The Loathing of Expertise
In making claims that have no basis in science, Trump also tapped into the zeitgeist against experts and proclaimed expertise.
The loathing against expertise has been a common refrain among Americans for some
time. As far back as 1962, Michael Oakeshott skeptically referred to as the “rationalization of politics,” a “technique of the book” learned in graduate school by the newly trained professional administrator and applied to a series of political endeavors meant to usher in the new society of longitudinal studies and social engineering.30 This claim anticipated and ultimately mirrored concerns expressed by many in American society that U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was trained at UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School and who was responsible for the institution of systems analysis (which later developed into the discipline of policy analysis), was responsible for both the escalation of the war in Vietnam and its ultimate failure.
Today, both conservatives and liberals criticize intellectuals – particularly Ivy League elites. It is an ironic position to say the least, as many of the already mentioned conservative members of the Supreme Court are Ivy League graduates who believe they are better capable of making highly technical medical decisions than doctors and/or other medical experts.
But conservative columnist David Brooks takes it a bit further. He argues that “Donald Trump surged back into power with the support of millions of high-school-educated voters who are furious at the college-educated elite.” Brooks puts the blame at a well-meaning attempt, started by Conant, the president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, “who set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria
centered on brainpower … namely, a system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.” This attempt ended up effectively segregating America by intelligence, an intelligence that was defined in a very specific and narrow way: “the ability to perform well in academic settings and standardized testing.”
The consequence was students who had these skills were admitted into elite universities and then funneled into jobs at the commanding heights of society—in finance, law, government, and media, and atop large corporations.” Equally, “they married other people with these skills, invested massively in their children, who then went off to the same elite universities.” As Brooks says, “presto—you’ve got an inherited caste system.” Brooks concluded:
The diploma divide isn’t only a political divide. It’s a social divide. High-school-educated people die eight years younger than college-educated people, on average. They are much more likely to perish from opioid addiction, to have children out of wedlock, to be obese, to say they have no close friends. The academic-performance gap between kids who come from affluent families and those who come from less affluent families is greater than the academic gap between white and Black students in the age of Jim Crow.31
Does it matter? Apparently, it does.
Trump's cabinet picks were chosen not only because they supported Trump and his agenda wholeheartedly, but because their inexperience plays into anti-intellectualism and the loathing of expertise.
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