occasional epistemic fuck-ups, such as invading countries based on false information and blowing up the world economy based on false economic theories. Nevertheless, according to the post-truth analysis, this occurred against a background of substantial consensus, deference to experts, and respect for truth. Influential people did not brazenly lie about crowd sizes, suggest Satanic paedophiles run the government, or fabricate an epidemic of pet-eating immigrants.

Post-truth scholars typically trace the beginning of the decline of this golden age to the propagandistic activities of tobacco companies and fossil fuel companies. These companies purposefully sought to create doubt about expert consensus on the harms of smoking and the reality of climate change, which they achieved primarily by influencing the right-wing media ecosystem that emerged in the late twentieth century (especially Fox News). This then paved the way for a more general right-wing attack on science, experts, and truth itself.

As Lee McIntyre puts it in On Disinformation, a representative treatment of this topic favourably reviewed by almost every prestigious liberal outlet,

“One imagines some ambitious, orange-haired politician making the cynical leap of inference from cigarettes and global warming to other fact-based beliefs: “Why, if they can get away with lying about that, I can lie about anything at all.” And he did.”

Friedman’s alternative history

Friedman tells a different story.

Although there was a kind of “golden age” in American politics, it was not a golden age of truth or objectivity but rather a golden age of political consensus: the post-New Deal consensus. According to Friedman, this was overwhelmingly a consensus of establishment liberals, indicated by the political dominance of the Democratic Party throughout this time, the popularity of liberals even within the GOP, and the hegemony of establishment liberalism within leading cultural institutions, including academia, media, and the arts.

Of course, this liberal dominance was not absolute. For example, the Republicans occasionally elected a president due to the personal charisma of their nominees or events that undermined the popularity of Democratic candidates. Moreover, there was some dissent from establishment liberal ideas within elite political culture, such as William F. Buckley’s National Review and, later, towards the end of the golden age, the Chicago School’s mainstreaming of right-wing libertarianism, primarily through the efforts of Milton Friedman.

Nevertheless, the several decades of the middle-twentieth century were overwhelmingly a period of establishment liberal hegemony. It is this period of “epistemological complacency”, writes Friedman, “that the post-truth discourse mourns, for post-truth scholars mistake agreement—agreement among experts, and agreement with experts by nonexperts—as a sign of truth.”

Of course, this “golden age” eventually broke down. To understand this process, Friedman highlights the trajectory of two segments of American society that were marginalized and excluded by the liberal establishment consensus.

The emergence of the right

Friedman dates the “beginning of the end of the Golden Age” to 1987 when the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required those with broadcast licenses to present political controversies in a fair and balanced way.

This paved the way for the emergence of a thriving right-wing media ecosystem that catered to a large segment of American society excluded from the establishment liberal consensus. This included highly influential talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, who—as an article in the Wall Street Journal puts it—”was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination.” Of course, it later included Fox News, which launched in 1996.

One aspect of this right-wing media ecosystem involved the positive affirmation, celebration, and justification of commonsense attachments to faith, flag, and free markets. However, an equally important aspect was an obsession with liberal bias in mainstream media and other cultural institutions, such as academia and Hollywood. (Fox’s original slogan was “Fair and Balanced”, an explicit rebuke to mainstream liberal media, which was depicted as unfair and unbalanced).

According to Friedman, the attachment to naive first-person realism led conservatives to interpret mainstream liberal bias as sinister. Because "commonsense” beliefs are self-evidently true, the establishment was not just mistaken but deliberately biased:

“The media and other elites who got reality wrong, according to the populist conservatives, did so knowingly, as these elites, like everyone else, had access to the self-evident truths that they claimed to reject. The charge of media bias, then, led to the conclusion that liberal elites were engaged in a conspiracy against the truth in the service of self-serving political ends.”

Once the growing influence of the conservative media ecosystem became apparent to establishment liberals, they reacted similarly.

Especially given the prominence of climate change scepticism within this new media ecosystem, such liberals, as third-person naive realists, assumed conservatives must be aware of the self-evident truth of climate science. Given this, they treated the rejection of climate science as a kind of mass deception and denial.

The integration of the radical left

An equally important part of this history focuses on another segment of American society marginalised by the post-New Deal consensus: the radical left. As a fundamentally establishment consensus, the “golden age” was just as hostile to anti-establishment, left-wing radicals as to right-wing populists. Such radicals viewed the liberal establishment not as a bastion of truth and objectivity but as a propagandistic tool of capitalism, American imperialism, and—especially according to radicals near the end of the “golden age”—white supremacist, patriarchal, and heteronormative hegemony.

Nevertheless, left-wing radicals went on a very different journey to right-wing populists. Instead of setting up their own institutions and alternative epistemic universe, they gradually integrated into establishment institutions. (Friedman traces the beginnings of this “long march” of left-wing radicals through institutions to a vast number of job openings in American universities in the late 1950s, which enabled left-wing radicals to enter the academy in large numbers).

Of course, the relationship between establishment liberals and left-wing radicals has not always been a happy marriage. However, Friedman suggests that the cumulative effect of this process has been a transformation of establishment liberal institutions. Popular forms of progressive radicalism have moderated as they sought to transform these institutions, and these institutions have become more explicitly aligned with left-wing, progressive politics. (For an illustration of this dynamic, check out Scientific American’s explicit endorsement of Kamala Harris for president).

This process has dramatically exacerbated the mutual alienation and hostility felt between America’s two tribes:

“The resulting identification of academic expertise with an activist left-wing orthodoxy, which is now officially proclaimed on university websites, in college admissions materials, and in first-year orientation programming, only serves to confirm, on the right, the suspicion that “expertise” is an ideological sham.”

Of course, the blue tribe—the party of science and experts—does not view things this way. As naive realists themselves, they view the connection between expertise and progressive politics as an objective response to the self-evident fact that conservatives have abandoned truth.

Trump, Floyd, and the Acceleration of Epistemic Polarization

Friedman’s story ends with two events: the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the killing of George Floyd.

“Trump and his supporters were accused of racism as soon as he announced his candidacy. Therefore, his election, coupled with the specter of widespread police violence against black men, solidified the conviction, on the left and in the mainstream, that little or no racial progress had been made since the Civil Rights movement. After Floyd’s death, this conviction led to a veritable anti-racist revolution that swept every major cultural institution, from universities to art museums and children’s book publishing.”

According to Friedman, Trump voters have not just felt insulted by these pervasive accusations of racism and the new ways of conceptualising and understanding racism within establishment institutions. They have also felt baffled. Among those for whom “common sense” includes the beliefs that they are colorblind, that racial progress has been substantial, and that “reverse racism” is just as bad as anti-black racism, the explicit repudiation of these ideas among the establishment looks insane.

Evaluating the analysis

Is Friedman’s analysis correct?

Clearly, any general story like this can, at best, amount to a simplified, coarse-grained depiction of far more complex events and processes. Given this, rather than focusing too much on the specifics of Friedman’s historical account, I will identify some weaknesses in his general approach.

This approach is rooted in a fundamental methodological assumption: we should treat people’s beliefs on their own terms when attempting to analyse politics. That is, rather than trying to debunk or deconstruct beliefs by tracing them to underlying social, political, economic, material, or psychological causes, we should treat people’s worldviews seriously and sympathetically as an independent explanatory domain. This is why Friedman speculates that America’s “present political crisis is nothing but an epistemological crisis.”

In this sense, Friedman’s analysis involves a fairly extreme “idealist” approach to the role of ideas in society. Roughly, idealists treat ideas as an autonomous realm that explains human behaviours and social organisation, in contrast to so-called “materialist” approaches that explain ideas in terms of underlying, more fundamental factors. (Marx’s claim that ideas are merely parts of a society’s “superstructure” determined by its economic “base” makes him the archetypal materialist in this sense.) Of course, these are two ends of a continuum rather than a simple dichotomy.

When combined with his radical skepticism and excessive intellectual charity, Friedman’s idealism produces various weaknesses in his account.

Against idealism

First, although Friedman insightfully describes some real trends in American belief systems, ideas do not come from nowhere. For example, any analysis of the evolution of popular ideologies embraced by America’s political tribes must consider the shifting alliance structure of American politics: the distinct groups in society that support the two main parties.

As is well-documented, one reason for the strangely non-polarized aspect of mid-twentieth-century American politics is that both parties were effectively united in the goal of maintaining racial segregation and discrimination, especially in the South. It was only once the Democrats passed major civil rights legislation in the 1960s that American politics began its great ideological and social re-sorting, with black voters flocking to the Democrats and many white voters embracing the Republicans. Describing this process, David Pinsof and colleagues observe three other major political realignments:

[1] The Republican Party took ownership of the pro-life, evangelical movement, causing Christian traditionalists to move into the Republican Party and secular feminists to move into the Democratic Party. [2] Influxes of immigrants from Latin America—coupled with urbanization and the decline of manufacturing work—gave rise to a rural, white underclass who attributed their declining status to immigration and globalization. [3] At the same time, expanding college enrollment produced a new upper class of highly educated “knowledge workers”, while large corporations commanded an increasingly greater share of wealth and political power. These trends resulted in competition and resentment between intellectual elites (e.g., highly educated professionals) and business elites (e.g., wealthy corporate executives). In other words, the lower class split apart based on ethnic rivalries, while the upper class split apart based on status rivalries, thereby weakening the historical link between partisanship and class.”

You cannot understand the prevalent belief systems in American society and the two tribes’ attitudes towards expertise without engaging with these forces. For example, the fact that the Democratic Party involves a coalition between highly educated white professionals and racial minorities illuminates the degree to which modern liberalism in the US combines deference to credentialed experts with a strong focus on anti-racist politics. Likewise, the strange coalition between rural, uneducated, white, socially conservative Americans and business elites within the Republican Party illuminates why American conservatism became so strongly pro-market in the late twentieth century.

To be clear, ideologies cannot be reduced to alliance structures, not least because the groups people identify with and support depend on which ideas they embrace. Nevertheless, they do not exist in a wholly autonomous domain either.

Too much charity

In addition, although Friedman’s commitment to intellectual charity—to treating people as sincere, rational agents rather than dismissing their views as consequences of deception, self-deception, or irrationality—is refreshing, it is also excessive.

He is right that naive realism is false. The truth is not self-evident, and even perfectly rational, well-meaning people can acquire very different worldviews based on the information they obtain from others and how they interpret it. Nevertheless, it is a fallacy to infer from the fact that error and disagreement can be caused by purely honest, rational processes that they always are.

For one thing, lying and propaganda—in the preferred language of the blue tribe today, “disinformation campaigns”—have played an undeniable role in American politics. Corporations peddle self-serving information and attempt to influence public opinion, as do political and cultural elites.

Moreover, humans are not disinterested truth seekers. We engage in motivated reasoning. We advocate for beliefs and narratives that promote our and our favourite groups’ interests and adopt ideas that win us trust and status within our ingroup. Being humans, these motives powerfully distort how Americans view the world.

They also shape the social dynamics of America’s conflicting political tribes, which transform partisan narratives into sacred beliefs, reward pundits and intellectuals who rationalise and defend those beliefs, and ostracize and cancel heretics who challenge them.

Friedman is correct in saying that many people exaggerate the role of such factors. Moreover, much discourse about propaganda, motivated reasoning, and groupthink is itself a form of propagandistic motivated reasoning, treating these issues as if they were restricted to only one of America’s tribes.

Nevertheless, you cannot understand American politics and its epistemological character if you treat people as dispassionate, truth-seeking robots. Humans are strategic, status-seeking primates who view reality in ways biased by self-interest and tribal allegiances.

America’s belief systems

Once you understand the role of political alliances and motivated reasoning in shaping political belief systems, it also becomes clear that Friedman’s claim that conservatives and liberals embrace different forms of naive realism is not entirely correct.

Although it is true that the right and left embrace naive realism and adopt very different attitudes towards credentialed experts and establishment epistemic institutions (science, universities, public health, mainstream media, etc.), their attitudes towards experts are not always consistent.

For example, although the left is happy to trust experts on topics like climate change, vaccines, and public health guidance, these issues all align with its political agenda. On other topics (sex differences, IQ, behavioural genetics, mainstream economics, and so on), there is often a willingness to dismiss or ignore expert consensus. For example, a recent article in The Atlantic defends Kamala Harris’s proposed price-gouging ban with the title, “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists.” And even on topics like climate change, liberals tend to be highly selective in which aspects of expert consensus they defer to.

Admittedly, this is made easier because one can always find academics willing to endorse preferred liberal policies or narratives, not least because of the dominance of liberals within these institutions. Nevertheless, the point is that the story is more complex—and more biased—than a default attitude of deference towards credentialed experts.

Moreover, in some cases, liberals are willing to abandon deference towards “expert” knowledge altogether if doing so aligns with political goals, as with the celebration of “lived experience” over statistical data when the lived experiences align with progressive narratives.

Something similar applies to the right, where conservatives are often happy to instrumentalize experts when their conclusions align with conservative causes and narratives. However, Friedman’s analysis is closer to the mark here because the neglect and contempt of intellectual thought increasingly look all-encompassing since Trump took over the conservative movement.

Passing epistemic judgment

Finally, Friedman’s analysis of America’s epistemological crisis attempts to avoid any assessment of the relative epistemic quality of its two tribes—that is, the degree to which their belief systems accurately map reality.

To some degree, this is understandable. Given Friedman’s rejection of naive realism, he denies that ideologies can be evaluated as categorically true or false. Instead, following Walter Lippmann, he thinks of such belief systems as selective, low-resolution models of reality. This means he treats both political tribes in the US as embracing “a different set of interpretive frameworks that determines how and what it sees of reality.”

Nevertheless, one can reject naive realism and acknowledge the possibility of multiple perspectives without thinking all perspectives are equally accurate. At times, Friedman seems to elide this distinction.

Of course, one can never step outside one’s belief system and evaluate its correspondence to reality. Any evaluation of a set of beliefs will inevitably draw on one’s own beliefs, which are highly vulnerable to error and partiality for the reasons Friedman identifies. However, this is a reason to be careful and embrace fallibilism, not radical skepticism.

With this in mind, I will make two general observations about America’s epistemological crisis.

Sectarian misperceptions

First, due to the highly polarized and sectarian nature of modern American politics, both sides view reality in ways that are distorted by partisanship and group allegiances. This biases judgment at the individual level. However, it has also created thriving rationalization markets in which members of the two tribes compete to win status and financial rewards by justifying and defending their faction’s favoured narratives.

Although this is common to all politics, it is especially toxic in America because the passionate partisans and pundits of both tribes increasingly inhabit distinct media ecosystems. With declining intergroup communication, the result seems to be growing dogmatism and radicalisation.

The failure modes of first-person and third-person naive realism

Second, Friedman’s analysis of the two tribes’ attitudes towards experts illuminates their different failure modes.

Even though the blue tribe often approaches experts with selectivity and flexibility, its general deference to establishment epistemic institutions produces distinctive errors and blind spots. The simple reason is that these institutions are far from perfect. Outside the hard sciences, many ideas advanced and legitimised within science and academia are simplistic, selective, biased, and unreliable.

The replication crisis is one indication of this. There were also many well-documented problems with public health authorities during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there are countless others. Experts are often overconfident and wrong. Whole bodies of putatively scientific knowledge are commonly built on sand. These problems are exacerbated by a situation where the line between progressive activism and science is not always clear (and sometimes wilfully blurred). And in many ways, things are even worse within establishment liberal media.

These and numerous other factors ensure that the blue tribe’s picture of reality is frequently biased, selective, or plain wrong. Moreover, without these evident problems with America’s epistemic institutions, the red tribe’s proud rejection of such institutions would probably not be possible.

Nevertheless, the blue tribe’s problems are much less severe than those confronting the red tribe.

The Republican Party and conservative media today have become almost fully unmoored from reality. Utterly baseless lies, fabrications, conspiracy theories, and absurdities run rampant. Nearly everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is a lie or exaggeration. And remarkably, this situation seems to worsen as time passes.

Few things could illustrate this more powerfully than Trump’s preposterous, evidence-free, racist claim that immigrants are eating Americans’ pets en masse, something which most Republicans apparently believed and Tucker Carlson celebrated as “awesome” because it “makes all the right people mad.”

This is the grain of truth in the blue tribe’s “post-truth” analysis of the modern Republican Party. However, the problem is not that the red tribe has wholly abandoned any concern with truth. The problem is that without knowledge-generating institutions and their norms and procedures (e.g., in science and professional journalism), caring about the truth achieves nothing. The consequence is instead a reversion to an epistemic state of nature in which ignorance, error, and tribal narratives are the default state.

In other words, for all the problems with America’s knowledge-generating institutions, these institutions evolved over centuries for a reason. If you reject them wholesale, the result is not liberation from bias and delusion; it is the complete capitulation to them.