The devolution of conservatism

Rejection of some elements of science by some conservative factions is readily explainable. Creationists cling to a pre-scientific belief system. Climate change deniers (apart from those who have a personal financial stake in fossil fuels and put greed ahead of their granchildren's lives) are committed to the Free Market™ religion, which is inconsistent with anthropogenic climate change, therefore climate change must be a hoax.

However, rejection of medical science does not have such a ready explanation. The Director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, is retiring. He has given an exit interview to CBS which occasions these thoughts. To be a member in good standing of the Republican party you have to believe that the Covid vaccines are ineffective and/or dangerous, but that anti-parasitic drugs are effective against the disease. For unspecified reasons, the entire medical establishment, in thrall to the evil wizard Anthony Fauci, is perpetrating a hoax on all of humanity by claiming these propositions are untrue.*

Dr. Fauci, under a continual barrage of death threats, requires 24 hour security protection for himself and his family. Dr. Collins is less publicly prominent, but he tells interviewer Rita Braver that he withstood pressure from the former president to endorse hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid 19. You will often read that it is unproven or there is no compelling evidence for its effectiveness. In fact, it has been definitively proven to be useless. 

The explanation for this is found in Orwell's novel 1984. 

 

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

As Sparknotes explains:

 

This quote occurs in Book One, Chapter VII, as Winston looks at a children’s history book and marvels at the Party’s control of the human mind. . . .  In this case, Winston considers the Party’s exploitation of its fearful subjects as a means to suppress the intellectual notion of objective reality. If the universe exists only in the mind, and the Party controls the mind, then the Party controls the universe. As Winston thinks, “For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” The mathematical sentence 2 + 2 = 5 thus becomes a motif linked to the theme of psychological independence. Early in the novel, Winston writes that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” The motif comes full circle at the end of the novel after the torture Winston suffers in the Ministry of Love breaks his soul; he sits at the Chestnut Tree Café and traces “2 + 2 = 5” in the dust on his table.

 

*This obviously does not mean that everybody who tells a pollster they identify with the Republican party believes these insane lies. However, almost no Republican politicians are willing to publicly denounce them.