How far can a government go in harming its own people before it loses support? And what does it mean if this form of harm happens via an attack on public knowledge institutions, from universities to meteorological services, in which expert knowledge is hosted? Even if you are not a friend of such institutions (and one could write many blogposts about what they could do better), isn’t there a basic sense in which they fulfill public functions in modern societies that should receive cross-partisan support? And shouldn’t there be some kind of recognition, on the part of lay people – which we all are, in the overwhelming majority of areas – that we need to trust the expertise of others for many public and private decisions?
A few months ago, Matteo Santarelli from the University of Bologna had kindly invited me for a workshop on my book Citizen Knowledge. I got a set of excellent comments and questions from a number of colleagues. But one line of the discussion in particular stayed with me and has bugged me since, as the attack by the Trump administration on universities and other expert institutions unfolds in the US.** It came out in the second half of the workshop, when Maria Regina Brioschi and Chiara Loschi gave their comments (kudos to them!).
One question that I had discussed in my book, and which has become ever more salient with the second Trump administration, is the relation between “normal citizens” and “experts”. In the book, I had proposed a “partnership model” of mutual responsibility between society and expert communities. But as Maria Regina rightly pointed out, there might really be different logics between scientific inquiry and everyday experience, and it might require more thought what it actually means to translate between scientific expertise and the lived experiences of lay people. Matteo brought in some arguments from Geertz about the ways in which elements of scientific inquiry can become part of common sense, but then do not function according to a scientific logic anymore. But at least, one might say, this is a way in which lay people come to integrate certain fundamental facts about the world from science into their own belief systems.
However, Chiara had also raised the issue that second Trump administration had started a huge onslaught on many forms of expertise, for example cutting down sources of information from the Center of Disease Control. This points to a second way in which expert knowledge functions in society, and which had often functioned relatively undisturbed: via channels between expert institutions, e.g. centralized health institutions and local hospitals. And whether or not they might have “trust in experts” in an abstract sense, many people follow the advice of medical stuff in a local hospital. They may not be aware of it, but in this way expert knowledge benefits them in very concrete ways, e.g. if a new therapy becomes available for a sick family member.
Which means that one can expect some “when the rubber hits the road moments”: what will happen if Trump voters interact with medical staff who tell them that they cannot offer them optimal treatment anymore because the government has shut down certain sources of information, or the development of new drugs has been stopped for lack of funding? To put it polemically: How many measle epidemics will it take before it might dawn upon people that these kinds of anti-expert policies harm them, and that the life and health of their families are at stake?
On my optimistic days, I think that we cannot be very far from the day when a majority of Trump voters sees how disastrous such policies are. This might happen via the route of medical expertise, or it might happen if Trump ignores expert views on the relation between tariffs and inflation, or in many other ways. This could lead to an electoral land shift away from Trump, and maybe, as a consequence, some major shakeup of the party landscape.
On my pessimistic days, I think that at least two other kinds of scenarios might then play out. Scenario 1 is that individuals in such a situation will prioritize their allegiance to camp Trump even over their own bodily interests. Maybe the administration will “help” them by providing an alternative explanation, e.g. scapegoating particular groups in society for the ills people experience (“the immigrants brought the measles”).
Scenario 2 is that even if individuals, on the ground, get it, and are angry and disappointed with the government, they will not have any media for sharing their grievances, because all corporate and social media that they are aware off are in camp Trump. Scenario 1 and 2 might also function in some kind of combination, to quell whatever resistance to Trump’s anti-expert policies might arise.
At the same time, and to move to a meta-level: I feel uncomfortable about the “now see what you did to yourself” flavor of my arguments. It smacks of a kind of arrogance that is precisely why a lot of resentment against expertise arose in the first place, I guess. People do not like being patronized and being told what’s good for them. If they perceive this as an attack on their dignity, they might resist it, even in cases in which this might save their life and health.
So, in the imagined scenario between a doctor and a Trump voter, I’m torn between decrying the latter’s unwillingness to see how their own interests are being harmed by Trump’s policies – and admiring, in a strange way, the willingness to put one’s own dignity even beyond one’s own interest, in the sense that one does not want to be patronized by someone who (one thinks) looks down upon one’s own values and lifestyle.
There must be ways for bringing the message that we all need the expertise of others across that avoid the perception of this being an arrogant attack on one’s dignity. There must be ways of creating meaningful relations between experts and citizens that avoid this. I don’t know what the best way is, but I am certain that it involves a great dose of epistemic humility on the part of experts, and probably a lot of effort to leave the ivory tower, to the places where people can be met personally. It might also involve, in the long term, a repositioning of expert institutions, with more openness towards parts of the public who currently feel alienated from them.
Or are (some?) Trump voters in a space in which all claims to expertise, simply as such, are already perceived as an attack on their dignity? Then some versions of the negative scenarios become all the more likely. Let’s hope that this is not the case!
** I do not mean to say that this is the most horrible aspect of what the Trump government is doing. I can’t even start to make a list of all the things that are far worse. Many are normatively completely overdetermined, and the question is not how to analyze them philosophically, but how to resist them most effectively…
{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
Ken_L 05.19.25 at 7:27 am
From my observations of public discourse in the USA, partisan divisiveness and the need to champion “our” side of an argument while pouring scorn on “their” side has come to infect virtually any issue about which differing points of view exist. One could, for example, construct a complex flow chart to illustrate the way right-wing detestation of Al Gore led to dismissal of the reality of global warming along with countless subsidiary positions such as fossil fuels good, renewables bad; EVs are rubbish (even Elon’s); Greta Thunberg is a horrible person; climate scientists (sorry “scientists”) have engaged in a massive conspiracy in order to facilitate One World Government; and so on.
While I believe the MAGA movement has been largely responsible for this sorry state of affairs, we liberals have not been totally innocent. There has been a tendency to take very rigid positions about transgender issues, immigration and education, for example, simply because they stand in stark contrast to MAGA dogma. Nuance or admissions that MAGA people have points worth considering often attract a torrent of condemnation for letting the side down.
It’s hard to see how expert findings and opinions will do anything in this environment other than be used as tools in the broader fight. There’s an article in an academic journal that finds limited evidence Ivermectin reduced the average hospitalisation times of Covid patients? Science proves Fauci a fraud and a liar! But this article finding children of same sex parents suffer no significant disadvantages compared to others? Social science is nothing but woke drivel!
Consequently I believe it’s a lost cause trying to change the minds of committed MAGA cultists, and a waste of time trying. They are simply impervious to rational argument. They will and do seize on even the most idiotic talking points to dismiss hard evidence that does not conform to their predetermined narrative. And that really is the kernel of the issue: for zealots, the narrative comes first. Evidence and logic are selectively introduced afterwards to validate it, and dismissed if they don’t.
The challenge for the academy is to maintain the trust of the non-zealots. Unfortunately they also tend to be the people who have the least interest in conventional means of disseminating knowledge. I admire those who persist in looking for ways to meet this difficult challenge.
engels 05.19.25 at 9:31 am
I think there are two sides to this and the “Brahmin left” (to use Piketty’s term) has become more authoritarian about (their own and others) credentialed expertise than they were when I was younger. As I’m too lazy to defend this seriously right now some trivial straws in the wind might be the obsession some academics have with lay people addressing them by their academic titles or the rising quotient of expert “explainers” in the Guardian to actual news (“how to garden/have sex/watch TV: a fellow at the Centre for Gardening/Sex/TV explains”…) So it’s not true to say that “people have had enough of experts”: the issue of expertise has become polarised (this doesn’t make the two sides equivalent of course).
Chris Mack 05.19.25 at 10:13 am
Haven’t we already answered this question? The US COVID response strongly supports pessimism.
MisterMr 05.19.25 at 10:35 am
I think we should distinguish “expertise” in general, where e.g. if I have a problem with plumbing I’ll call a plumber who is an “expert” about plumbing, and the kind of expertise we expect from academics/intellectuals, with populist voters only opposing the second (and also only when it goes against their beliefs).
But I’m not sure how to distinguish between the two other than “one is academic and the other is not”, that is a bit circular (why plumbing is not something academic?).
J, not that one 05.19.25 at 12:54 pm
I’ve seen attitudes towards expertise change a great deal since I finished college in 1987, not only (or even primarily) among less educated people, but among the college-educated and those with graduate degrees (not necessarily or even primarily doctorates). I’m personally interested in questions about whether or when it’s acceptable for some specialized subgroup to view the world differently from everybody else. What I’ve found, for the most part, is scholars saying of course it isn’t, really, because it’s arrogant, and scholars saying of course it is actually arrogant but if specialists behave well it’s necessary and people shouldn’t rebel against it. This, frankly, doesn’t change the basic political situation, which is that educated people who work in communicating to the general public (particularly those who graduated from college after 1993 or so) think roughly the latter, and “MAGA” think roughly the former, and both can claim scholarly support. Something like “erudite armies clashing by candlelight” is somewhat what it feels like, except that the battle appears to be here on the beach.
I think it’s past time, unfortunately, to assume people mean what they say. If Trump supporters and others say they think the whole modern, pluralist thing is a mistake, and they’re willing to die, and have their children die, and have other people’s children die, so that they can life in a way their grandparents would have recognized and approved, let’s not say “oh they don’t understand what the consequences are.” If they say “the one thing I ask is that you don’t expect me to be aware of what people unlike me do even if my life depends on those people” or “it’s mean of you to expect those people to be aware of you and what you believe” that’s maybe what they really believe.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to tell those who disagree with them that they have to get out of the way because the world actually does really revolve around MAGA types and always has. The path going forward is not going to be gently coddling Trump supporters while they rage, so in 100 years maybe we’ll have a society that both they and academics can approve.
Robin 05.19.25 at 2:14 pm
I wouldn’t demur from the notion that expertise can be a big plus in our lives. But I think the case is a bit biassed by the recurring reference here to doctors. In other words, shouldn’t we be distinguishing between different sorts of expertise? For isn’t it the case that a great many have reacted against expertise because of what some claiming expertise have inflicted on our social lives? I’m thinking of those who claim social, economic, and political expertise, and the at least implicit, but often quite discernible injunction, ‘you should do what we say because we know best.’ That’s hardly likely to go down well in places where industries and communities have been destroyed and where nothing has been done to help remedy these situations. I guess I should add that these expert measures are occurring within a particular context, one regularly reinforced by those who claim a certain sort of expertise regarding the economic system. Which is to say, I suppose, that certain sorts of expertise are actually more political than expert, while other sorts of expertise are actually more evidently based on more objective knowledge?
steven t johnson 05.19.25 at 2:22 pm
This is a thought provoking post. But I’m so far behind it isn’t obvious to me that people have systematic belief systems. Not even sure that a truly systematic, coherent and comprehensive, belief system is even possible? And worse, it isn’t obvious to me which way razor “one does not want to be patronized by someone who (one thinks) looks down upon one’s own values and lifestyle…” cuts? The phrase “holier than thou” comes to mind unbidden.
Cranky Observer 05.19.25 at 3:57 pm
Professional residential electricians spend a good amount of their time cleaning up near disasters caused by a homeowner insisting that he can do a job himself. Which is possibly true if he reads the code handbook and an electrician training textbook carefully and follows the rules, but the persons who insist most strongly never do that for some reason – they just hack away. “But it works!” they say. Oh yeah, firefighters also spend a fair amount of time cleaning up after the ‘we don’t need an electrician’ crowd.
somebody who remembers cars running others off the road because they thought they might bring a free life saving vaccine to them 05.19.25 at 3:59 pm
one key factor that will never happen in your hypothetical is that staffers saying “there’s nothing we can do” to a suffering person will never blame DOGE, republican cuts, or any other political force. if the staffer does accidentally blurt out that a broccoli-haircut catamite from x, the everything app, replaced everyone in the office with a chatbot telling all callers to eat three rocks a day and put glue on their pizza, the person will not accept that statement as true. they will be screamed at by the person for being a democrat plant. the person will then say and believe that the cuts were not severe enough – after all, a DEMOCRAT refused to help me, a good american! the staffer will then be fired and their family will be targeted by the blue checks on x, the everything app, for torture and elimination
CHETAN R MURTHY 05.19.25 at 5:03 pm
A discussion of the attack on expertise in the US would be incomplete without including the salient counter-example: expertise in the pay of corporate masters.
During Newt Gingri(n)ch’s (sic) time, Congressional budgets for staffers were cut, and this had the effect of reducing Reps’ ability to hire and retain experts in public policy areas; as a result, more and more legislation got written by lobbyists. At the state and local level, the same thing happened via organization like ALEC, who provide read-to-pass model legislation to Republican legislators at the state level, all over the country.
And I’ll add that -nobody- is raising the alarm about these corporate shills, like they are about how and why Al Gore Is Fat.
Lameen 05.19.25 at 6:53 pm
How far can a government go in harming its own people before it loses support? And what does it mean if this form of harm happens via an attack on public knowledge institutions […] in which expert knowledge is hosted?
Sounds like a description of the dissolution of the monasteries, doesn’t it? Or – on a much more modest scale – Bourguiba’s closing of al-Zaytouna University in Tunisia. Historically, such decisions have rarely been driven by resentful voters, even if appeals were made to the wider populations. It sufficed that there was a split among “experts” with different ideas about what kind of knowledge rightly conferred that status – providing, of course, welcome opportunities to plunder those institutions’ resources.
In a functioning democracy, voters are supposed to have the last word. But as you say, they need to trust experts – who accordingly get to shape much of their decision-making. What happens when a critical mass of them are not so much distrusting experts as trusting ones unworthy of their trust?
nastywoman 05.19.25 at 7:16 pm
There is this theory that a expert in ART turned Hitler into a monster like Trump was turned by an expert of comedy into the German Robber Baron FF VON CLOWNSTICK
and so it is a very old problem of the KNOW NOTHINGS hating on the KNOW IT ALLS
and there is no way to ever solve this problem – or only by Elon Musks ‘sink’ be thrown at himself.
Peter Dorman 05.19.25 at 7:24 pm
I think there are two aspects of the OP that need to be looked at. The first is about understanding the loss of hegemony experienced by professional expertise in various fields leading up to the DOGE assault on the public sector. The second is the expected effect of these attacks on future politics.
For the first, it helps to look at it from the perspective of the Silicon Valley crowd. They think we are in the midst of an epochal change in which AI will replace most professional labor. This can be managed efficiently by the private sector, since profitability is a reliable guide to how to accomplish this. (Yes, there will be lots of mistakes, but these can be corrected.) The public sector, lacking this metric, is clueless. That’s why an outside, profit-aware force is required to wipe the slate clean and build it back up again on an AI-centric basis. The Thiel-Andreessen-Musk etc. axis is quite explicit about all this. From there we can go on to examine why they believe these things, and also why most of the ownership class in this country seems willing to go along with them, for the time being at least.
As for the second, from my reading on the history of regulation in the English-speaking world (I am generally ignorant about everywhere else), the demand for expertise did not come from the population in general, but was part of the movement for rational management, public health and the like whose roots were in the professional class but also attracted sufficient support from the wealth owners. Specifically in occupational safety and health (my home field), yes, workers demanded regulation, but the expertise aspect was not a rank and file concern. Union leaders with professional class connections were active supporters of epidemiology, toxicology, etc., however.
The relevance of this is that I don’t see how the much-mediated effects of a destruction of public expertise will in itself alter its politics. The center-left can still muster a lot of support among its “brahmin” constituency, but in the political economy we currently live in, the crucial question is whether the notion of expertise-driven rational management still has a claim on the owners and managers of capital. If AI proves to be a bubble, which I think it will, I expect that claim to be renewed.
Incidentally, the anti-professional-management movement, while strongest on the right, is not confined to it. I see the “abundance” trope moving along a parallel line—not the denigration of expertise altogether, but an argument for significantly scaling back expertise-driven management in favor of the technological revolution that will supposedly replace it.
engels 05.19.25 at 8:01 pm
Has anyone read this?
https://braveneweurope.com/taking-back-control-states-and-state-systems-after-globalism-by-wolfgang-streeck
Mike on the Internet 05.19.25 at 8:08 pm
“People do not like being patronized and being told what’s good for them.”
Some people, sure. But I don’t think this is a culturally universal truth, even within the United States. Many people, not infected with a pugnacious and absurd sense of self-sufficiency and pride, would likely be thrilled to be told what is good for them, so as to better seek their own well-being. It is “patronizing” to give knowledge to the ignorant in the same way that it is “patronizing” to give food to the hungry. The fact that some recipients resent it is more a symptom of cultural pathology than an argument against “patronizing”.
Perhaps it’s useful to reflect on the value of appropriate intellectual humility for everyone, not just experts whose advanced education and aptitudes make them susceptible to delusions of grandeur. The un-experts should also be warned away from delusions of adequacy (in specific domains). The survival of democracy may depend on it; societies based on the popular election of leaders and representatives need electors to be humble enough to recognize and vote for their betters. If electing one’s peers (or anyone who can appear “relatable” for 30 seconds at a time) is good enough, why not just dispense with parties and campaigns, and just draw lots instead.
CAYdenberg 05.19.25 at 8:33 pm
I suspect your typical swing voter would not say that we no longer need experts. They would just say that we need different ones.
The problem is that, at least channelled through the popular press, the laity gets the strong impression that experts are also victims of overzealous groupthink. This was especially true during the pandemic, and the squishy middle voters are left with the strong impression that what “experts say” will crush any public policy debate.
engels 05.19.25 at 9:20 pm
why plumbing is not something academic?
In few years it will be, and you will only be allowed to unblock toilets if you took the toilet unblocking module in your masters (fee £10000 for home students). Until it’s automated away a couple of years later.
Matthew G. Saroff 05.19.25 at 9:44 pm
I think that a lot of people who disregard experts are not doing so because they think that they know better, but because they think that experts are corrupt.
Given the degree to which (for example) big pharma has poisoned medical research, they are correct about the pervasive corruption in the lucrative scientific fields.
Alex SL 05.19.25 at 10:34 pm
Any analysis that treats “normal people” as a homogeneous group is too simplistic.
The reactions to harm caused by the Trump administration will differ depending on what subsection of “normal people” we are talking about. Two groups are the ‘problem’. First, about a third of the US population is in the grasp of a cult. If masked ICE goons comes into their house and literally take the food and medicine away from them while they watch, they will with either “I still support you, sir Mr President, of course, sir, I know you are doing what you need to do to protect our country, but could I perhaps have some of my food back?” or “this is exactly what I want to happen to other people, only I didn’t expect it to happen to me” or “I never wanted food and medicine anyway”. There are many stories like these going around in recent weeks; cult members who lost their government jobs or had their spouses deported who still cannot admit the cult leader may not be a nice person. The best case is always that they temporarily realise that what they experienced is unfair, but it is only unfair because it happened to them, they never see it as something that should not happen to anybody.
Second, about another third of the US population is so poorly informed and has such goldfish-like memories that it doesn’t matter how badly they are hurt, they will not understand what is going on and how they could vote to signal their displeasure. Most of them vaguely think that Trump just bought Norway and made Bitcoin legal tender, but they will not understand that his administration will have been responsible for Medicaid cuts, in the same way and for the same reason that my cat doesn’t understand how our air conditioning unit works. Some of them likely think Hillary Clinton is president. (Note that I make no claims that this phenomenon is unique to the USA. I sometimes randomly think back to an interview with a British voter who was convinced that Labour had been in government during the Cameron and May years because her local MP was Labour.)
The first group cannot be convinced, and “don’t you realise your mistake” is not going to work on them. Regardless of whether the USA becomes a totalitarian dictatorship for a generation or returns to something more resembling the status quo ante, these particular voters will keep hitting themselves in the face with a frying pan until they die. The only hope that the next generation will contain fewer of them.
The second group could be convinced, and I believe “don’t you realise your mistake” could work with them because voting Trump isn’t part of their identity. However, there is nobody sufficiently competent and prominent or influential who even tries to inform them. We do not have something like the labour movement of 100-150 years ago that systematically tried to educate themselves after having been failed by the school system. We have influencers with the incentive to say what gets the most clicks, and that structure reinforces ignorance and strong emotions.
Finally, even if you can convince enough people to organise a backlash against the dismantling of the USA in favour of a few oligarchs, what is the realistic best-case outcome? Four years of Democratic administration that stresses bipartisanship, that fails to jail Trump and the goons who illegally abducted innocent people, that fails to expropriate Musk and Murdoch, that tries some half-hearted improvements but then says “okay, I guess that’s that” when opposed by the supreme court or one filibustering senator, and in 2032 MAGA is back under its new leader because low-information swing voters are disillusioned.
John Quiggin 05.19.25 at 11:40 pm
It’s useful to distinguish attitudes to expertise from attitudes to truth. The anti-vaxxer who “does their own research” may sincerely believe that the experts are either incompetent or in the pay of Big Pharma. There’s no easy way around this, except to wait for people to learn from experience.
But the great majority of Trump supporters believe, or profess to believe, false claims where expertise isn’t relevant, for example the claim that the 2020 election was stolen. And they have seen Trump tell easily checkable lies thousands of times over. Quite simply, as Al Gore put it, they prefer comfortable lies to inconvenient truths.
mw 05.19.25 at 11:47 pm
I hesitate to comment on this here because I suspect this may be one of those “fish don’t realize they’re wet” scenarios, but my sense is that the deliberate, intentional (almost exclusively leftward) politicization of academia has lead those (roughly half of US voters — give or take depending on the year) who don’t share left wing politics to develop a deep-seated distrust of credentialed experts. This trend has been building for a gneration at least, but Trump and the pandemic really supercharged it. There was an important epistemological and practical wisdom to academia endeavoring to confine itself to an apolitical pursuit of truth (just as there was in the press and permanent bureaucracy from trying to do the same in their domains). Perhaps we’ll return to that someday, but I’m not yet optimistic.
To get a sense of how this looks to non-leftists, consider the libertarian-leaning economist Arnold Kling who has written a long series of ‘Road to Sociology Watch’ posts discussing his sense that Economics is well on it’s way to becoming as thoroughly left-wing as Sociology. For example:
The bad thing is that the profession is rapidly becoming as extreme left as sociology. (Johnny) Cochrane is 64. I think his is the last generation of economists to include a significant libertarian or conservative cohort. When they’re gone, there will be no one left in top tier economics departments to make the case for markets or for politically neutral research.
The point isn’t whether or not he’s right. The point is that this is how the world appears to him (and people like him). And keep in mind that he’s certainly not an anti-intellectual or a Trump fan. Not only that, but the problems have recently deepened in the US with the publication of Original Sin. Non-leftists are unlikely to believe that concealing Biden’s deterioration was carried out exclusively by a small cadre of White House insiders and that all of the hard-nosed expert journalists in the respectable press were universally bamboozled (‘shocked, shocked to discover …’). And now we find out that Biden has advanced prostate cancer that he allegedly did not have in November — a claim that is not quite impossible, but not very plausible.
But let me finish one on positive note — one of those swallows that does not make summer. Maybe, just maybe, Trump cornering the political market on protectionism (and lately even price controls) will lead the left back toward economic (and maybe even other forms?) of liberalism? Or at least an alliance of convenience with liberals. An old guy can hope anyway.