If you want to lay blame at a single aspect of American government as you have, I think it's more fair to blame a two party system and cultural emphasis on wedge issues (abortion, gun control, gay rights, etc).
I didn't lay blame. You seem to have misread my comment or conflated it with GP. I was just saying that Trump's election doesn't demonstrate a decline in environmentalism among the electorate.
That's blatantly false. US common adherance to science in terms of progress has varied throughtout its history, while general religious belief has almost perpetually declined for two centuries. They do not appear to be very strongly linked in the US; that's due to its secular foundation. The US has been the world's leader in scientific output since the Civil War, there hasn't been a close #2.
Under your theory, the US should be radically more scientifically oriented now than it was a century ago, as religious beliefs have plunged substantially over that time.
Or for another example, the Chinese culture is extremely mystical. And saying extremely, is an understatement. Just their beliefs around luck alone are as mystically out there as any hard-core Christian notions I've ever run across in the US.
And yet those mystical beliefs supposedly do not deter the Chinese from the pursuit of science.
A near majority of people in Western European nations believe in ghosts or the equivalent. In fact, less Americans (42%) believe in ghosts versus people in the UK (52%) [1]. How do you believe in ghosts without believing in some kind of convoluted afterlife theory? How can scientifically oriented people believe such things?
Canadian monthly church attendance rates were as high as recently as 1988, as the US is today. Did that mean Canadians were crippled scientifically until the last 10-15 years? I doubt it.
I'm afraid I believe that culture that values expertise and scientific decision-making is just that - culture, embedded in people's minds and functioning in a very similar way to religion as a default mindset. Most people who are cheerleaders for science believe scientific "facts" without evidence too. They are not looking at the source data and verifying p-values, discounting cherry-picked studies, etc.
Actual critical thinking takes a lot of effort and most people don't continually question their assumptions. I don't think it's possible to bake that into education. Thus we need to inculcate a decent set of assumptions via educational indoctrination. And this, on its surface, is indistinguishable from religious indoctrination, even if it has the best of intentions.
The fragmentation of national narratives certainly has a part to play as well. Increasing divergence in shared narratives reduces political will for the right kind of indoctrination, while the divergent narratives fight culture wars against one another for control of their kids' minds.
