Americans have always been skeptical of science, mostly because Americans are naturally skeptical about extravagant claims. There has always been a paradox at the center of the American identity. Americans assume there is a solution to all of the practical problems of the world. On the other hand, Americans suspect that the people offering those solutions are not on the level. As a result, American can marvel at scientific progress but hold science in low regard.

This turns up in popular culture. Watch old films and you often see scientists presented as overconfident in their abilities, unethical in their pursuit of knowledge or foolish in how they ignore the risks of the work. In popular culture, the scientist is Dr. Frankenstein, a mad scientist, or a naïve fool. These movie tropes are common because they appeal to the cultural framing of science. While scientists may be our smartest people, they are not the most trusted people.

Probably the biggest driver of this is medicine. Despite trillions poured into the medical establishment, we do not know that much about the human body. The three main drivers of health and longevity in the West are antibiotics, nutrition and sanitation, not great scientific breakthroughs. We have gotten better at treating things like cancer and heart disease, but we are a long way away from curing them. Medicine is still not sure why cancer exists, much less how to prevent it.

This persistent ignorance, however, has not stopped the medical profession from lecturing the public on health. Public health officials have spent the last fifty years anathematizing tobacco use. The claim was it caused cancer. Therefore, eliminating smoking should lower cancer rates. Smoking rates have collapsed in America, but cancer rates have remained the same. Lung cancer rates have not changed much at all, which is where we should have seen the benefit.

Something like smoking is where you see the problem most clearly. Science has figured out why smoking causes emphysema. The ash builds up in the lungs. People figured this out long before we considered medicine a science. We still have no idea what it is in tobacco that causes cancer. There is no honest answer as to what is in cigarettes that gets people hooked on them. People who smoke pipes or vape do not display the same dependency that we see with cigarettes.

Given the trillions spent on medicine and medical research, one would think by now that we would have unriddled the whole tobacco puzzle. Even if our libertarian impulse would prevent the banning of tobacco products, we should be able to ban the highly addictive additives put into some of these things. The best we have is nicotine supplements designed to keep the addict hooked on nicotine. You cannot blame people for thinking this is not entirely on the level.

Of course, there has been no bigger blow to the reputation of science than the army of grifters and conmen shouting “trust the science” during Covid. People with impressive credentials in medicine told the public that you must wrap your underwear around your head and stop drinking after a certain hour to prevent Covid. They also invented a vaccine that does not inoculate you against the infection and has some chance of killing you with myocarditis and blood clots.

It is not so much that these cranks and lunatics were all wrong about Covid, but that there have been no consequences. The seriousness of a profession is determined by its willingness to maintain its own standards. No one trusts lawyers because crooked lawyers rarely face punishment. The one profession with less policing of the ranks than the law is medicine. The same people making bizarre claims about Covid will be out doing the same act during the next manufactured crisis.

Another blight on science and related to medicine is the area of nutrition. There are two sides to the nutrition debate. The official side promotes the Standard American Diet, which is designed to boost agribusiness. The other side is the army of grifters and snake oil salesmen pushing supplements and fad diets. Nowhere in American life is the old “heads they win, tails you lose” dynamic more obvious and pernicious than in the realm of human diet and lifestyle.

Start with the official side of things. Everyone reading this has probably got a lecture from their doctor about cutting out fat and salt from the diet. The food pyramid tells us to eat more grain and minimize red meat. Generations of Americans were told to replace butter with margarine. None of this is based on science. In the case of margarine, we know this crackpot idea was pushed by agribusiness looking for a way to make money off what at the time was a waste product.

The response to this oogily-boogily is just as insane. Fad diets used to promise weight loss with minimal sacrifice. Now they come up with nonsense claims about the science of health and fitness. The latest is the carnivore diet, which claims we need to eat like our ancient ancestors. That means just meat and some dairy. Our ancient ancestors did not live on meat and dairy. They ate whatever they could find. More important, for ten thousand years we have survived on bread, not meat.

When someone with “MD” after their name is often seen pushing crackpot ideas like the carnivore diet or some witch’s brew promising to make you smarter, it is no wonder that we call doctors “quacks”. When your doctor says you have high cholesterol and need to take pills, you want to trust her, but then you find out that there is not a lot of evidence that the pills make a real difference. You start to wonder if she is just another type of sales rep from the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

When you combine the conflation of medicine with science and the shoddy reputation of medicine, it is no wonder that Americans have a negative view of science. How can anyone “trust the science” when the people screaming “trust the science” on social media are both wrong and crazy? Replace the phrase “trust the science” during Covid with “trust the crazy homeless guy who screams at people in the middle of the street”, and you would have the same effect.

That raises the other big problem for science, the expert. America is plagued with people claiming to be experts. Pick any noun and search for it along with the word “expert” and you will find someone claiming to be an expert in the noun. Of course, all nouns are equal in the expertise game, but some nouns are more equal than others, so you will have better luck finding a “racism expert” than someone who can tell you a good way to keep the squirrels out of the attic.

The modern age is now flooded with experts whose expertise ranges from the annoying to the ridiculously impossible. Diversity experts, for example, are not experts in the sense they have a mastery of the subject. They just repeat the magic words from the catechism in a hectoring tone. The extremism expert is claiming to be knowledgeable about a subject that does not exist. Extremism is undefinable. How can you be an expert on something that is no more than a moral signal?

It is no wonder that Americans are skeptical of science. The main ways they interface with science are horribly corrupt and stupid. Granted, medicine is not science and the people claiming to be experts in social causes are crackpots, but they are presented to Americans as the product of science. Science has now become the authority for all things annoying and offensive. If science gives us the carnivore diet and the racism expert, maybe science is more trouble than it is worth.

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