The People Who Break Things [Joseph Uscinski]

This talk seeks to explain recent instances of institutional erosion in the United States and elsewhere. Human flourishing requires science, medicine, public health, education, economic markets, and democratic governance; all of these depend on stable, long-standing institutions that can develop standard operating procedures, sort fact from fiction, and implement directives. In recent years, however, political movements in the U.S. and elsewhere have organized around the destruction of society’s institutions and their knowledge-generating processes. For example, a popular U.S. movement that rejects established science, such as the germ theory of disease, has been successful at dismantling U.S. public health institutions, including the CDC and NIH, allowing once eliminated infectious diseases, like measles and whooping cough, to have a resurgence.

Drawing on 15 years of original survey data, Professor Joseph Uscinski identifies a distinct group of citizens who share a hostility toward political, scientific, and social institutions. Historically disengaged, these individuals were mobilized into a durable political coalition focused on breaking things, both with their political support and occasionally with violence. The result is a form of mass-enabled nihilism in which democratic norms are undermined not only by elites, but by citizens who actively seek institutional destruction. Professor Uscinski concludes by discussing the implications of such coalitions for democratic resilience and outlining strategies for putting the broken scientific, medical, public health, educational, economic, and democratic institutions back together.

Dr. Joseph Uscinski is a professor of political science, one of the foremost experts on conspiracy theories, and a lifetime fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. For more than a decade, he has been polling Americans about their beliefs in conspiracy theories and other dubious ideas. Professor Uscinski has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles and several books, including American Conspiracy Theories, widely considered the foundational study of modern American conspiracy theories, and Conspiracy Theories: A Primer, the first textbook on conspiracy theories.