If it can be said that there is a crisis of science and expertise and that we have entered a post-truth era, it is with regard to these sorts of problems, and to the claims science and scientific experts would make upon how we live and how we are governed.
Writing about the limits of science for resolving political disagreements about issues such as the risks of nuclear energy, the physicist Alvin Weinberg argued in an influential 1972 article that the inherent uncertainties surrounding such complex and socially divisive problems lead to questions being asked of science that science simply cannot answer.[5]
He coined the term “trans-science” to describe scientific efforts to answer questions that actually transcend science.
Two decades later, the philosophers Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz more fully elucidated the political difficulties raised by trans-science as those of “post-normal” science, in which decisions are urgent, uncertainties and stakes are high, and values are in dispute. Their term defined a “new type of science” aimed at addressing the “challenges of policy issues of risk and the environment.”[6](Funtowicz and Ravetz used the term “post-normal” to contrast with the day-to-day puzzle-solving business of mature sciences that Thomas Kuhn dubbed “normal science” in his famous 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[7])
What Funtowicz and Ravetz stressed was the need to recognize that science carried out under such conditions could not — in theory or practice — be insulated from other social activities, especially politics.
Demands on science to resolve social disputes accelerated as the political landscape in the 1960s and 70s began to shift from a primary focus on the opposition between capital and labor toward one that pitted industrial society against the need to protect human health and the environment, a shift that intensified with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Public concerns about air and water pollution, nuclear energy, low levels of chemical contamination and pesticide residues, food additives, and genetically modified foods, translated into public debates among experts about the magnitude of the problems and the type of policy responses, if any, that were needed. It is thus no coincidence that the 1980s and 90s saw “risk” emerge as the explicit field of competing claims of rationality.[8]
I believe Russia has characterized the US as “Not-agreement-capable”. In part, simply because the two parties in the US are very divided, but also because the Democrats in particular have absolutely no consistent core. No one knows what Democrats will say or do except disagree with Trump.
And “science” devolved to a reliance on modeling which allowed all sorts of shenanigans to take place mostly in the quest for grant money. It will not regain its reputation as a respectable academic structure until it regroups around the discipline of Scientific Method which seems to have lost its way in current day academia.