How America Lost Faith in Expertise (2017)

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.