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The revolt against experts has been very calculated and very Republican

Matt Yglesias writes today about the widely reported revolt against experts:

“Experts” is not an incredibly precise term, and “elites” is even vaguer. When Sean Trende says (and Nate Silver agrees) that “it hasn’t exactly been the best century for the expert class,” I both know what they mean and also struggle to pin down precisely what the claim is.

Yeah. The usual explanation for this phenomenon just ignores subtle distinctions and attributes it vaguely to a couple of decades of policy failures. The Iraq war. The Great Recession. China. COVID. Matt allows all this but points out there have been big policy failures forever. Nothing much has really changed recently.

This argument is almost perfectly designed to appeal to me, and it does. But it's an interesting subject, addressed presciently at book length by Chris Hayes more than a decade ago, and it's worth making a few points about it.

First, it's not new. It famously started with Vietnam and Watergate—but mostly among liberals. It came later for conservatives, largely for self-serving reasons: There were just too many experts who held inconvenient views. Experts, for example, said evolution was real. They said cutting taxes would raise the deficit. They said climate change was dangerous. They said the COVID virus probably didn't leak from a Chinese lab. But Republicans wanted to appeal to evangelicals, cut taxes, slash environmental regulations, and stir up animosity toward China. That practically required them to insist that experts didn't know anything.

In other words, the revolt against expertise has been far from organic. It's mostly been promoted as a very conscious strategy by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Republican leaders. It was basically a precondition of gaining public support for movement conservative goals.

This quickly became a vicious circle: As conservatives turned against experts, experts naturally drifted away from them and became more liberal. This made conservatives disdain them even more.

It didn't help, of course, that experts made some mistakes that really did seem due to little more than a stubborn opposition to conservative values. There was the long fight against phonics, for example. And the rejection of any genetic role in personality. More recently, the trans activist community has vigorously enlisted the medical community to stretch the evidence about gender-affirming care. These kinds of things are less frequent than most conservatives think, but all it takes is relentless promotion of a few hot button examples to convince the proles that liberal corruption is rampant.

There's another distinction that's also important: what I call soft vs. hard. Conservatives have to spend the most effort on combating experts in the hard sciences. People just naturally have some deference towards physicists and biologist and doctors. But economists? With all due respect, they're shit at predicting much of anything. The softer sciences are a horror show, full of dedicated lefties making ridiculous claims no one can replicate. Then add to that the various "studies" departments at universities that produce mountains of tendentious nonsense. The whole vast landscape is a sitting duck, and it's easy for the sometimes deserved contempt toward soft researchers to seep over into the hard sciences too. How else could conservative leaders convince their followers to turn against mainstream biology, climate science, and medical research?

The 21st century has not been an era of especially egregious policy errors. There have plainly been some, but no more than usual—and if that was what turned Americans against expertise it would have done the same in lots of other countries too. But it didn't. What happened in the US has been a deliberate and cynical war against expertise that's being waged to promote conservative causes, helped along by a lefty establishment in the soft sciences that continually shoots itself in the foot. Ending it will not be easy.

47 thoughts on “The revolt against experts has been very calculated and very Republican

  1. middleoftheroaddem

    I think Democrats/ Democratic coded people, on occasion, add fuel to this GOP centric dumpster fire.

    For example, instead of publicly saying Covid is novel, and thus we are making our best educated guesses, the CDC and Fauci make definitive statements. The result, schools stay closed too long, there is not a ton of science around six feet of distance (versus say five feet), the lab leak theory is said to be near impossible (when it clearly still unknown but possible).

    Similarly, some of the more extreme claims on global warming appear hyperbolic and discredit the broader science.

    My point, when its a best guess, with a lot of uncertainty, don't present information as the gospel....

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      Emphasizing that Covid was novel might have helped stop some of those stupid memes were right wingers claimed they were protected from Covid by their superior immune systems because they played a lot in the mud when they were kids.

      1. rick_jones

        Early on, but my bit-error-prone wetware DIMMs believe that in the news outlets at least it rapidly shortened/Telephone Gamed to COVID.

      2. DButch

        I certainly remember the term "novel" in articles about COVID-19 I read in the Seattle Times. It IS a term used when a new disease appears AND especially when it changes rapidly as it spreads.

      3. Toofbew

        When most people hear "novel coronavirus," they think of a book by Tom Clancy or John Grisham.

        "New coronavirus" or "new killer virus" might have gotten the public's attention better.

        BTW, Kevin says about the experts, "They said the COVID virus probably didn't leak from a Chinese lab." This seems to still be up in the air. Those who accept this have no actual evidence for a natural spill-over, and it does seem awfully coincidental that the only lab in the world working on bat guano from Chinese caves containing covid-19 is in Hunan. The jury is still out on this. See

        https://newjerseymonitor.com/2024/06/18/scientists-argue-over-the-origins-of-covid-19-before-u-s-senate-panel/

        Excerpt (as of June 2024):

        Gregory Koblentz, associate professor and director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University in Virginia, said during the two-hour hearing that debate continues in the scientific community about the origins.

        “The possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately developed as a biological weapon has been unanimously rejected by all U.S. intelligence agencies,” Koblentz testified. “While the intelligence community is divided on the origin of the pandemic, most of the agencies have determined that the virus was not genetically engineered.”

        Residents in Wuhan, China, were first diagnosed with “an atypical pneumonia-like illness” in December 2019, according to a COVID-19 timeline from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

        Initial cases all appeared linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market at the time, though there has since been much speculation about the types of research taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

        Koblentz said he believes the available evidence points to a spillover event from an animal, though he added a “research-related accident can’t be ruled out at this time.”

        The lack of transparency and data from the Chinese government has significantly hindered scientists’ efforts to unify around the origin of COVID-19, he said.

    2. Citizen99

      Your comments are obviously made in good faith, but I think they miss the mark. The "definitive statements" made by some health experts at the start of the pandemic reflected a perfectly reasonable risk minimization bias, so 6 feet was absolutely the right call in the absence of better numbers (which can only be obtained by analyzing the epidemiological data over many months).

      There is also the habit of the general public (and the media) to lose their minds if they don't get "definitive" answers to scary questions. Even though it's routine for scientists to tell each other "we don't know," the general public is just the opposite, and scientists in the public eye know they will hear pundits saying "What do you mean, you don't know? Aren't you supposed to be the experts?" So they do what they must, which is to make pronouncements based on minimizing risk.

      As for the "extreme claims on global warming," were those made by actual climate scientists? Not really. Sometimes they were stated as *possible* outcomes and then picked up by the press with the qualifying words omitted. Again it was a matter of risk analysis, which is VERY hard for the public to grasp. And in other cases, claims were made by individuals (*cough* . . . Al Gore . . . *cough*) who were not scientists but knew just enough to be dangerous. In reality, virtually ALL of the global warming predictions made by actual scientists have either turned out to be accurate or underestimated the real impacts.

      1. middleoftheroaddem

        Citizen99 - perhaps let me expand on my post.

        Fauci could have said ' based on our knowledge with similar illnesses, our initial recommendation is six feet of space. We will test this recommendation and update our guidance once we have better information.' Despite a huge CDC budget, no testing of the six foot guidance was ever done. Rather, I read a study that found, three feet of spacing is almost as effective as six. The six foot rule hurt many businesses.

        The masking of young kids and keeping schools closed is similar. Initially, this was probably a very reasonable decision. However, as time passed, the data was pretty clear: young people seldom got Covid. Further, the learning loss associated with remote school was not a shocking finding. It seems like Fauci could have revised his recommendation sooner.

        I hold a similar perspective on cloth masks. Made sense originally, but the effectiveness should have been tested. With new information, modify the recommendation.

        Basically, the expert should 1) disclose the limit of their knowledge 2) test their recommendations 3) examine third party data 4) update information once more is known.

        1. KenSchulz

          All of the detail that you think should have been included was available to anyone who wanted to do a little reading, but to expect the general population to absorb and understand it is just way overestimating the time and attention most people could muster.
          I did a lot of that reading. I recall articles at the time relating the 6-foot rule to the settling rate of sneeze droplets. Once it was found that the virus could become aerosolized, distance was only relevant to dilution.
          Yes, with 20/20 hindsight, some decisions about school closings might have been different. But your description of the situation is wrong in several particulars: children were less likely to be seriously ill, but could be asymptomatic carriers; there are a lot of adults in schools (duh); schools that remained open or re-opened early also showed learning losses.

          1. middleoftheroaddem

            KenSchulz - we can respectfully disagree around particular examples, such as the school opening timelines. Rather, I stand by my broader insight

            "My point, when its a best guess, with a lot of uncertainty, don't present information as the gospel...."

  2. Sylvia

    I love how trans issues, which Kevin knows little about and apparently cares less, are dragged into practically every post these days.

  3. Anandakos

    You constantly use the phrase, "conservative causes" when in fact what is being served is not the conservative temperament or limited government. What is being served is greed and lust for power. Neither of those is classically "conservative". They are reactionary, selfish, and male-centered. In short, it's another rerun: Bro Culture Seven: The Shaming

  4. iamr4man

    A big part of the problem is the MSM in general and right wing media in particular. No matter what the scientific issue is you can always find some scientist/ Dr. with a contrarian view. The media will give equal weight to contrary opinions. So if 1,000 specialists in a field say (as an example) “this is why AIDS is happening”and one or two scientists disagree both sides are given an equal hearing as if there was a controversy. And if the one contrarian scientist is believed by someone in power hundreds of thousands of people might die:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg

    So climate,science might say global warming is happening but if some scientist disagrees that disagreement might get equal or even greater weight. Even more so if the majority is equivocal and the minority vehemently positive.

    1. Austin

      No matter what the scientific issue is you can always find some scientist/ Dr. with a contrarian view.

      There’s always money in the banana stand for people who sell out or betray other people in their group.

    2. miao

      As a technical person, I find that the discussion in the MSM of pretty much anything I know something about generally comes across as superficial at best.

      Some of the technical / science publications are pretty good, but most people don't read the long write ups in, say, Science or Nature.

    3. DButch

      Time to drop in this long running article on "The Discovery of Global Warming". It was kind of short when I first found it a number of years ago - but has grown quite a bit as more threads have been contributed.

      Bottom line, global warming started a LONG time ago - a few hundred million years ago as the atmosphere started changing to a semblance of the nitrogen/oxygen/CO2/etc. mix we have today. (There's a lot of "Kentucky Windage" in there, not uncommon when the process took a long time to play out.)

      We just didn't know that the earth was already warmer than it should have been (compared to an airless, rocky body in space). The actual science (in the European world) started in the 1800s, and by the late 1800s a pretty good estimate of what would happen if we "evaporated our coal mines into the atmosphere".

      Then the oil and then gas (NG, propane, etc.) came along with "hold my beer". Everything is playing out pretty much exactly as those scientists of the 1800s expected - except they underestimated the build-up speed IMHO.

      1. Coby Beck

        "Bottom line, global warming started a LONG time ago - a few hundred million years ago"

        No, this is not the bottm line. Word choices matter, and the shorter you want your summation to be, the more important your choices are. "Global warming", absent any clearly stated other context, means the anthropogenic global warming begun in the industrial revolution.

        The bottom line you are maybe trying to express is that the Greenhouse Effect of CO2 has been influencing the earth's temperature for 100s of millions of years.

        That article is a good one, and puts to bed the "climate change is a scientific hoax argument", as the actual science of the topic goes back 150 years.

    4. DButch

      Time to drop in this long running article on "The Discovery of Global Warming". It was kind of short when I first found it a number of years ago - but has grown quite a bit as more threads have been contributed.

      Bottom line, global warming started a LONG time ago - a few hundred million years ago as the atmosphere started changing to a semblance of the nitrogen/oxygen/CO2/etc. mix we have today. (There's a lot of "Kentucky Windage" in there, not uncommon when the process took a long time to play out.)

      We just didn't know that the earth was already warmer than it should have been (compared to an airless, rocky body in space). The actual science (in the European world) started in the 1800s, and by the late 1800s a pretty good estimate of what would happen if we "evaporated our coal mines into the atmosphere".

      Then the oil and then gas (NG, propane, etc.) came along with "hold my beer". Everything is playing out pretty much exactly as those scientists of the 1800s expected - except they underestimated the build-up speed IMHO.

  5. J. Frank Parnell

    It is a characteristic value of authoritarian regimes to reject inconvenient science. Little known fact: the Nazi's initially rejected quantum physics and relativity as "Jewish physics". It got so bad that Anna Heisenberg visited her friend Anna Maria Himmler to complain how Anna Maria's son Heinrich's people were being so nasty to her boy Werner.

    1. Citizen99

      And let's not forget how Stalin embraced the pseudo-science of Trofim Lysenko, who rejected mainstream genetics in favor of a pre-Darwin evolutionary theory that led to a terrible famine in Ukraine and other Soviet areas. I don't think the rejection of Darwin was specifically anti-Jewish, but it was definitely based on the rejection of "decadent bourgeois science."

  6. bad Jim

    Anti-intellectualism has always been a feature of conservatism, and science has been in conflict with religion throughout history and all over the world.

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      Modern science is considered to have originated during the age of enlightenment, although one could argue for the Greeks or other earlier cultures. Whenever science originated, anti-intellectualism occured about 5 minutes later.

  7. skeptonomist

    The MSM pundits have adopted the attitude that the MAGA movement is a rebellion against the "elites", and this definitely includes the scientific elite as well as intellectual elites. This is simply nonsense when applied to economic elites, because the Republican party has always stood for the big-money elites, and Trump is obviously filling his administration with billionaires and other true economic elites (in the positions which aren't filled with TV talking heads). It's the fossil-fuel industry elites which are opposing recognition of global warming.

    But the "elites" that MAGAs are really rebelling against are those which are trying to put an end to the dominance of White Christian Supremacy. The movement toward equality has been slowly and episodically succeeding and this instills a kind of tribal fear. Of course immigration adds to this. Republicans have been tapping into this cultural resistance for over fifty years. When enough irrational distrust has been aroused, it can be directed against hard science, as well as other intellectual aspects of liberalism.

    1. JohnH

      Yes, and you can take for granted in political commentary that "privileged" now means no more than educated. It can be a kid in debt out of college earning little, and how stupid of the Democrats to ignore "real" people.

        1. Toofbew

          I heard on the radio yesterday that 32 percent of American adults have tattoos. And I read that an arm "sleeve" tattoo costs about $20,000 and a leg "sleeve" tattoo costs even more. And people say eggs cost too much.

  8. Srho

    Excuse me, I was just born yesterday, so I have to ask: if people must deny reality to do things they want, why do they want to do them?

  9. Citizen99

    Kevin, I agree with you so much here that it actually hurts!

    You are exactly right about the right-wing oligarchy working deliberately to delegitimize the hard sciences because they threaten their wealth and power.

    And you are also right that some of the "soft" sciences so beloved of the identitarian left have presented targets so juicy for the alt-right that they cannot believe their good fortune.

  10. tigersharktoo

    What I love it that the last three GOP Presidents have railed against the "elites".

    What are more elitist than trust fund babies and Ivy League grads?

    Like the last three GOP Presidents.

  11. cmayo

    You assert that experts became more liberal due to conservative disdain without citing any evidence. This is especially glaring because it's antithetical to what experts actually are: nonpartisan sources of expertise and knowledge.

    I also can't help but notice that the graph coincides more or less perfectly with the advent of Fox News. Occam's Razor is better than your explanation.

    1. Jim B 55

      But it is wrong - it is not disdain that has driven the experts away from Republicans, it is policy that people who know what they are talking about know is destructive. It is conservatives who are thin skinned, experts are used to dealing in facts.

  12. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    Kevin, you have one study in the Netherlands to back your claim on GAC. The Netherlands is a great place to live, but one study is not definitive, and you know better. Why do you hang your argument on it?

  13. Lon Becker

    A newer post brings out Drum's fixation on the unsupported idea that experts are doing something wrong about the treatment of transgender children. But his inclusion of this here seems to point to another factor in the revolt against experts. That is the center=left's odd willingness to join the attack on experts when it seems politically expedient.

    Drum has suggested that the problem is that the center-left does not criticize the left enough and so gets tarred with the views of the left. But a bigger problem may be that the center-left is too quick to criticize the left which produces the idea that the left is worse than the right (think about how many people think that most censorship comes from the left even though objectively this is nonsense. But given that the left and right both criticize the left for censorship and only the left criticizes the right for censorship, is it surprising that people think the bigger problem is with the left?)

    Transgender children are currently under assault from the right. And at least some of the center-left seems to have decided that politically it is important to try to find a way to make the right seem reasonable while objecting to the cruelty they use. That is in fact the thesis of Drum's newer post. But here we just get the claim in passing that the experts are wrong on this issue with no evidence whatsoever. In effect Drum is aping the right in simply claiming that the experts are being politicized when he has no expertise and is coming at it from a political perspective.

  14. Doctor Jay

    You know, my daughter's situation - as a trans person - was not created by lefty social scientists.

    It is a situation that has happened to particular human beings anywhere human beings have been found over the course of millennia. It has nothing to do with lefty social science overreach.

    I really wish you would go to a trans health conference or something and actually learn something about trans people rather than "I read about it on the internet" which is a giant cherry-picking machine. Because you are doing the exact thing, Kevin, that you complain about in this post.

  15. D_Ohrk_E1

    In court, both sides hire experts to testify for them. Which expert is to be believed? IMO, this is a nuanced problem.

    People who don't like having their cred questioned, reactively claim expertise and bemoan the revolt against expertise. In some cases, sure, people are questioning their expertise, but broadly people are challenging the conclusions.

    Now, many of those folks challenging the conclusions have zero expertise or ability to discern the quality of a conclusion. Cognitive biases, such as Dunning-Kruger, play a role. But, as is the case in life, rarely are things binary or cut and dried.

    When KD comes out and claims anyone not believing in X is wrong, much of the time that's far too cut and dried for my taste. It leaves no room for additional evidence to change the conclusion.

    And that, my friends, is why I often seem contrarian or questioning of the heterodoxy. To know the Truth is to be God.

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