The Death of the Expert Class

All true but so incredibly slow. Not an expert in sight to explain what’s happening, leaving Trump to unravel this, veeeeery sloooowly by himself.

This is a result of wiping out the very class of experts who are not political operatives. There should be people who provide expertise in their highly specialized field without using this as an opportunity to foist their political opinions on everybody. Such experts used to exist. One example is Philip Bobbitt from whom I first found out about the hollowing out of the nation-state by neoliberalism. He advised several US presidents on the subject.

Nobody can be knowledgeable on everything. The world is complicated and is not growing any simpler. There should be experts. People who love what they do more than they love their often inane political opinions. But we left the age of Philip Bobbitt and entered the era of Timothy Snyder, a brilliant historian who abandoned the discipline in which he was the brightest star and became a dime-a-dozen political operator.

People often say that COVID killed the idea of a trustworthy expert class. This is entirely untrue. The people who lied to us were not the experts but the bureaucrats and the journalists. The entirety of my knowledge of what COVID actually was came from the habit of reading one scientific study per day in the first few months and per week later on. The experts were always extremely helpful. Real science revealed the truth. Real science made it abundantly clear by April 15, 2020 that children were at no risk. By mid-May of 2020, real science made it clear that, unless you were elderly, morbidly obese or extremely unwell, you weren’t going to die of COVID. So no, experts did not fail.

Leaving that aside, it’s tragic that there’s nobody to advise Trump on such things as the Russo-Ukrainian war. He’s figuring it out but at a snail’s pace because it’s not an easy topic and nobody should be expected to understand it without learning a lot of the backstory.