First I thought this too tangential to post here, but with the discussion above about banning anti-vaxers etc. this becomes relevant.
I have seen a few articles about how Michel Foucault was appreciated by leftists but is now appreciated by alt-right types. I'm always searching for good models of our current strange situation. And I think this model of " revolution against expert biopower" is a useful building block. It's not that I absolutely agree with this model, but it explains the current tensions and even makes testable predictions.
Let me share a few quotes from these articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/opinion/michel-foucault.html
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/how-we-forgot-foucault/
https://outsidertheory.com/theorycels-in-trumpworld/
https://www.city-journal.org/the-establishment-strikes-back-for-now
From his 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic up to the final series of lectures he delivered in the early 1980s, Foucault’s work on the inseparability of power and knowledge laid particular emphasis on the political implications of biomedical science.
Even a perfunctory reading of Foucault should raise questions about the current veneration of scientific expertise [my note: in corona times: including the bashing of ant-vaxxers, mask-refusers etc.] and related demands to subordinate politics to science. Indeed, there could hardly be an outlook more opposed to Foucault’s mode of analysis than a politics premised on “believing in science.” From a Foucauldian perspective, such a fetishization of scientific knowledge entails a blindness to its inextricability from power. In his famous 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault asserted that “[t]he real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent.” In other words, the same qualities that the average professional-class liberal today views as the virtues of scientific institutions are what Foucault claimed should lead us to be skeptical.
During the pandemic, the delegation of decisions to public health experts has entailed a dramatic expansion of state authority and abrogation of basic rights, most notably freedom of speech and assembly. A range of needs and values that might contravene the prevention of infection were sidelined at the behest of unelected health officials.
This conflict becomes visible when the determinations of medical and scientific experts are presented as transcending politics, as has occurred in the past year. For the average citizen, the opaqueness of the relevant calculations, along with the identification of extraordinary risks, essentially forestalls the possibility of debate. Questioning the determinations of health experts is treated not as participation in a democratic decision-making process, but as tantamount to “literal murder.”
And some comments even make a link between Foucault, Trumpism and the resistance to the scientific expert class:
Foucault, like the Frankfurt School, offered a bracing account of the subtle means by which power is exercised in the modern era, especially under the neutral guise of bureaucratic institutions. Despite its clear left-wing provenance, such a view resonates with the longstanding right-wing attack on the liberal control of supposedly neutral institutions like education and the media. Like the New Left in the 1960s, many on the right now see themselves as opponents of what Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse (one of Breitbart’s main nemeses) called the “totally administered society.” Those on the left, conversely, revere the institutions Frankfurt School theorists and Foucault viewed with suspicion, such as the media, entertainment, education, medicine, and government bureaucracy. This is in part because that’s where their paychecks tend to come from.
And there are voices that this anti-expert "revolution" may be quashed for now, but that it's not dead at all. And may come back with force:
The people in charge of our great institutions fear and loathe the public. The election of Trump convinced them that ordinary citizens couldn’t be trusted with the vote. The rise of social media has persuaded them that limits must be imposed on what can be said. Aware that they lack personal and institutional authority, they will gladly settle for political power. They aim to tame the beast.
Let’s be clear: there’s no elite conspiracy, no secret gatherings in smoke-filled rooms, only a herd-like huddling of conformist minds. There’s no elite ideology in any coherent sense, only a blind impulse to control that gravitates instinctively to certain positions on certain issues. The script is always the restoration of order in a broken world.
Two common threads are apparent: the public is a bigoted and destructive monster, and only state power wielded by virtuous elites can protect this creature from itself.
Looking through this model, some things become clearer, for example why the anti-science resistance is so strong and persistent, and why it is echoed so strongly in alt-right conspiratorial circles.
Note:
I was afraid that this analysis might be too esoteric for this forum, but then I found this nice post and quote. And it fits!
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...s-dont-happen-much-anymore.65825/post-1859518
Foucault has:
Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true."