Many on the left are deeply concerned by the collapse of public trust in government. David Roberts of Grist has written a lengthy blog post on the subject:

The right’s project over the last 30 years has been to dismantle the post-war liberal consensus by undermining trust in society’s leading institutions. Experts are made elites; their presumption of expertise becomes self-damning. They think they’re better than you. They talk down to you. They don’t respect people like us, real Americans. …
The decline in trust in institutions has generated fear and uncertainty, to which people generally respond by placing their trust in protective authorities. And some subset of people respond with tribalism, nationalism, and xenophobia. The right stokes and exploits modern anxiety relentlessly, but that’s not all they do. They also offer a space to huddle in safety among the like-minded. The conservative movement in America has created a self-contained, hermetically sealed epistemological reality — a closed-loop system of cable news, talk radio, and email forwards — designed not just as a source of alternative facts but as an identity. That’s why when you question climate skepticism you catch hell. You’re messing with who people are.

One wonders if it is fair to suggest that the experience of Watergate and Vietnam and the more recent experience of Iraq and the financial crisis have undermined confidence in U.S. elites; if voices on the left have suggested that wealthy elites represent a threat to democracy and that wealth concentration is driven by the (supposed) immiseration of the U.S. working and middle classes; and how we can understand the surge of xenophobia between 2004 and 2006 tied to offshoring, the controversy of Dubai Ports World, etc., without reference to Democratic efforts to capitalize on rising discontent with sluggish wage growth, a phenomenon closely tied to the relative increase in the share of compensation devoted to non-cash benefits.

Whenever I read essays on income inequality that make no mention of non-cash benefits, the economics of tournaments, and the growing importance of organizational capital, I’m forced to draw the conclusion that the epistemic closure problem is not limited to the political right.

There is one section of Roberts’s post that I find particularly intriguing:

The conservative movement in America has created a self-contained, hermetically sealed epistemological reality — a closed-loop system of cable news, talk radio, and email forwards — designed not just as a source of alternative facts but as an identity.

The sentence gives you the impression that this is a phenomenon unique to the 42 percent of Americans who identify as conservatives. As I understand it, he is describing a fairly widespread tendency towards assortative mating and cultural sorting that has intensified as the U.S. population has grown more educated and affluent. My sense is that there are for whom the embrace of various left-of-center assumptions is a sine qua non of membership in the community of right-thinking people. Indeed, many of the observations in Roberts’s post suggests that he is one of them, for all his virtues.