There are many well-known reasons for (US-based) anti-elitism/anti-intellectualism: religious/religion-influenced cultural beliefs, poor education, mass media f

There are many well-known reasons for (US-based) anti-elitism/anti-intellectualism: religious/religion-influenced cultural beliefs, poor education, mass media failures, insular cultural groups that invent alternate explanations for things, and plain old ignorance. There's also Agnotology - "culturally induced ignorance", which is important to understand (and deal with) in the context of this topic. There is, however, another reason, which may be less obvious than the above. It applies to people who do, in fact, know better, but maintain laughable/ignorant/ridiculous positions about issues regardless. Let's call them "Future Policy Fearers." There was a brilliant comment on Less Wrong (http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_not_that/1mdz http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_...) that sums this view up perfectly (this particular example uses climate change/AGW, but it could be about Creationism/Evolution or a hundred other things): "It becomes a signaling game, in which each choice of belief will be understood as exactly how you would communicate a particular choice of political move, and the costs of making the wrong political move feel very high. So the belief decisions and the political actions become tangled up. Roughly, people have no way of saying: 'I believe that in terms of pure decision theory, the predicted AGW damage and costs of further investigation and costs of delay are high enough that mitigation attempts should start now. But I don't want to give up my {economic privileges / substantive national sovereignty / chance to get the standard of living of past carbon-emitting nations} without a fight, because I don't want groups in the future like {scientists / profit-hating hippie tree-huggers / freedom-hating U.N. environmental bureaucrats / greedy unfair first-world hypocrites} to think I'll just roll over when they try to impose concessions on me, in the name of premises that will feel psychologically as though they might just as well have been made up. In that future situation, it will be important for me to be able to credibly threaten outrage at being forced into such concessions. But as long as nobody else is going to take me for their fool, the sacrifices needed to prevent AGW are fine with me; we could start today.' So instead, they say: 'I believe that the case for AGW isn't strong enough. I demand clearer proof.' If it were possible to negotiate separately about AGW action and about precedents of policy concessions to e.g. scientists' claims, then you might see less decision-theoretic insanity around the AGW action question itself." This group is just as important when dealing with perceived ignorance as those who are victims of Agnotology. Their actions and positions act as a proxy for a future power struggle, and should be understood as such.