Newtonian physics is often represented by the action of pool cues on billiard balls, a relatively easy case. The cue, a powerful tool, transmits force to a movable object, which then transmits it to others. Virtually the entirety of the problem can be understood as a puzzle about predicting the final positions of the balls. A high-school math or physics homework assignment never ends up with the cue breaking against the shock of an implacable sphere, maybe shattering to its wooden shards or even bloodying the hands of its wielder.
The political life is sometimes implicitly thought of the same way. It’s easy to imagine that the challenge of politics is limited to questions about just where things will end up if we apply our enormous, and enormously reliable, tools in various ways. Take a recent tweet by Keith Olbermann, in which the former MSNBC star raged: “You know what would’ve stopped Trump’s blackmailing of these universities? What could STILL stop it? If [the University of Pennsylvania] retracted his degree. If Penn merely announced it was being ‘reviewed’ because of problems in the admissions office.”
The notion is remarkable both for the sentiment and for the choice of weapon.
A place like Penn plays a double role in the pool game of liberal politics. First, the duly credentialed experts at such an institution are the ones who can do the billiard math. They can tell you authoritatively what is going on around you: why Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, how one of your thoughts or actions constitutes a microaggression or an implicit bias, that you must wear a mask outdoors to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and so on.
Second, the expertise of academics at Penn and similar institutions is itself one of the main tools of American progressives. Trump can be attacked because the experts gave him a low score on the democracy index. You can win an argument because you have experts to cite, and your opponent doesn’t.
At the heart of this role is the credential, which makes an expert somehow official. Of course, a credential is precisely what Olbermann suggested Penn should retract. The idea that some people and institutions have this quality of being official and others don’t is surely part of selective liberal meltdowns about fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and conservative skepticism about the academy. The sensible and admirable concern that falsehoods and bullshit are easily spread is often unwieldy, since it gets us quickly into very difficult questions about how to figure out what’s true and what’s false, and how to convince others once we’ve convinced ourselves. These dangerous waters are canalized into the worry that official sources are being drowned out by unofficial ones.
What went wrong with our experts and our official stories? There’s no master answer, but various sorts of errors were made, I think, over and over again. One characteristic mistake is confusing the political and non-political realms. For instance, in applying for grants, academic scientists and mathematicians for years have been asked to frame the benefits of those grants in terms of political goals like diversity, equity, and inclusion, even if the topic of the research was something non-political like theoretical physics. On the other hand, clearly political projects like the 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd might be recommended under the supposedly non-political banner of public-health expertise.
“What went wrong with our experts and our official stories? There’s no master answer.”
Another characteristic mistake is confusing the entry requirements for expertise with the outcome of expert inquiry. Someone with a credential in the study of, say, race or gender might rest on their authority to give some pronouncement about race- or gender-based oppression. But anyone who would contradict that pronouncement would have been weeded out of race and gender studies long ago. So the credential doesn’t give the pronouncement any extra weight; to a sensible observer, it should already be factored in. Noam Chomsky famously asserted that American foreign policy was controlled by a “secular priesthood” which required certain views at the outset.
The patina of expertise can be produced in much sillier ways. Soon after Trump was elected in 2016, a “Media Bias Chart” started circulating. On this graph’s left was an arrow indicating reliability pointing upward, in some versions toward “Original Fact Reporting” and in others toward “Fact-Reporting Sources,” and on its bottom axis were the words “Liberal” or “Left” on the left and “Conservative” or “Right” on the right. The chart looked a bit like a bell curve, so that the most centrist sources (apparently Reuters, The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC, and so on) were also among the most reliable, and the most Left-wing (apparently Mother Jones, New Republic, “Occupy Democrats,” and so on) and Right-wing (apparently Fox News, The Daily Wire, Breitbart, and so on) sources were among the least reliable.
This chart is now in its 13th version, but even in its nascent form, it was virally popular. But very few concrete metrics went into the determinations made for the chart; even now, nearly a decade later, its methodology mostly involves splitting the task of rating individual articles between a few people of different political persuasions. It was the fact that the chart looked like the sort of thing that features hard data, rather than the presence of any actual hard data, that gave it persuasive power. It looked, in a word, official.
In a polity of critical thinkers, things ought to first be official because we trust them, and only later, derivatively and provisionally, should it be that we trust things because they seem official. Official stories have faced myriad challenges recently, from the replication crisis in social science (which I wrote about for UnHerd five years ago) to journalists’ abandonment of objectivity to government malpractice of all sorts. At heart, an expert must be someone with extraordinary knowledge or extraordinary skills, but our respect for excellence has dwindled, as has our ability to recognize it.
Early on in The Godfather, a great film about the realities of pursuing political power, the drug dealer Virgil Sollozzo tells Don Corleone that he needs “all of those politicians that you carry around in your pocket,” to which Corleone responds — after some time — that his “friends in politics . . . wouldn’t be so friendly if they knew [his] business was drugs.” Just as friends can stop being friends, and no longer serve our political goals, so can experts stop being experts, officials lose the imprimatur of their offices, and credentials cease to mean anything at all, if they don’t act with prudence and in the way that their role requires.
There is a kind of uncertainty principle in politics, that the tools we use to accomplish our goals change in our very hands as we make our attempts. Liberals like Olbermann should step back and think about just what is left in their arsenals before lining up their pool shots.
