Expertise

How We Killed Expertise

(And why we need it back.)

By TOM NICHOLS

Average Americans have never much liked eggheads. That’s not a bad thing in itself: Americans are a skeptical but level-headed people—or were until recently—whose common sense and ingenuity allowed their nation to achieve great heights in science, diplomacy and the arts, while never displacing the ordinary voter as the deciding voice in affairs of state.

But recently skepticism has curdled into something more toxic, even dangerous. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned against experts, calling them “terrible” and saying he didn’t need them. As president, he seems determined to prove that experts are unnecessary to the running of a superpower—winging important conversations with foreign leaders, issuing an executive order without advice from his own Cabinet and picking a radio talk-show host with no background in science or agriculture for the top science position in the Department of Agriculture.

In the far less grand homes of ordinary American families, knowledge of every kind is also under attack. Parents argue with their child’s doctor over the safety of vaccines. Famous athletes speculate that the world might actually be flat. College administrators ponder dropping algebra from the curriculum because students keep failing it. This is all immensely dangerous, not only to the well-being of individual citizens, but to the survival of the United States as a republic.

How all this happened, and why it threatens our democracy, is a complicated story. Even Alexis de Tocqueville took note of the American distrust of intellectuals in the 19th century, and it only deepened with the social and political traumas of the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, globalization and technological advances have created a gulf between people with enough knowledge and education to cope with these changes, and people who feel threatened and left behind in the new world of the 21st century.

As a result, the implicit social contract between educated elites and laypeople—in which professionals were rewarded for their expertise and, in turn, were expected to spread the benefits of their knowledge—is fraying. Americans live increasingly separate lives based on education and wealth, part of a decades-long “big sort.” What is qualitatively different today is that ordinary citizens seem increasingly confident in their views, but no more competent than they were 30 or 40 years ago. A significant number of laypeople now believe, for no reason but self-affirmation, that they know better than experts in almost every field. They have come to this conclusion after being coddled in classrooms from kindergarten through college, continually assured by infotainment personalities in increasingly segmented media that popular views, no matter how nutty, are virtuous and right, and mesmerized by an internet that tells them exactly what they want to hear, no matter how ridiculous the question.

It is easy to dismiss hostility toward experts as a function of a poor education, but that’s inaccurate. The affluent, educated parents of Marin County in California, after all, led the way on the anti-vaccine madness. “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams, who holds an MBA, has a large audience for his attacks on experts, including his astonishing claim that there’s nothing a president can’t master in a conversation with a specialist in an hour. Narcissism and know-nothingism are not afflictions found only among a few disgruntled high-school dropouts in the heartland. They are endemic across the country, exacerbated over the past half-century by affluence, technology, a permanent youth culture—and, above all, politics: academic postmodernism and fashionable relativism on the left, and the anti-intellectualism of certain evangelical strains and a long history of populist skullduggery on the right.

Voters say they reject expertise because experts—whom they think of as indistinguishable from governing elites—have failed them. “Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, ‘What have experts done for us lately?’” one USA Today columnist recently wrote, without irony. Somehow, such critics missed the successful conclusion of the Cold War, the abundance of food to the point that we subsidize farmers, the creation of medicines that have extended human life, automobiles that are safer and more efficient than ever, and even the expert-driven victories of the previously hopeless Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. Experts, in this distorted telling, have managed only to impoverish and exploit ordinary Americans; anything that has benefited others apparently happened only by mere chance.

This mythology was central to Trump’s 2016 victory. The experts, voters were told, waged wars they didn’t know how to win, signed trade deals that depopulated America’s towns and unleashed a plague of terrorism. Trump adviser Steve Bannon even required new White House staff to read The Best and the Brightest, the landmark study of the origins of the Vietnam War, as a cautionary tale about intellectual pinheads who rammed the United States into a ditch in Southeast Asia. But Bannon, like so many others, misunderstood the book’s message, which was not about the domination of experts, but rather about what happens when experts are ignored. Before and during the debacle in Vietnam, actual experts on Asia and other subjects were pushed aside, often by people who thought their own intelligence and professional success in other endeavors (running a car company, for example) made them more capable. Bannon is right that the book is a cautionary tale—but one mostly about people like Steve Bannon.

Sure, there’s truth even in the stereotypes about the educated classes. They do, in fact, run the day-to-day affairs of the nation, and often in ways that voters would not approve if they understood them. Nor are the experts blameless; their track records are full of mistakes, some of great consequence. Worse, because experts tend to speak mostly to one another, they often display a lack of empathy with those who do not understand them or their specialized jargon. They barely veil their pleasure at the distance, both physical and intellectual, they enjoy from laypeople. And they too easily fall prey to the arrogance of believing that their expertise in one subject can be applied to almost any issue—especially if there’s a healthy paycheck involved.

The cure for these transgressions, however, is not to replace expertise with ignorance: It is to replace it with better expertise. If complaints about experts were meant to restore a balance between experts and laypeople, experts would be the first to support it. But this requires voters to be at least modestly informed, not simply convinced they are automatically right. And as it stands now, attacks on expertise often amount to a demand from ordinary citizens—sometimes encouraged by politicians and hucksters—that their views, no matter how contradictory or hazardous, be considered equal to those of the most experienced expert.

No country, and especially not a republic based on delegated powers, can maintain the values and practices that sustain democracy when voters remain ignorant about their own system of government. When most Americans think a quarter of the U.S. federal budget is devoted to foreign aid, when more than 70 percent of them cannot name all three branches of government—and nearly a third can’t name even one—the basic structures of American democracy cannot survive.

The Founding Fathers believed that civic virtue was built on education and knowledge. In a republic, citizens need not be experts, but they must learn enough to cast an informed vote. Or, in the words of James Madison: “A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” If Americans do not rediscover this foundational truth about their own system of government, they not only court disasters from pandemics to wars; they risk ceding their government either to the corruption of a mindless mob—or, in the wake of a disaster, to a new class of technocrats who will never again risk asking for their vote.