I would like to point out that a lot of scientists treat average nonscientists as less than valuable to their work. That creates an alienation of the common man, in which science is offering answers no one can understand without years of college, and are unwilling or unable to show where it is interesting and fun, but instead stress the amount of work needed to come to any understanding.
Would you agree that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a massive step forward in physics research? Well, guess what? We could have built a more powerful machine here in the US, and it would have been finished more than a decade ago. Construction had already begun. It was called the Superconducting Super Collider:
Superconducting Super Collider - Wikipedia
What happened? Politicians do what politicians do and made it look like wasted money. Conservatives ridiculed the scientists and did everything they could to trash the program, and it worked.
The question is why does this work? Why are conservatives able to consistently attack science and win?