Amid the many excellent discussions of challenges to science in the United States, I would highly recommend Shawn Lawrence Otto’s Fool Me Twice and Chris Mooney’s Unscientific America. You cannot go wrong with either (actually recommend both) of these.

One key element (in both) is how anti-science syndrome suffering skews across the political spectrum and its impacts in political discussion/policy making differ across the political spectrum.

For example, generally, anti-vaccination anti-science attitudes are perceived as being ‘liberal’/’left-wing’ — but these do not drive policy-making and are rather rarely embraced by significant political actors/politicians. The ‘anti-science’ elements exists ‘on the left’ but, writ large, remain on the margins of, rather than dominating, policy approaches.

On the other hand, climate denial skews very heavily to the right and this dominates today’s Republican elite which, in fact, is far more anti-science/climate-denial dominated then the ‘average’ registered Republican.