How a Propaganda Campaign Killed Our Trust in Science and Government

One of this year’s William G. Ferguson lectures at WashU had a doozy of a title: “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.” I had wondered. Both the loathing and the love felt too extreme to be organic. But I had never dug as deep as the lecturer, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, a distinguished professor in the history of science at Harvard.

Science, mind you, not economics. Oreskes named her lecture for the book she just coauthored with Erik Conway, also a historian of science. But what do business and economics have to do with the history of science?

Oreskes’ first puzzle, answered in her previous book with Conway, was “What turned Americans against science?” My usual answer is “ignorance.” Ignorance of how science works, ignorance of what it can do, ignorance of how it can be integrated into faith and need not dispel it. But just as I reach for that weary excuse, Oreskes announces what she learned writing Merchants of Doubt: that much of the hostility “was driven not by ignorance but by malice.” Malice that fed a century-long propaganda campaign against science and government regulation.

I suppose there had to be a cause that deliberate, that fervent. Americans used to be so proud of science. We felt like all of us had landed on the moon, and cured diseases and opened hearts and transplanted organs and engineered genes and discovered new planets and—ah, here is the sticking point—tracked climate change. Which was not, at first, denied. President George H.W. Bush, hardly a leftist tree-hugger, strengthened the Clean Air Act to repair the ozone hole, established the U.S. Global Change Research Program to coordinate federal research on the nature and impact of climate change, and promised that “the United States would lead the world on environmental protection.” At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, he signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and vowed, “We must leave this Earth in better condition than we found it, and today this old truth must be applied to new threats facing the resources which sustain us all, the atmosphere and the ocean, the stratosphere and the biosphere. Our village is truly global.”

So, Oreskes wondered, what the heck happened?

At the end of the twentieth century, as warnings about climate change grew more strident, there was “a politically motivated campaign to cast doubt on that science.” Just as it had cast doubt earlier on attempts to regulate child labor, clean up the environment, and warn smokers of the dangers of tobacco. This campaign emerged from the political ideology of market fundamentalism. “Essentially it’s the rejection of regulation in favor of allowing the marketplace to do its magic,” she says, adding that it is especially hostile to government regulation.

She tosses out a few examples, including one that shocks me: secondhand smoke can cause Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. How do I not know this?

Maybe because the propagandists worked hard to bury the facts, Oreskes suggests.

And meanwhile, people buried beloved infants, I think bleakly. Why downplay any possible cause of SIDS?

Because this was market fundamentalism, in which any slope was slippery, and even the most basic, common-sense regulation could cause everything to be regulated. Disclosing possible lethal consequences of secondhand smoke was a few shaky steps from totalitarianism. Economics needed to be unfettered.

Yes, yes, laissez-faire, the invisible hand, let the market decide…. I remembered Adam Smith. But taken to an unqualified extreme, any theory is nonsense. In what other cooperative endeavor is it a good idea to have no regulations? Football? Poker? Sex? Board meetings? Religion? Schools?

To shore up credibility, Oreskes continues, the market fundamentalists imported foreign academics, paid their salaries, and dictated their research. Princeton would not agree to such terms, but the University of Chicago did, and it wound up the home of the Chicago School economists, among them Milton Friedman and George J. Stigler.

Stigler became the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions. He edited Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into a popular, readable set of excerpts—and turns out he omitted all the pages about the need for restraint; the need for banking regulation; the need for a minimum wage and the injustice of starvation wages; the right to unionize; and the need for taxation to support public goods such as roads and bridges.

“A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder once observed. Market fundamentalism spread that error, slathering it like butter. The ideology equated democracy with free enterprise and believed that freedom and social progress could only come through economic success. Its zeal was so pervasive, it even influenced Democrats, President Bill Clinton among them, to step back from what they had been taught to call “Big Government.”

Today, another classic text of market fundamentalism, Project 2025, demands free market solutions to social problems, disparages evidence of climate change, and wants the EPA dismantled. After being bombarded with market fundamentalism for a century, the country is leaning hard on markets and shying away from governance. But “‘free enterprise’ is nowhere in our Constitution,” Oreskes points out. “Freedom is not protected by our economic system but by our laws.” She sighs. “They all have been burnishing a myth…. There is no such thing as the free market and never has been. There have always been rules and regulations for how markets should operate, going back to the Old Testament.”

The irony, she adds, is that “regulation can strengthen capitalism.” Before regulation, one in every thousand U.S. workers was killed on the job. “It was safer to fight in World War I than to work on railroads or in a coal mine.” Child labor was pervasive, as were racism and unfair treatment of women. “A good deal of this suffering, a good deal of this denial of freedom, was remedied not by the free market but by law and regulation. And it did not lead to totalitarianism.”

Quite the opposite. It was unregulated markets that proved bad for democracy. Yet here we are again, with “vast accumulation of wealth and anti-democratic concentrations of power.” In her research, what Oreskes found most frustrating was that Milton Friedman and his cohort knew all this: “They brushed these facts aside in favor of a political ideology supported by their sponsors.

“In many ways, this was a con,” Oreskes says. We were persuaded to believe that if we cut taxes for the rich, everyone would benefit—but that has been disproven again and again. “Cutting taxes for the rich only makes the rich wealthier.”

Abraham Lincoln’s words grow increasingly obvious: “We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word, we do not all mean the same thing.” Is liberty freedom from all regulations? People dream of pure, unregulated joy, like kids insisting they get to stay alone while their parents are away. And then the house burns down. Or the planet.

Market fundamentalism’s propaganda campaign led to climate destruction, a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, and an—inadequate would be the polite word—response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Oreskes believes. Not to mention “the biggest market failure of our time, namely, climate change.”

Crazily, it also, inadvertently, returned Donald Trump to us. The least hands-off president you can imagine.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.