The Expertocracy

But by the lights of the American news media, ours is a nation teeming with experts of every variety, a nation dominated and governed by experts: an expertocracy. You could probably chart its rise by documenting the spread not of the word expert, but of its rough equivalent, the word professional. At one time there were only three professions: law, medicine, and the church; the word “profession” signified the solemn declaration or promise you made in order to practice in these fields. Now the term is synonymous with livelihood or even job. So everybody is a professional—an expert—at the thing he or she happens to do from 8:30 to 5 on weekdays.

Whatever can be studied and done well must also be an area of expertise, a specialized field requiring degrees and licenses and institutional protection. Hence the spread of licensure in most states’ regulatory codes. In my state of South Carolina, for instance, there are quiet efforts, which sooner or later will succeed, to require licenses for music therapists and locksmiths, and for decades you’ve needed a license to earn income by cutting someone’s hair. These codes are put in place in the name of “public safety,” but many, if not most, are dreamed up by practitioners of these activities—the music therapists and locksmiths and barbers—simply to limit competition from those willing to perform the services for less money. But what sort of mindset must one adopt in order to believe that your barber should have to be certified by the state before he or she takes scissors to your hair?

Then, of course, there are the universities—institutions that turn out credentialed experts, or pre-experts, in a constantly multiplying array of disciplines and sub-disciplines, many of which were invented solely, it would seem, for the purpose of training experts to train more experts. You can earn postgraduate degrees in public relations, retailing, and risk management. (Risk management is more commonly known as insurance.) You can earn a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a doctorate in a field called hospitality tourism—degrees enabling you to manage hotels with various levels of expertise.

There are a few overlapping phenomena in what I’m describing, all of them more or less regrettable—the rise of credentialism, the hegemony of higher education, hyper-specialization in academic discourse, and so on. Underlying them is the propensity to apply the concept of expertise where it doesn’t belong, and concomitantly to trust those deemed “experts,” not on a basis of sound arguments or a record of success, but because of an institutional imprimatur.

There’s a case to be made that expertise, especially expert knowledge of particular subjects, has come under attack by the forces of postmodern relativism and general cultural dissolution. Many of us have read with horror the words of apparently literate people—I’m thinking especially of the commenters beneath web articles—who feel no shame in fulminating at length on subjects of which they are utterly ignorant. And then there are the shockingly stupid pronouncements on political subjects by celebrities who show no awareness that those subjects might have more than one dimension. Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, expressed the apprehensions arising from this unhappy trend in a sharp 2014 essay for The Federalist website—”The Death of Expertise”—in which he lamented “a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers.”

So popular was the essay that Nichols turned it into a book, recently published by Oxford University Press under the same title. The Death of Expertise is a highly readable and entertaining broadside against a cultural trend toward the rejection, as the author thinks it is, of all forms of expertise. Not coincidentally, Nichols was a fierce critic of Donald Trump from the beginning of his candidacy, and judging from its Amazon sales rankings the book has touched a nerve among people who worry about the new administration’s attitude toward experts and professionals.

One problem with Nichols’s argument, though, is that he does not distinguish between areas of study and activity that lend themselves to expertise and those that don’t. In his introduction, for instance, he explains that the division of labor is what allows our society to produce enormous wealth and complexity and beauty.

Surely, though, there is a categorical difference between expertise in glazing and expertise in, say, foreign policy or housing policy. There is a right way and a wrong way to mount a glass panel onto a building; the subject admits of very little argument. Maybe there are technical aspects of glazing over which glaziers disagree among themselves, but this is not an area in which there would seem to be a lot of room for views or interpretations or schools of thought. Glaziers don’t establish magazines around “isms” or hold conferences with grandiose thematic titles.

It makes sense, in other words, to apply the idea of expertise to tasks that require high levels of technical knowledge and manual skill. But to call a foreign policy official or a sociologist an “expert” sounds like an attempt to cut off an argument. There is an unearned peremptoriness about the word—if he’s an expert, who are you to say he’s wrong?—and it often fits badly in more abstract and conceptual areas of activity that need argument and counterargument in order to flourish. Government policy is such an area: diffuse and often imprecise and, like a soft science, in need of interpretation and persuasive expression.

It’s hard to see how the concept of expertise is appropriate in a field in which the most influential figures consistently take contrary positions. If two “experts” in education policy disagree with each other on fundamental questions, one of them must be basically right, one of them basically wrong. Yet the latter is deemed as much an “expert” as the former: The news media and our political institutions defer to both of them.

The courts have been forced to grapple with the issue of expertise, since legal battles can quickly degenerate into displays of dueling expert testimony; in Khumo Tire v. Carmichael (1999), for example, the Supreme Court unanimously gave judges wider discretion in, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it, excluding “expertise that is fausse and science that is junky.” In the political sphere, by contrast, it’s much harder to place meaningful limits on expert opinion. Indeed, for most Americans, it’s hard even to know what expertise is. What they do know is that the entire apparatus of the federal government is run by people with impressive academic degrees and extensive specialized experience—by people who, in 2008, brought the nation to the brink of economic disaster and, over the last half-century, put the government nearly $20 trillion in debt; by people who were allotted billions for the eradication of poverty but failed to do much of anything beyond the creation of a few expensive and inextinguishable government agencies; by people who claimed to know how to lower the cost of medical care but managed to raise it dramatically.

Americans might wonder, understandably, what the point of all this peremptory expertise is supposed to be. They’ve grown weary of watching highly credentialed experts of all kinds assert major claims about consequential government policies, get those claims spectacularly wrong, and return a few months later to assert yet more claims, their credibility seemingly undiminished.

These people saw and heard something in Donald Trump that, maybe, despite qualms about his obvious failings, they rather liked. They heard someone who, whether he’s right or wrong on the point at issue, literally doesn’t care what a phalanx of experts says about it. Trump’s rise to power is as much an epistemological phenomenon as a political one: an insistence that experts in the realm of policy and politics only have the authority to tell us what the facts are, not how to interpret them. It’s a declaration of war on the American expertocracy.

The first stage of the war was Trump’s campaign. His was everything political strategists would have told him a winning campaign can’t be. Compared to the consultant-driven bid of Ted Cruz, a notoriously disciplined campaigner and strategist, Trump had no strategy other than to get in front of as many people as he could and talk about whatever he wanted to talk about—which was usually something about how the people who’ve run the United States for a generation were total losers and, all their prestige and smooth talk notwithstanding, didn’t know what they were doing.

The Trump campaign, despite all its slapstick zaniness and allegedly catastrophic missteps, made fools of those who claim to be, and derive large incomes from being, experts in the art of politics. The experts got it wrong because—to put it plainly—you can’t be an expert in politics. Politics is an area of human activity in which most of the rules of success aren’t rules at all because they change from place to place and from day to day; what works at one time for one candidate won’t work in any other circumstances. The main requirements to succeed in politics are fortuitous timing (also known as luck), an ability to exploit connections and raise money, and a tacit feel for what voters might respond to at the moment.

Since his victory, Trump has mounted a brutal assault on Washington’s culture of expertise. He’s hired some experts, to be sure, but he has also appointed people to key positions who, whatever their capabilities, do not speak the language of the agencies over which they have authority. He has done this, I assume, deliberately. Ben Carson, now the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, never pretended to know much about housing policy. The current secretary of the Department of Energy, former Texas governor Rick Perry, once said he thought the agency should be abolished, so foreign is he to the customs of energy policymaking. Rex Tillerson had never been a diplomat until he was confirmed as secretary of state. In her confirmation hearings Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, simply couldn’t answer some technical questions about education policy—an inability that horrified many education specialists and news reporters but not, I suspect, most ordinary educated Americans, who, like DeVos, had little idea what the questions meant.

The experts are appalled. This was the theme of a March essay in Politico Magazine titled “Trump Takes on The Blob”—”the Blob” being a term for Washington’s foreign policy experts who do things their way and only their way, and whose traditions a succession of presidents have deferred to. Whether Trump will meet even partial success in changing the Blob is unclear, but its members certainly feel he will. They’re terrified. One of them, Tom Countryman, a Foreign Service officer with vast experience, was told by the administration to leave his post as acting undersecretary for arms control to the dismay of his colleagues. He delivered a speech at his going away party in which he remarked, as a kind of polite complaint on the way out, that foreign policy professionals should serve the administration if they can, since “a foreign policy without professionals is—by definition—an amateur foreign policy.”

There is a circularity about the remark—professionalism is good and right because it’s not its opposite—but it touches on the painful and dangerous part of this revolt against the expertocracy. Expertise, whatever it is, is bound up with experience, and experience is almost always a benefit and rarely in itself a disadvantage. Experience may be less valuable in, say, public health policy or immigration policy, fields dominated, respectively, by stultifying academic jargon and bureaucratic groupthink, but it is extremely valuable in international diplomacy. In a reaction against experts like the one we are experiencing, however, experienced professionals get thrown out along with the ideological cranks and cant-spouting careerists. As they say in the hyperbolic local car ads, everything must go.

There is more at issue here than policymaking in Washington, though that is the focal point. The expertocracy is a cultural problem as well as a political one. And it’s a cultural problem that ordinary Americans have themselves generated and inflamed—we send our children to overpriced universities, well aware that they might not actually learn anything but reasonably happy in the knowledge that they’ll at least have credentials conferred on them; we demand licenses for our own fields of work, even as we complain about the high prices that result from excessive licensure in other fields; and we stupidly believe the findings of every university-funded study to come along for the simple reason that this is what the experts say: Coffee is good for you, coffee is bad for you, no, it turns out that coffee is good for you.

Cultural problems can’t be solved by tidy and elegant formulas that fit nicely into the concluding paragraphs of essays like this one. They can only be affected by a mass revolt or declaration of war—revolution and warfare being only clumsy metaphors for the kind of gleeful havoc and antagonism we’re witnessing in the Trump movement. There are signs of a revolt outside the political order, too, especially on the home turf of America’s expertocracy, higher education. The costs of a college education are rising sharply and have been for two decades, even as college enrollment is incrementally decreasing as many Americans, rightfully dissatisfied with the product, are opting out of the whole system. The higher education “industry” (as it’s now frighteningly called) is due for a terrible reckoning.

The experts whose job it is to interpret political trends—the pollsters, pundits, and political scientists—have so far been flummoxed by the meaning of the Trump phenomenon. It’s not about policy: Trump has never been clear about what his policies are, and in any case his policy reversals don’t seem to bother his supporters. It’s not about white supremacy: The election returns don’t bear out that thesis, much to many journalists’ frustration and disappointment. And only the most tendentious commentators insist Trump’s victory was the outcome of Russian election-fixing.

What the experts haven’t yet realized is that the Trump phenomenon is ultimately about something quite simple and close to home. It’s about them. ¨

Barton Swaim is the author of The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics. He is writing a novel about political consultants.