Blog

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

This past week, The Atlantic ran an excellent, helpful, and important piece by David Zweig, excerpted from his forthcoming book An Abundance of Caution, which is, at least superficially, about the coronavirus pandemic and the school closures it prompted. Zweig denies that it is about the pandemic specifically, saying that it is, rather, about “the failure of the expert class.” Whatever the case, Zweig is unsparing in his criticism:

The main point of Zweig’s case is that the so-called expert class was not particularly expert in this instance, which is to say that the damage it did was predictable and therefore preventable. Those in charge, whom we were all urged constantly to “trust,” were either ignorant of existing literature warning of the consequences of the actions they were taking or arrogant enough to think that they could produce outcomes different from those previously forecast. 

In the end, the “experts” failed the nation and especially its children, who suffered disproportionately from their arrogance.

Zweig is right, almost inarguably, and I look forward to reading his book. Nevertheless, I would take his case even a step further, suggesting that the problem is bigger than an arrogant and out-of-touch expert class. The problem, rather, is the largely unique American tradition that insists that expertise and politics must be distinct from one another, and that when they clash, the narrowness of expertise must take precedence over the girth and depth of the democratic crowd.

The COVID pandemic is not the first time that the American people have been let down and dragged down a dark road by their purportedly brilliant experts. Indeed, the defining event of the Baby Boom generation is, perhaps, the greatest (though hardly the only) example of previous “failures of the expert class.”

Americans’ faith in experts and the expert class likely hit its zenith in the 1950s, a decade in which almost anything seemed possible. America had defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. It had rescued Europe from its war and the post-war destruction. It was strong and tough and, of course, it possessed the brightest scientists and the mightiest weapons in all of human history.

On his best-known solo album, The Nightfly, Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen reminisced about those days and the promise they held. For example, in “I.G.Y.,” he muses:

The I, the G, and the Y in the title of Fagen’s song refer to the “International Geophysical Year,” which was an 18-month-long scientific exchange celebration that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. The project was meant to take advantage of a reprieve in Cold War tensions to demonstrate to the world how science could produce lasting peace and harmony. The Soviets spoiled the peace and harmony bit by launching Sputnik three months later, sooner than the Americans could launch their satellite propelled by the rockets of Project Vanguard. In a fitting twist to the utopian agitprop of the IGY project, in response to Sputnik and to Vanguard’s failures, the United States turned, at last, to one of its greatest “experts” on rocket design, the erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun.

Of course, most Americans didn’t know about Braun, and so their illusions about the “experts” remained unshattered. In 1960, they elected a man and an administration that would come to epitomize the hope and the faith they placed in their experts. David Halberstam put it as follows in his classic The Best and the Brightest:

As the Fates and Nemesis would have it, however, it was the best and brightest who, in their arrogance and insularity, eventually shattered the expertise illusion with their debacle in Vietnam. Again, Halberstam wrote:

The battle between the “rule of experts” and the rule of the people dates, like most of the dreadful battles in our society, to the dawn of the Progressive Era and the musings of Richard Ely and Woodrow Wilson. The expert class they envisioned proved to be a disaster, just as the Best and the Brightest did—and just as the health and education experts did during COVID.

As I say, the problem here isn’t expertise per se. Expertise is invaluable, obviously. Rather, the problem is the belief that expertise conveys both infallibility and moral superiority and, therefore, should—always and everywhere—be considered superior to the will of the people. Again, this is an artifact of Progressivism, and as important and insightful as books like David Zweig’s may be, they will not alter the dysfunctional operation of our system until we address this original sin.