Are You Tired of Experts?
10th February 2021
I sure am.
What, after all, is a professional politician if he is not a supposed expert, first in the business of getting himself elected to office, and second in the art of statecraft that competent governance requires? Before 2016, expertise in politics was expected and admired by the American electorate, as Americans admired expertness in every other occupation. In electing Trump voters were expressing their distrust — indeed, their contempt and positive dislike — for the professional political wizards who had transformed their country beyond recognition over the past half-century, in the process half-destroying it. But because political expertise has been merged in modern activist-progressive democracies with techno-scientific-bureaucratic expertise, expertise as a concept — even as a word — has been discredited along with expertness of the political kind, to the point where this overworked nine-letter word is close to becoming the popular equivalent of a four-letter one.