culture
politics

Mistrust of Experts, Donald Trump, and Politics Today

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

Tom Nichols

U.S. Naval War College

May 4th, 2020
At the very outset, you conflate “experts” with “policymakers.” This is a common way of excusing both the public and their elected officials from any responsibility for self-government.
It is in fact rare that experts and policymakers are the same thing, just as it is rare that expertise and policy are the same thing. A doctor can tell you that smoking will shorten your life. Policymakers, elected by all of us, must decide whether to support legislation based on that expertise to prohibit smoking in public places.
It seems to me that what you are really criticizing here is the refusal of experts to affirm the judgment of the political majority. “In any principal-agent relationship,” you write, “the principal's satisfaction, not the agent's, is what counts.”
This is a transactional notion of expertise, and it is both wrong and unhealthy. It is the same mindset that regards college students as “clients” whose satisfaction must override the judgment of the professionals who must educate them. It is the Peter Navarro school of expertise, in which – as Navarro has said – the expert’s job is to affirm the president’s “intuition.”
That’s not how any of this works.
Yes, if called upon to execute the wishes of a principal, experts should do their best or quit. I have faced such situations in which I was called upon to execute what I thought was a bad policy, and I did what experts should do: I wrote out a plan, along with the likely costs and problems that would arise from following it. Sometimes I was heeded, other times I was told to get on with it.
But either way, I was not required to add: “And I think this is a great idea because enough people wanted it.”
Expert judgment is “expert” precisely because its precepts do not respond to opinions. The greatest responsibility of every expert is to speak truth to power – whether that is to a political leader or to society as a whole. “Expert” is not a job, it’s a profession, in the best sense of that word.
The fact that the public doesn’t know what it wants makes that profession harder. You describe the public’s wants as vague and subjective, but it’s far worse than that. The public, in general, has no idea what policies it wants other than the classics of peace and prosperity. We know from experiments, for example, that when we switch the names of policies and political leaders around, voters will change their minds in order to stay aligned with leaders rather than policies. That’s no way to run a republic.
“Does the patient know best,” you ask, “whether he or she is sick?” Doctors will tell you that patients often do not, in fact, know if they are sick. And in a society riven by willful ignorance and narcissistic demands for affirmation, “majoritarian approval” does not mean “good government,” and it is never the job of an expert to say so.
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