Welcome to the Party, Pal (cont'd)

Nate Silver discovers a problem with our expert class.

Welcome to the party, pal.

Nate Silver is worried about experts, and their dubious performance and questionable actual expertise. Where would he have gotten that idea?

Well. I was writing about this stuff long before Nate got hip. Back in 2017, just as Donald Trump began his first term, I wrote The Suicide of Expertise, by way of responding to Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise. Nichols’ thesis was that the experts were expert, but that ignorant, superstitious Americans rejected their advice out of insecurity and an unwillingness to be proven wrong. My response was that the experts’ actual track record wasn’t looking so good:

Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.

But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.

It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.

And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty. . . .

On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.

It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.

And this was long before the experts’ ne plus ultra of failure, the bungled, dishonest, and downright self-serving response to the Covid pandemic. The pandemic stemmed from experts’ arrogance, in the form of illegal “gain of function” research funded by the U.S. and laundered through Chinese labs, was met with ass-covering “wet market” lies to try to conceal that origin, and then with public health measures, such as lockdowns and social distancing and masking rules, that were backed by no actual science at all, and that were cheerfully flouted by those propounding them whenever it suited their purposes. The final nail in the experts’ authority-coffin, though, was when, after all the lockdown hysteria, they approved massive public marches by Black Lives Matter because, we were told, racism was a public health problem.

Well, so are STDs, but they weren’t encouraging anyone to march against gonorrhea.

Rather they were (ab)using their position to promote the leftist cause du jour. Everyone saw through it, and their stock collapsed.

So. Welcome to the party, pal. Nate’s noticing just how far things have gone downhill.

But if you zoom out the lens, 2024 was in some ways more shocking than 2016 — and much more of a middle finger to the expert class. In 2016, progressive institutionalist types could at least console themselves by saying the public didn’t know what it would be getting with Trump, and might have had some natural desire to experiment when the alternative was Hilary Clinton, the unpopular avatar of the technocratic status quo. Well, this time around, the public saw what it got with Trump — including the pandemic, January 6, and all those crimes and misdemeanors — and decided it liked it better than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In the national exit poll, 52 percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance from his first term in office, compared to 42 percent for Biden.

Yes, that’s what got Nate’s attention. The experts weren’t just losing, they were dragging the Democrats down with them. (And I suspect public opinion on “the pandemic, January 6, and all those crimes and misdemeanors” was colored by doubt that those made Trump look as bad as the expert class kept maintaining, given that all three were basically expert-class creations.) The postwar academic/media/bureaucratic ruling class is in trouble. “Its institutions serve the public increasingly poorly — but it’s also increasingly losing politically.”

Well, it deserves to. By its fruit the tree is known, and the fruits of our ruling class, which has long based its authority on an assumed, and increasingly implausible, expertise have not been impressive. The election of 2024, as Silver rightly notes, represents a repudiation of those failures. As Joel Kotkin notes, the working class, having ceded much political power to the experts in the postwar era, is taking that power back. And there are signs that this may be happening elsewhere, as, for example, Germans grow restive under the economic calamities wrought by green energy policies that are popular with the laptop classes, but that wreck the fortunes of farmers and factory workers.

And it’s a good that the working class is taking power back. Leaving aside the undemocratic nature of technocracy, technocracy has failed the ultimate in technocratic tests: It doesn’t work. Putting “smart” – which turns out to mean “credentialed” – people in charge of everything, and letting them run things with no real constraints except the blinkered and self-serving opinions of other members of their social class, has turned out not to work very well. Whether in agriculture or in governance, monocultures are unstable, and our ruling class monoculture has been a narrow and increasingly incestuous one. Its performance has failed to justify its existence.

Goodbye and good riddance.