culture
politics

Mistrust of Experts, Donald Trump, and Politics Today

Editor, Modern Age
U.S. Naval War College
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Daniel McCarthy

Editor, Modern Age

May 4th, 2020
In practical politics, as in practical medicine, expertise is only instrumental. If a physician possesses tremendous knowledge, but cannot apply it to making patients well, he is a bad physician. Likewise in politics, a learned expert who nonetheless produces poor results is a bad policymaker.
Yet who is the judge of the results? Does the patient know best whether he or she is sick? Does the public know best whether it's well-governed? Many philosophers answer in the negative. But in what's commonly understood as a free society the answer must be affirmative. The patient does have final say over whether a doctor's perfomance is satisfactory. And the public has final say on whether political experts have succeeded or failed. Patient and public establish the criteria of success, however vague or inappropriate the physician or politician might consider such criteria. In any principal-agent relationship, the principal's satisfaction, not the agent's, is what counts.
Expertise answers to something outside itself. And that outside authority might define its criteria in ways that experts find appalling: a patient prefers to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and die in his 70s rather than abstain and die in his 90s. The public prefers a candidate the experts detest. But as long as the principal-agent relationship is clear, the expert's duty is to fulfill the principal's orders in good faith, or else persuade him to change his objectives--or simply to resign. Persuasion is most apt to succeed if it takes the form of demonstrating what good may come of following expert advice. Haranguing one's employer about his stupidity is, most of the time, absurd.
If defenders of policy expertise are unhappy with the decision that the voting public made in 2016, they must make the case that the public's own ends would be better served by following experts' advice. That, however, requires emotional intuition of a kind that experts have lately lacked. The public's aims are vague and psychologically subjective. The experts of today are trained to have contempt for vagueness and subjectivism. Ironically, this makes them extremely inept advocates for themselves, like the accused criminal who acts as his own attorney and decides to rant against the judge and jury.
Looking not only at the election of Donald Trump but also at the election of Barack Obama as a candidate of "hope and change," at the rise of the Tea Party, and at the sizeable minority of Democrats who support Bernie Sanders, one can make an educated guess about the voting public's judgment. The common denominators here suggest unhappiness with the expert-devised, expert-implemented foreign and economic policies of the recent past. The Trump and Obama elections indicate voters are open to more than one kind of alternative. Yet defenders of expertise generally offer not alternatives but excuses: fresh justifications for what the public has scorned. If policy experts wish to be esteemed again, they must serve not their own preferred ends, but those of the people they disdain.
0 Comments