Why have so many Americans turned against the idea of expertise in public affairs? David A. Hopkins on how the government has become increasingly reliant on experts, and experts have become increasingly influenced by politics.
This summer, Donald Trump remarked that rising sea levels might create “more oceanfront property.”
Previously, he called climate change a “hoax.” And he’s far from the only Republican who’s skeptical, if not blithe, about the scientific consensus on climate change. Steve Scalise, the U.S. House of Representatives’ majority leader, for instance, said that “it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature.”
Climate change is just one issue where the question of expertise has become political in America. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Democrats and Republicans fought incessantly over public health. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, claimed that his strategy of keeping schools and businesses open was a “tremendous success,” while Democratic critics called him “DeathSantis” for not having “followed the science.”
At the same time, American opinion of public-health experts—not least of Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2022 and a key figure on the White House Coronavirus Task Force—has split along partisan lines: 79 percent of Democrats thought public-health officials were doing a good or excellent job in responding to the pandemic, while only 44 percent of Republicans thought so. Why has the idea of expertise lost so much credibility on the American right?
David A. Hopkins is an associate professor of political science at Boston College and co-author of Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Hopkins says that on one level, the phenomenon is simple enough: These days, governing a country requires more and more specialized expertise; and policy experts have become increasingly liberal—creating both a greater role for expertise and a natural distance between the experts who provide it and conservative sentiment.
But there’s also been a complex chain of cause and effect from there: Experts increasingly weigh in publicly on the liberal side of politically contentious issues, even issues outside their areas of expertise; Republican politicians increasingly exploit a resulting alienation among their voters toward experts as a class; and liberals increasingly see Republicans as willfully ignorant.
It’s all conspired, Hopkins says, to drive not only a deep shift in American politics—with the Democrats becoming more and more the party of credentialled elites and the Republicans, more and more the party of the non–college-educated—but a vicious cycle in U.S. democracy that’s delegitimizing actual, specific expertise on vital challenges facing America and the world …
Gustav Jönsson: What kinds of expertise have come so much into question here, exactly—and why?
Daniele Levis Pelusi
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