
How America Lost Faith in Expertise (2017) - rosser
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise
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calais
A trend that seems implicated in what Nichols reports but that he doesn't
touch on much is the secularization of identity. Expertise is much more
threatening to people's egos as people come to identify with things that
didn't develop to function (as religion did) as a wellspring of identity.

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PaulHoule
America's foreign policy "experts" have long been the worst of the worst. Look
how few of them stood up against the Second Gulf War. I read a book in the
1980s that said exactly how that war was going to play out and you know, it
did.

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wahern
Plenty of foreign policy experts, perhaps _most_ , were against the war.

IMO, one of the primary reasons why America has lost faith in experts is
because most "experts" on television and lobbying Congress are anything but
experts. They didn't study foreign affairs in college, have professional
experience in the foreign service, nor have any other sort of substantial
foreign affairs expertise (e.g. running major NGO). If they have any bone
fides at all, it's typically via a series of political appointments.
(Unfortunately, the ones who come out the other side of a political
appointment chastened aren't the ones that get tapped for advice or
commentary, especially on politically charged topics.)

What these lobbyists and pundits tend to do is echo the most radical
ideologues in the scholarly community, particularly those whose theories
nominally justify partisan political policies. The archetypical example is the
cult behind Arthur Laffer. To most professional economists the namesake Laffer
Curve is an obvious and largely uninteresting illustration of the relationship
between taxation and market deadweight loss. All it does is beg the question
of _where_ the optimal point is. Laffer's substantive policies are radical and
the vast majority of economists don't take them seriously. But to Republican
politicians and the GOP platform Laffer lends their policies scholarly
credibility, at least in the eyes of non-experts. But because Laffer's and
Laffer-justified policies are manifestly broken in a way that is readily
apparent, that has had the effect of making many people skeptical of experts.

The same thing happens on the left, particularly wrt to various theories about
race, gender, and cultural identity more generally, not to mention poverty and
crime. I don't mean to equivocate because I think the problem is much worse on
the conservative side of the spectrum. There's a reason those Democrats, like
Hillary Clinton, who bought into the Iraq War are considered "hawkish"\--i.e.
conservative--in foreign affairs. OTOH, it was leftist academics who seemed to
have begun the scholarly trend of rejecting empiricism and skepticism in favor
of radical ideologies. Among other things, radicalism is helpful for careers
in academia, in ways similar if not identical to the dynamics of publication
and citation in science. Beginning in the latter part of the 20th century
conservative scholarship adopted these tactics and brought them into the
mainstream of political culture in a way that hadn't happened before.

The fact of the matter is that American culture, particularly political
culture, has historically been relatively conservative, so it's not a
condemnation of conservatism per se to say that it was conservative
politicians that brought radicalism into the mainstream. It couldn't have been
any other way. In other countries with more liberal-leaning political cultures
its of course the leftist parties that usher in radicalism.

~~~
calais
Goldwater, in particular, brought a greater skepticism of expertise to
American conservatism, which has come to define it.

~~~
wahern
Goldwater, Buckley... yeah, you can trace a lot of the our modern dynamics
quite far. These people brought intellectual gravitas to mainstream
conservative politics, giving it a voice and modus operandi.

