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.
