By celebrating "common sense" over expert authority, populism performs a dramatic status inversion. It gifts uneducated voters the power of knowledge and deflates those who look down on them.
"You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition."
Indeed, the very name "fact-checker" is an assertion of status that can only cause resentment.
To treat someone with respect, you have to start from a position of "I may be wrong, but here is what I believe and why I believe it," rather than with a claim to superior authority.
For the fact-checker … yes. But for the scientist and academic, I‘m more skeptical. Referring to this sentence: „The scientist, the academic, the fact-checker —- they do not expect to learn anything from ordinary voters.“ You could equally say „the farmer does not expect to be fed by city dwellers“, so should be expect city dwellers to be resentful of farmers?
If we go to part VII of the essay, with the division between the educated and the uneducated class, and now assume (thought experiment) that the scientist and the academic had somehow managed to keep their epistemic impartiality despite their own class affiliation, then I think there would not be a major „trust the experts“ problem (although there are always some narcissists as in part VI; also, there would still be progressive condescension and a backlash against it). The scientist, the academic, the farmer, the plumber, they all provide something to society and are paid for their contribution. So I think the essay provides a great account of unfortunate developments that set in once the experts have abandoned impartiality, but the root cause of the problem is still that they abandoned it.
> You could equally say „the farmer does not expect to be fed by city dwellers“, so should be expect city dwellers to be resentful of farmers?
Regardless of what one "should expect", a resentment between city dwellers and farmers very well exists and is established ("rednecks", "hillbillies" "backwoods", "hicks", "yokels", etc). Same for the opposite direction ("city slickers", "coastal elites", "hipsters", "city kids", all the way back to "tenderfeet").
These terms (the first five) all seem to mean „unsophisticated rural white people“, do they have anything to do with humiliation felt by urban people that they receive their food from farmers without being able to offer food in return? I would have guessed it’s more like pure contempt, looking down at less „cultured“ people without having been provoked by experiencing humiliation.
I'm pretty sure there's some jealoushy at play too, perhaps also a little feeling of being emasculated - city folk making their living in some abstract way, stuck in bullshit jobs, often working 9-5 in open plan offices or cubicles, suffering office/academia politics and humiliations from "pointy haired" managers, to produce nothing concrete. While the others work with their hands, produce something concrete they're proud of, live around country scenery, and are freer in several ways.
(Also, the terms might appear to target just "„unsophisticated rural white people“ but those "sophisticated" city folks would absolutely include blacks and hispanics as the targets of those sneers too, if it wasn't out of fashion and a career ending faux pas today - and back in they day, they absolutely included those too).
Between farmers and city-dwellers, though, there is a well understood trade: without farmers the city-dwellers have no food, which would suck, but without city-dwellers the farmers have no tractors or fertilizer, which would also suck. In spite of a couple of recent efforts in MAGA-world to inspire some kind of rural-urban class resentment, everyone seems to get this.
I don't think its as simple as saying experts abandoned impartiality first. Most expert advice in most fields is correct. What does seem to have happened in some cases (say, school closures during COVID, to pick one that is now pretty uncontroversial) an understandable export error became politicized, making it hard to reverse.
I don‘t think tractors or fertilizer would play a role for the psychology here. Rather, the farmer gets paid for the food, that‘s why it‘s not charity.
Experts usually correct? On that, see Pete McCutchen‘s comment. I especially like that he includes diet in his examples, probably the biggest failure of them all even though others are more obvious and may therefore have bigger psychological impact. Also, if „understandable export error became politicized, making it hard to reverse [although it should have been]“ was a fair description in most cases (I don’t think it is), this wouldn‘t really seem to be in conflict with the hypothesis that abandonment of impartiality came before the popularity of „trust the experts“ and resentment against that on the other side.
(But admittedly the hypothesis is speculative, it could also be that the class divide and progressive condescension are enough to trigger the bad dynamics.)
I agree. As someone who ticks off all the boxes for membership in this "expert" or "elite" class, this doesn't track with my "lived experience" as they say. The majority of people in my social circles do not check of these boxes and they don't have problems with experts. They have a problem with people who lack humility. They have a problem with people who fail to recognize and respect that expertise comes in many shapes and sizes. In other words, it's not experts they have a problem with, it's assholes.
For better and for worse the role populism plays in democracy is to act as a last ditch corrective mechanism against elite overreach. A healthy democracy requires a well informed public which includes widespread dissemination and communication of expert analysis and opinion. But when an expert class gains excessive authority coupled with top down elitist governance then populism is a messy and chaotic but nevertheless necessary response, and the appropriate move is to course-correct by winning back public opinion with better policy and less top down abuse. If one populism is met with scorn and oppositional populism, or by doubling down on top down policies, this pushes the system into something far worse than populism. You certainly are correct to examine the limits of common sense, and it is a fact that populists are generally good at breaking things and rarely good at solving difficult problems, and of course expert authority is not the answer.
“If this analysis is correct, the populist rejection of expertise is not merely an intellectual disagreement over truth or evidence, even if it is typically presented that way. It is, in part, a proud refusal to accept epistemic charity from those who present themselves as social superiors. “
Epistemic charity is only possible when those on the receiving end lack an education that enables them to understand the evidence for themselves. So a primary driver of all this is the gap in educational attainment. Compare the US to, well just about anywhere really, and its role becomes clearer. The gap, for obvious reasons, should be narrowed from the bottom. The current administrations efforts are to do the opposite.
I try to think of them not as bad people....but as good populists. Vis-a-vis the scorpion and frog parable. Keeps my frustration at bay. Hopefully the opposition in both parties will course correct with better policy instead of doubling down on previous policies.
I don't want to be the blog contrarian, but, with all due respect, I thoroughly disagree with explanatory aspect of essay in the main. Yes, telling someone they're stupid is likely to make them defensive, and the con-man operates in part by playing off resentments and weaknesses. But, as others commenters and I have frequently pointed out, propaganda works, and important aspects there cannot be neglected in any reasonable theory.
Crucially, I would contend your conclusion here is framed in a blame-the-victim way:
"Institutions dominated by a single social class and political tribe will inevitably face resistance and backlash in broader society, ..."
Bluntly, if there's a political tribe made up of anti-intellectuals, who have disdain for intellectuals as part of their tribal identity, it's impossible by definition to have intellectuals from that tribe.
In specific (pound table), if Republicans have an anti-vaccine lunatic as Secretary of Health, it is completely reasonable for intellectuals to express disdain and contempt for the Republican Party. And this isn't recent. Again, I suggest you might have a filter-bubble effect, if your daily life is leftist academic Professors of Blathering, you might not fully appreciate the extent that religious fanatics have power in many (not all, but many) areas in the US.
There's plenty of punditry about the problems of the disconnect of the Democratic Party from the working class. I think that abandonment is a big problem. But I view it as a economic topic tied into unions and worker's rights and income inequality and similar issues. In a nutshell, "wokeness" happens because word-policing is a lot easier than union-organizing. However, preaching about being nicer to nutcases nattering nonsense, is just putting a burden on people who should not bear it, i.e. those angry and frustrated at the effects of the torrent of right-wing lying (Carthago delenda est! I mean, Measles is back!)
Well, from one perspective, it's a matter of weighting of factors. But on the other hand, sometimes a quantitative difference is functionally a qualitative difference. A deep scratch and a gaping chest wound are both sources of blood loss.
Its so crazy to me that you talk about the weight relative impacts without taking into account that Fauci likely funded the research that has killed tens of millions worldwide and yet your hyperventilating over a few measles cases which were likely caused by people who have a religious objection to vaccines, not anything RFK has said. I will grant you, he’s a nut. But IMO liberals are really bad at weighing the impacts of their decisions. How many years of learning loss have we had as a result of school closures? The same people who said nothing when Biden let in 10 million illegals are saying it’s the end of due process because one person was deported to the wrong country. Its astounding.
Some of what you say is apt, but there are a bunch of people who've been sent to Salvadoran prison without being convicted of their supposed crime. Would you agree that every one of those is a pretty serious violation of due process?
There can be no entity less Trump-like whatever that means, than the big metro school district in our state capital with its 56% economically impoverished. By the same token that free lunches are given to all at the majority of campuses, so that no one must demonstrate need - the district has also waived enforcement of its own vaccination requirements. This subject came up after the Mexican Mennonites inadvertently spread measles about in a part of our state, though not probably for reasons of principle.
Even the lunatic young local Redditers, upon looking into it, were forced to concede that of the grade schoolers in the district who were unvaccinated (some 17%) only a small number were so because their parents filled out religious exemption paperwork.
No, it was just the 3rd world creeping into the first, and the authorities not wanting to rock the boat by demanding compliance.
Does this mean that the 100% blue city is -more RFK, Jr.-like than not?
*To their, ah, credit, the Redditers lost no face but were quick to jump to the suggestion that the schools district, with its $4 million budget deficit and numerous “failing” schools - should take on a new task, of operating as medical clinics also. The young folk are so bright, it’s really beautiful.
These issues are pretty fraught in a variety of ways. It's certainly not like what happened is that everything was going great with the world, then elites started making bad mistakes that undermined their credibility, and then there was a populist backlash. Sometimes it does seem like Dan W is saying something like that... charitably I think we should read him as saying something more reasonable.
Realistically, the whole thing was kicked off by 9/11, which simultaneously supercharged the latent currents of xenophobia and conspiracy-theorizing in American culture, and also set the stage for the GWOT that destroyed the credibility of conservative elites and made way for Trump to take control of the Republican party.
But the decline and fall of the Republican party did not lead them to become medical-science-deniers until pretty recently. RFK and the MAHA "crank sort" are very late steps in this whole process. In other words, RFK is not any part of the reason why elites originally became contemptuous of Republicans, and that contempt would still be pretty much as strong as it is now if there were no RFK--and even if there were no Republican anti-vaxers.
In other words, it's highly inaccurate to suggest that what's going on bears any resemblance to a world in which well-informed people woke up one day, noticed that Republicans were crazy about vaccines, and reasonably decided Republicans deserve contempt. Republicans do deserve contempt because of RFK, but that's not why elites have contempt for them.
No, this doesn't have anything to do with 9/11, or any single event. The Republicans have always, for at least more than a century, been the party of religious fanatics and anti-intellectualism. That's just a fact, and it's necessary to understand it to do meaningful analysis. It goes back, just for one example, to them trying to outlaw teaching Evolution in schools, and then the push for Bible stories, I mean Creationism. And note, the solution to this was not for biologists to be more humble and open and respectful to Creationists, and it's not that biologists are smug and arrogant so religious fundamentalists hate Evolution.
Now, what's happened over the past few decades is that the Republican Party have driven out the factions that weren't authoritarian in viewpoint, or had some sort of _noblesse oblige_ beliefs (the latter was Bush I and maybe Bush II). There's lot of punditry on this, it's mentioned in the article above. It's just another fact.
The result is that they've now distilled down in terms of factions to their most destructive aspects. And it is a sight to behold, the sort of thing which is an awesome spectacle to watch if you're not actually living through it. It's not just Trump, but all sorts of other powerful people will respond in highly serious contexts by in essence saying "My answer is simple - F* YOU!". Here's just one example, and bear with me, I'll show the relevance:
"I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth," she continued, adding that she's glad she didn't have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy.
"But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," she said.
Note that last sentence. It's very important. Call it signaling, a tribal marker, whatever - she's appealing to religious fundamentalism. Not the washed-out spirituality of intellectuals. The real stuff, "everlasting life ... Jesus Christ" (Jesus Christ indeed!).
And, to finish this futile utter waste of time, my point is that it's both morally and factually wrong to suggest dealing with this by blaming the intellectuals for this anti-intellectualism.
Also with respect, I disagree with you, hence my reaction. I read this piece has having a heavy amount of such blame, particularly in the last two paragraphs. Such aspects as stressing "social class and political tribe" sound too close to me to parody recommendation of (deliberately exaggerated for humor since this is a short comment) needing more Creationists in the biology department in order to more accurately reflect the intellectual diversity of the population. I'm well aware that I'm vulnerable to the accusation of misreading it, and I'm trying to be very careful on that point. But the context this is taking place, with repeatedly not considering how the massive right-wing lie machine interacts therein, and the sheer utter craziness of the Republican Party in e.g. anti-vaccine lunacy, has moved me to try to say something on this point, perhaps unwisely and intemperately.
Well look, I think there's blame to go around, which doesn't mean the blame rests equally on all those who have fallen short..
Compare the Ukraine war. A reasonable perspective (not the only reasonable one) would be to say "I mostly blame Putin, but it's probably also true that if GW Bush hadn't ineffectually pushed to get Ukraine admitted to NATO, the war would never have happened. So I also blame Bush to a lesser extent."
Similarly I'd say the right attitude is to blame the MAGAs themselves 90%, but recognize that maybe 10% of the blame rests with the intellectuals, who could have headed off the problem if they'd lived up better to their own ideals.
Ah, but this is exactly what I think is both factually false and blame-the-victim: "maybe 10% of the blame rests with the intellectuals, who could have headed off the problem if they'd lived up better to their own ideals."
I believe people who advocate this do not properly take into consideration the effects the right-wing lie machine. Note, the point is not that they deny it exists, but rather they don't factor it in properly as to why their supposed solution is wrong. It leads to punditry of the form (again, humorous, short comment):
"Intellectuals, if you were absolutely and completely perfect, flawless and saintly, then the right-wing lie machine would have no power. Thus, I will preach at you to be perfect. Oh, don't say I'm blaming you, I'm "helping" by detailing all the ways you could improve. Did you lose your temper when a Senator called for you to be jailed for war crimes? Bad intellectual! Your ideal is to always explain your position with humbleness and humility, and you didn't live up to it there. ..."
This is a loop which can be run endlessly. It's ideologically impervious to falsification, since one can always find something to criticize (I'm actually amused by the concept of needing scientific journals run by the poorly educated - there's something rhetorically intriguing in turning a logical paradox into a criticism, and even better, it's intrinsic fodder for a line of attack).
So wait, do you think that if 9/11 hadn't happened we would still have had President Donald J Trump, or anything resembling the MAGA movement? I don't think there's any way you get Trump without the radicalizing shock to the system from 9/11.
I think you're conflating some things that are very different. Of course there have long been religious nuts clustered on the right, although they are a much smaller and weaker faction now.
But religious nuts are not MAHAs. RFK was a Democrat until recently. Republicans were more religious and religiously conservative 20 years ago. They were much less anti-vax 20 years ago. The anti-vax issue and the religious nut issue are not the same thing.
The idea that they've just "distilled down" to their worst aspects is belied by the fact that Republicans now are basically OK with gay marriage. It's true that on the whole they are more destructive now, but in very different ways than they used to be--Republicans weren't tariff nuts until Trump came along, and not really earnestly until 2025! They've gotten saner in some ways even as they've gotten much more insane in other ways.
Indeed, not 9/11, but I think Trump is an outcome of some very bad long-term trends regarding inequality, deindustrialization, destruction of civic society, and so on. This is pretty standard historical analysis, of what causes the rise of authoritarian strongmen.
And I stress one has to consider the history of political divisions. You're right, "religious nuts are not [MAGAs not MAHAs - typo?].". But the Republican Party is the party of religious nuts, and drove out countervailing factions. I'd also agree "anti-vax issue and the religious nut issue are not the same thing.", but the religious nuts are anti-intellectuals by nature, and this matters in terms of support for anti-vax.
That's *why* RFK Jr went to the Republicans. the Democrats would not give him any power, the Republicans named him Secretary of Health! That's a difference between the two parties in a nutshell.
The worse aspects was referring to actions such as the above. There was a time the Republicans wouldn't actually do something so destructive.
The issue of gay marriage is whole different topic. In one of his very early speeches, Trump said something along the lines of, paraphrased, gay-bashing is out instead we're going to be doing Muslim-bashing now. But this is long enough.
MAHA = "Make America Healthy Again" = RFK's movement
It certainly sounds like we rate the significance of 9/11 differently. The change in US conservative culture following that event was really dramatic, I thought. Foreigners and Muslims became the enemy within almost overnight.
I agree with this: "Republicans have an anti-vaccine lunatic as Secretary of Health, it is completely reasonable for intellectuals to express disdain and contempt for the Republican Party"
But ... If the Democrats have a senile intellectually incompetent politician as President and insist that anyone who points out this fact is peddling "misinformation," shouldn't it be reasonable for intellectuals express disdain and contempt for the Democratic Party too. Some of them do, but much fewer than those who express contempt for the Republicans.
I think those cases have orders of magnitude difference between them, and it's not reasonable to morally equivalence them. Though one of the things I'm curious about, do you believe that the White House physician who repeatedly gave Biden a clean bill of health, was in fact lying? And if you do, would you then grant it's reasonable to believe that there's a cover-up now of Trump's increasing dementia from perhaps Alzheimer's Disease?
Do you *not* think that any doctor who gave Biden a clean bill of health in 2024 was lying? It seems like the Tapper/Thompson book is pretty incontrovertible when it comes to this issue.
(I would be totally open to the possibility that Trump has dementia and it's being covered up, although I have doubts about whether his admin would be capable of that.)
What I try to figure out, really, is "what's true?". Tapper has every incentive to exaggerate to sell books and hype a story. There's an immense amount of lying and wolf-crying by the Republican Party. On the other hand, Biden certainly sounded terrible at times, and much more than for that debate disaster - no doubt about it, age and stress were taking a toll. Yet (I'll both-sides here, but I think it's relevant) Trump often sounds outright demented, is the oldest President ever elected plus has a family history of Alzheimer's Disease, and the Republicans don't care and apparently consider him fit for office - what's the standard? On and on.
My thinking is, for a novel idea, let's start with what's the absolute best sourcing, which is the White House physician's report. These reports consistently gave Biden a clean bill of health. Were they lies? I've noticed all the partisan ranting condemns Biden's aides, the media, the Democratic Party, etc. etc. - but they never seem to denounce those White House physician's reports. This seems very odd to me. It's repeated black and white statements he's fit for office, with a named person on the record, who is an actual doctor, who has in fact examined Biden. It seems to me that IF Biden was actually unfit, it necessary follows that these must be complete lies - but once more, I've never heard that said in any of the hate-machine output I've seen. Frankly, I don't understand this.
It does follow that the Republicans would have to be screaming there was an ongoing conspiracy to hide the mental deterioration of the President by falsifying physical reports. And maybe they don't want to go there for obvious reasons.
Sometimes you just can't find the truth of a controversy. But I do want to press on the physician's reports, given how little they seem to be mentioned (also, Trump/Alzheimer's is very worrying - I can't provide a scientific basis for this, but my impression is he's getting worse).
I agree there's an interesting question about what explains the doctor's reports.
A lot of sources have said that Biden was typically lucid for a 4-6 hour stretch in the afternoon. Perhaps the appointments with the physician were scheduled for that time period, and maybe they rescheduled them if he was having a bad day that particular day. Just one hypothesis.
It seems to me that Tapper and Thompson's incentives to exaggerate are counterbalanced by some pretty strong incentives to not get caught exaggerating.
Again, very happy to grant that Trump could have Alzheimer's. Anyone with eyes can see that he's got something going on mentally that's in many ways worse than Alzheimer's.
A thought provoking read that misses a very important point about the expert class. Back in the day when 5-10% went into tertiary education they likely were the intellectual elite, today when close to 50% do, the distrust should be understandable.
Education is not intelligence, it is more and more just received wisdom without questioning. The education system is pumping out more and more of these "experts" that we see patronising the peasants constantly.
Today the credentialled experts are lecturing us about "safe and effective", a century ago they'd have been middle managers in a cotton mill.
Three cheers for Nietzsche. (woot, woot, woot) It feels like we are going through a Nietzschean cycle and I'm surprised at the lack of resurgence in Nietzsche appreciation and awareness. Orwell is getting due recognition but certainly the Friedrich-Meister should be getting his piece too. For lack of a better explanation I blame it on pervasive misreading and misteaching of his intended message.
A great piece, Dan. I think this is your best work.
I want to emphasize what is at stake here.
It is instructive to examine a past period when an educated elite, a proud hierarchy who, despite continued expositions of humility, and with little or no respect for the perspective of those they dictated to, were challenged by a populist movement that dismissed elite interpretations of the world. This group of experts, with distinctive competence in interpreting the word of God, was the Catholic Church, and their flock were subject to regulatory overreach and massive value extraction. Resentment with theft, financial and moral corruption, and a suffocating definition of how one was to relate to God, spawned the success of Luther and the rise of Protestantism.
An excellent reason for exploring this parallel is to take stock of the gigantic cost this conflict inflicted on the people of Europe. This battle between established experts and a populist movement for personal religious freedom spawned the conflicts in Europe which originated in the Protestant Reformation and lasted for 130 years: (1517 Martin Luther's 95 Theses) until 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia.) And this was not the last of it. The death toll was gigantic - millions of people died in the wars, massacres, and persecutions and it spawned such disturbing institutions and repeated inquisitions with appalling torture as a means of extracting confessions.
There are non-trivial differences from our present circumstances to be sure. Our crisis has an ineradicable epistemic dimension which was largely absent from the above catastrophe. But
a populist rebellion against a caste of experts is not a new phenomenon and the costs incurred in such a rebellion can be gigantic. We should be worried. Very worried.
New here. In those 130 years of conflict, how much weight did Protestantism vs Catholicism have as the root cause of the violence, vs acting as a convenient cassus belli?
The thought came while watching Louis Theroux's latest doc. Property is so much more expensive in Tel Aviv than in the proposed West Bank settlements, that I wonder how much religious zealotry is emergent, acting as a veneer of justification for (ultimately) economic root causes.
New here. In those 130 years of conflict, how much weight did Protestantism vs Catholicism have as the root cause of the violence, vs acting as a convenient cassus belli?
The thought came while watching Louis Theroux's latest doc. Property is so much more expensive in Tel Aviv than in the proposed West Bank settlements, that I wonder how much religious zealotry is emergent, acting as a veneer of justification for (ultimately) economic root causes.
I think, related to this, the social dynamics of "dunking" is highly complicated in a way that makes it unclear if it's good political strategy for the wider liberal/center movement or not. I remember after 2016 Trump/Brexit double upset there were a lot of think-pieces about "liberal smugness" and how it had ignited right-wing backlash. The argument went something like: "we need to stop sounding so smug about being more intelligent, more educated, more cultured and moral than these poor misled rural boomers". And even though that internal discourse was itself probably aggrivating for outsiders, I think there was a point to it. If you make someone feel humiliated they'd rather sink the ship you're both on than let you steer. Smugness is enjoyable (status affirming) for you but it means the targets of your condescension will never ever join your side.
On the other hand: The audience for a smug expert dunk can just as well identify with the dunker rather than the dunkee. It will all depend on the specifics of the situation. Experts raining down hellfire on these absolute idiots in a way that gives one the option to experience a vicarious status-boost can probably solidify trust in experts. They're my guys!
From a PR perspective the problem is that this type of content is usually directed at other highly educated people within the "professional managerial class". I remember one version happening often on science/statistics twitter before it collapsed; subjects of dunks (usually also academics to be fair) were treated as absolute rubes for not knowing niché methodological pitfalls. The message to the audience is implicitly "if you like/retweet this dunk you're *with it*". It's an effective message for a certain person, but for a wider audience it's just smug nerds trying to one-up each other. For me (the target audience) it made me more attentive to statistics (lest I get dunked on horribly in the future), so from my experience it worked, but there may be other experiences.
That is a sort of apolitical area for dunking, but the same goes for more politically loaded ones. It can be true that they both create populist backlash and also recruit and solidify establishment identification. I lean towards dunking/smugness being bad and the solution being friendly accessible educational contents that improve people's knowledge base and makes them feel the experts are friends. Feels warmer, and like it'd have less risk of a violent backlash.
I think you understate the extent to which the expert class has sabotaged itself. When it comes to, say, physics or aeronautical engineering, I’m fairly sure the experts have a pretty good idea what they are talking about. But take three examples.
1. Transgenderism. The “experts” tell us that trans women are women, despite the whole penis thing, and that trans female athletes can compete against biological females with no compromise of competitive balance or safety. They support dubious and unproven treatment of gender nonconforming children, despite the lack of evidence for the efficacy of such treatment. In the process, they reify gender stereotypes that, until about last week, feminists were trying to break down.
2. Diet. Based on ideological and aesthetic commitments, doctors at places like Harvard are advancing plant-based diets and denigrating meat. They do so based on flawed epidemiological research that does not meet basic scientific criteria.
3. Covid. During Covid, we were told not to mask and then to mask. If that had been based on new scientific information, that would be fine. But Fauci admitted that the change in guidance was based on mask availability, not any real evidence. And people were told to mask outdoors, where the risk of outdoor transmission is effectively zero. And in California, parks, public basketball and tennis facilities, and beaches were closed, despite zero risk, with nary a peep from the public health experts. Since California is habitable outside about eleven months out of the year, and since obesity is a Covid comorbidity, instead of closing parks, the government should have encouraged outdoor fitness activities!
Then, to make matters worse, the same public health authorities said BLM demonstrations were OK. And they were — the ones that didn’t involve arson. Because they were outside, and most outdoor activities were fine! But the sudden exemption for outdoor demonstrations (as opposed to swimming or running around a track) was clearly politically motivated.
To me, this status hypothesis sounds a lot like cope. People have lost faith in experts because experts have screwed up so badly in the last decade or so. You may protest, rightly, that there are areas and fields where experts genuinely know stuff. I agree! I think, for example, that most economists are right on tariffs and Trump is wrong. But how are people to distinguish between “experts” who know real stuff and charlatans?
As to Harvard, I am not sure people object to a real intellectual elite, which is joined based on real excellence. But I think you underestimate the extent to which opening the window on its admissions practices undermined the university. A large number of Harvard students are LADCs — legacies, athletes (often in aristocratic sports), dean interest people (rich donors, children of celebrities and the politically powerful), and children of faculty and staff. Then you have a group of people admitted under a racial spoils system. And finally some get in because they are genuinely capable. But honestly it looks a lot like “privilege laundering” as Scott Alexander called it. It starts to look like Harvard’s status is largely unearned.
You have some good examples, but its worth interrogating what's really going on. In two of them - treatment of trans people and diet - in what sense are we saying "the experts say such and such"? Because there isn't a clear consensus in favor of a plant based diet or in favor of early treatment of trans-identified youth, if you look at actual published research.
It seems really what is happening is that experts are pulled into the process of affective polarization Dan has described in earlier articles. Experts are, overwhelmingly, members of the professional managerial class and therefore members of the "left-wing" coalition (we really need better names, but none seems to stick). Once the idea that meat eating is bad for the environment enters the news, their social environment, both personally and professionally, will incentivize taking positions that oppose meat eating, even if the underlying data is ambiguous. Similarly, once the idea that youth gender dysphoria often causes suicidal ideation enters the mainstream, pediatricians calling out the weak evidence for most proposed treatments, lose professional status, regardless of the facts (and I should say I'm not taking a position on specific cases here beyond the bare facts). This gives the wider coalition the illusion of expert consensus where none really exists.
This seems like a case of a market like mechanism awarding social status for advocates of one side of a controversy regardless of the facts. Some rationalist writer had a name for this but I'll be damned if I can find it.
The widespread adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions during COVID, in spite of the very weak evidence that they work either previously or during the pandemic, is something books are still being written about. This was a worldwide phenomenon, and people will argue that NPIs did work in Australia and New Zealand and most of China. As I often do in these cases, I find much US criticism so parochial as to be almost self-invalidating. If people in the UK are being arrested for walking in the hills near their home (that almost happened to my parents) and people all over Asia are wearing masks everywhere, it doesn't say much that is useful to complain about particular CDC and CDPH decisions. If everyone everywhere (except maybe Sweden) is making the same kinds of mistakes, its not a problem with our government specifically, it is something systemically wrong with the way we are thinking about the problem.
What I think happened and I think fits the timeline is a kind of accelerated version of what's happened with diet and childhood gender dysphoria. At the very beginning it makes sense to tell everyone to stay home and implement NPIs because we don't have tests and we don't know how the virus is transmitted. All we know is that there is community transmission in California and in New York, there are over 6000 deaths in NY in the first month and even more in Italy, and there's a very strong public pressure on the public health community to do something.
But then very rapidly those of us who tend to do what experts tell us adopted NPIs as a social necessity, and at the same time the CDC and other public health authorities in their internal communications were not assimilating new findings as fast as they should. Once it was known that virus was airborne and only airborne, that most cases are asymptomatic or mild, and that most fatalities are in people 70+ the public health guidance should have changed quickly to focus on people at risk and relaxed most of the NPIs. That change should have happened in most developed countries around this time in 2020, and in fact if you look at the timelines it did - many counties in California had lifted their mask mandates and NYC had started to allow businesses to reopen, but when case numbers continued to rise, which was expected and not a counter-indication, NPIs were reimposed and remained imposed or even were tightened through the summer.
This was a mistake, but sociologically its a very interesting mistake that was made almost everywhere in the world at around the same time. Its not explicable by any specifically American personalities or institutions. What seems to have happened is that the public had accepted NPIs as a partial solution that made sense, at least the part of the public that interacts with infectious disease experts, and created a professional and social pressure for findings that supported NPIs. The public wanted fewer cases, they thought NPIs were a solution (because to be fair they had been told they were and the message lost some nuance somewhere) and so it became had for the experts who should have gone back to their original message that masks and social distancing were unlikely to be useful, to actually stick to that message.
I appreciate your thoughtful grappling with responses to expertise. It’s particularly interesting to read this piece on the heels of Krugman’s today, “Understanding inequality, part I.” My sense, on a first reading of each, is that yours and Krugman’s pieces are most helpfully read together to give us a fuller picture of why we are seeing such extreme discontent from so many quarters.
Right now, all but the very rich have been stripped of reasonable opportunities for hard work to gain them a comfortable life, and the further down the scale you go economically, the worse it gets. Those who are claimed as experts are reasonably understood not to have helped this situation, and are reasonably seen quite often to have made it worse. The handling of the pandemic by experts, as we all can see, was a mess, with vast, real world negative consequences for almost everyone. I wonder whether we may also do a disservice in seeing this as right wing/left wing—or “elite” vs. uneducated”—as the language of this piece might sometimes seem to suggest.
In a closing paragraph, you state: “Moreover, it suggests that rebuilding trust in experts means more than improving their reliability, as crucial as that is. Institutions dominated by a single social class and political tribe will inevitably face resistance and backlash in broader society, regardless of their technical competence.” That is definitely getting at something important, and the question is where to go with that thought. That observation itself may in fact lay bare at least part of our collective failure: that is, a failure to respect and recognize expertise that does not lie within the halls of academe and its ilk. I think, for example, of my failed attempt to use a mitre box to cut and fit crown molding. My respect for the expertise of carpenters has known no bounds ever since—and I always make sure to say so when the opportunity arises to appreciate a carpenter’s expertise.
What if, as a society, we treated one another with genuine mutual respect and worked hard to assure everyone had a fair shot? I am given to wonder whether that’s at least half the battle here.
Thanks for yet another incredibly thought-provoking piece.
There were many reasons behind the "expert" failure during the pandemic, but one big factor was the idea that public health experts' expertise extended into areas that in reality they had little expertise in, and in many cases that was class-based. For instance, they often seemed unaware that family visiting nursing home patients is an important factor in preventing medical errors, especially in nursing homes that are not high quality. Similarly, they were often unaware that keeping kids home from schools meant that parents had to quit jobs. And the inability to understand that people were not keen on wearing a mask for 8 hours a day when it was 95 degrees or in a workplace where being able to clearly hear what other people are saying is important for basic safety. There was a lot of skepticism about cloth masks coming from people who had to wear PPE in their jobs (science, manufacturing, construction) because they had first hand experience of what blocked what. I would also argue that the hard line taken against in-person religious worship was partly class-based given that educated Americans tend to be much more secular.
This is an excellent essay. Without doubt at the moment in the US there is a considerably larger rejection of expertise on the right than the left.
However, it's worth noting that many people reject certain forms of expertise. People on the left frequently reject mainstream economics. They reject what nuclear scientists say about the safety of nuclear power. Quite a few people on the left now reject biology. Perhaps most people reject some forms of expertise that disagree with some of their priors.
Michael Sandel explores the same topic in Tyranny of merit. It’s worth your time, it’s a very well constructed argument which convinced me at least. Essentially, the elites (we can define them by status) must recognise that their success is not their own merit & also that the “plebes” lack of success if not their fault. This makes us all equal in “condition” (not in opportunity nor in outcome). We want to keep the experts but delete their moral desert.
Outstanding as usual Daniel. The bitter experience of life has converted me to the cynical or tragic view that you and David Pinsof espouse. But can your careful thought process and concern for the greater good be all based on vanity? I think there is a slight performative contradiction here... and I also suspect that David Pinsof is a *genuinely* nice guy. Seriously though - some people are high on the Honesty-Humility scale and concerned with truth and these are the ones (eg JS Mill) who helped establish the constitution of knowledge as we now have it. It's a kind of meta view, and maybe a minority taste of philosophical types.
Status is where it is at though, this has helped me understand anti immigrant sentiment here in Ireland, which is restricted to those excluded from cultural capital. People excluded from certain status games start new ones. I'm not sure TJ Scheff is in vogue any more, but his explorations of shame and violence are brilliant if you haven't come across them.
The case of gender in the academy is really a special one. The populist view - depending on your definition of gender - is more in line with biological science than the elite one.
Very interesting comment — thanks for taking the time to write it!
What you call the “cynical or tragic view” is the idea that most (all?) of what we do is driven by selfish psychological motives, even what appears to be disinterested altruism — is that right?
If so, would you agree that these motives are typically unconscious?
I was wondering whether this view might risk becoming a tautology, depending on how it's framed. For instance, if we're talking about unconscious or “hidden” psychological motives, are we saying anything more than: we do what we are programmed to do — which is essentially the behavioral code evolution has "given" us, applied to the environment in question?
Another related thought: could the dissemination of these kinds of findings from evolutionary psychology (i.e., selfish motives behind altruism) be considered a form of infohazard?
In the sense that learning about self-interested reasons behind seemingly unselfish actions might devalue those actions — and perhaps even discourage them?
Thanks for reading my comment Flavien. I'm still working out my considered view on these things! I could be more accurate by calling my view simply naturalist. I think Dan Williams would say that as evolved mammals, no genetically-based traits that operate against our reproductive interests will survive after multiple generations, or something like that. So in that sense, natural selection establishes a tautology. It is not so much selfish interest as 'inclusive' or kin interest. But traits have latitude in how they are expressed. Pro-social traits that have been naturally selected might have side effects beyond kin, and we can say that the wide scale co-operation we see in modernity would be an example of that.
I do think that some actions dressed up as altruism are less pure than they appear, and only next to our ability to fool other people is our ability to fool ourselves - see the work of Trivers on that point.
These reductionist explanations of behaviour might be a hazard - this is a general problem with naturalism. Traditional metaphysics posited some transcendent reasons for moral prescriptions. Without the transcendent do social mores etc, eventually falter? I believe this is called evolutionary debunking. But from the lived experience perspective, valuing and choosing between alternatives is unavoidable.
On a more positive note, I don't really see things as zero sum selfish versus altruistic, nor as strategic and instrumental as some evolutionary accounts suggest. The difference is seeing the interpretive and intersubjective side of human nature which is relational in a way that is irreducible to a third person perspective.
I see human moral and political systems as an example of niche construction, and human meaning making as within that context. Theorists tend to understate this dimension of human experience because it is hard to quantify. For instance they confuse the organism with the self. The self is inherently relational, plugged into an inherited web of intersubjective stuff (attachment, recognition, symbolic meaning making, mutual attunement).
The importance of reputation was already recognised by Adam Smith, long before Veblen. See the quotations from Smith in https://kantandsmith.substack.com
I wish elites will frame their messaging like Dan, because the social shaming and moral condemnation they engage in doesn’t seem to work right now. The theory of populists refusing helpful advise to keep their pride and status is plausible, sad but one we can have a possible cure for. The problem is maybe even that won't work now, the loss of trust and the rising power of social media makes the solution harder to implement. I see some people get triggered in comments by a double standard where Dan condemns both elites and populist equally because the latter is way worse. But the reason for that is Dan's criticism is gonna be perceived by the educated class more productively, it is not like RFK or Musk read this blog. Populists are small minded , have less trust of academic prestige and their opinions are harder to shake. Whereas people who already agree with his views are more likely to take his feedback into account. For elites to exercise their authority they have to accept a higher responsibility and standard of public judgement. Provided democratic norms are intact.
"You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition."
Indeed, the very name "fact-checker" is an assertion of status that can only cause resentment.
To treat someone with respect, you have to start from a position of "I may be wrong, but here is what I believe and why I believe it," rather than with a claim to superior authority.
For the fact-checker … yes. But for the scientist and academic, I‘m more skeptical. Referring to this sentence: „The scientist, the academic, the fact-checker —- they do not expect to learn anything from ordinary voters.“ You could equally say „the farmer does not expect to be fed by city dwellers“, so should be expect city dwellers to be resentful of farmers?
If we go to part VII of the essay, with the division between the educated and the uneducated class, and now assume (thought experiment) that the scientist and the academic had somehow managed to keep their epistemic impartiality despite their own class affiliation, then I think there would not be a major „trust the experts“ problem (although there are always some narcissists as in part VI; also, there would still be progressive condescension and a backlash against it). The scientist, the academic, the farmer, the plumber, they all provide something to society and are paid for their contribution. So I think the essay provides a great account of unfortunate developments that set in once the experts have abandoned impartiality, but the root cause of the problem is still that they abandoned it.
> You could equally say „the farmer does not expect to be fed by city dwellers“, so should be expect city dwellers to be resentful of farmers?
Regardless of what one "should expect", a resentment between city dwellers and farmers very well exists and is established ("rednecks", "hillbillies" "backwoods", "hicks", "yokels", etc). Same for the opposite direction ("city slickers", "coastal elites", "hipsters", "city kids", all the way back to "tenderfeet").
These terms (the first five) all seem to mean „unsophisticated rural white people“, do they have anything to do with humiliation felt by urban people that they receive their food from farmers without being able to offer food in return? I would have guessed it’s more like pure contempt, looking down at less „cultured“ people without having been provoked by experiencing humiliation.
I'm pretty sure there's some jealoushy at play too, perhaps also a little feeling of being emasculated - city folk making their living in some abstract way, stuck in bullshit jobs, often working 9-5 in open plan offices or cubicles, suffering office/academia politics and humiliations from "pointy haired" managers, to produce nothing concrete. While the others work with their hands, produce something concrete they're proud of, live around country scenery, and are freer in several ways.
(Also, the terms might appear to target just "„unsophisticated rural white people“ but those "sophisticated" city folks would absolutely include blacks and hispanics as the targets of those sneers too, if it wasn't out of fashion and a career ending faux pas today - and back in they day, they absolutely included those too).
Between farmers and city-dwellers, though, there is a well understood trade: without farmers the city-dwellers have no food, which would suck, but without city-dwellers the farmers have no tractors or fertilizer, which would also suck. In spite of a couple of recent efforts in MAGA-world to inspire some kind of rural-urban class resentment, everyone seems to get this.
I don't think its as simple as saying experts abandoned impartiality first. Most expert advice in most fields is correct. What does seem to have happened in some cases (say, school closures during COVID, to pick one that is now pretty uncontroversial) an understandable export error became politicized, making it hard to reverse.
I don‘t think tractors or fertilizer would play a role for the psychology here. Rather, the farmer gets paid for the food, that‘s why it‘s not charity.
Experts usually correct? On that, see Pete McCutchen‘s comment. I especially like that he includes diet in his examples, probably the biggest failure of them all even though others are more obvious and may therefore have bigger psychological impact. Also, if „understandable export error became politicized, making it hard to reverse [although it should have been]“ was a fair description in most cases (I don’t think it is), this wouldn‘t really seem to be in conflict with the hypothesis that abandonment of impartiality came before the popularity of „trust the experts“ and resentment against that on the other side.
(But admittedly the hypothesis is speculative, it could also be that the class divide and progressive condescension are enough to trigger the bad dynamics.)
I agree. As someone who ticks off all the boxes for membership in this "expert" or "elite" class, this doesn't track with my "lived experience" as they say. The majority of people in my social circles do not check of these boxes and they don't have problems with experts. They have a problem with people who lack humility. They have a problem with people who fail to recognize and respect that expertise comes in many shapes and sizes. In other words, it's not experts they have a problem with, it's assholes.
For better and for worse the role populism plays in democracy is to act as a last ditch corrective mechanism against elite overreach. A healthy democracy requires a well informed public which includes widespread dissemination and communication of expert analysis and opinion. But when an expert class gains excessive authority coupled with top down elitist governance then populism is a messy and chaotic but nevertheless necessary response, and the appropriate move is to course-correct by winning back public opinion with better policy and less top down abuse. If one populism is met with scorn and oppositional populism, or by doubling down on top down policies, this pushes the system into something far worse than populism. You certainly are correct to examine the limits of common sense, and it is a fact that populists are generally good at breaking things and rarely good at solving difficult problems, and of course expert authority is not the answer.
“If this analysis is correct, the populist rejection of expertise is not merely an intellectual disagreement over truth or evidence, even if it is typically presented that way. It is, in part, a proud refusal to accept epistemic charity from those who present themselves as social superiors. “
Epistemic charity is only possible when those on the receiving end lack an education that enables them to understand the evidence for themselves. So a primary driver of all this is the gap in educational attainment. Compare the US to, well just about anywhere really, and its role becomes clearer. The gap, for obvious reasons, should be narrowed from the bottom. The current administrations efforts are to do the opposite.
I try to think of them not as bad people....but as good populists. Vis-a-vis the scorpion and frog parable. Keeps my frustration at bay. Hopefully the opposition in both parties will course correct with better policy instead of doubling down on previous policies.
I don't want to be the blog contrarian, but, with all due respect, I thoroughly disagree with explanatory aspect of essay in the main. Yes, telling someone they're stupid is likely to make them defensive, and the con-man operates in part by playing off resentments and weaknesses. But, as others commenters and I have frequently pointed out, propaganda works, and important aspects there cannot be neglected in any reasonable theory.
Crucially, I would contend your conclusion here is framed in a blame-the-victim way:
"Institutions dominated by a single social class and political tribe will inevitably face resistance and backlash in broader society, ..."
Bluntly, if there's a political tribe made up of anti-intellectuals, who have disdain for intellectuals as part of their tribal identity, it's impossible by definition to have intellectuals from that tribe.
In specific (pound table), if Republicans have an anti-vaccine lunatic as Secretary of Health, it is completely reasonable for intellectuals to express disdain and contempt for the Republican Party. And this isn't recent. Again, I suggest you might have a filter-bubble effect, if your daily life is leftist academic Professors of Blathering, you might not fully appreciate the extent that religious fanatics have power in many (not all, but many) areas in the US.
There's plenty of punditry about the problems of the disconnect of the Democratic Party from the working class. I think that abandonment is a big problem. But I view it as a economic topic tied into unions and worker's rights and income inequality and similar issues. In a nutshell, "wokeness" happens because word-policing is a lot easier than union-organizing. However, preaching about being nicer to nutcases nattering nonsense, is just putting a burden on people who should not bear it, i.e. those angry and frustrated at the effects of the torrent of right-wing lying (Carthago delenda est! I mean, Measles is back!)
Fair enough. I'm not sure there’s as much disagreement between us as you're implying
Well, from one perspective, it's a matter of weighting of factors. But on the other hand, sometimes a quantitative difference is functionally a qualitative difference. A deep scratch and a gaping chest wound are both sources of blood loss.
[edit - fixed inverted quan/qual from original]
Its so crazy to me that you talk about the weight relative impacts without taking into account that Fauci likely funded the research that has killed tens of millions worldwide and yet your hyperventilating over a few measles cases which were likely caused by people who have a religious objection to vaccines, not anything RFK has said. I will grant you, he’s a nut. But IMO liberals are really bad at weighing the impacts of their decisions. How many years of learning loss have we had as a result of school closures? The same people who said nothing when Biden let in 10 million illegals are saying it’s the end of due process because one person was deported to the wrong country. Its astounding.
Some of what you say is apt, but there are a bunch of people who've been sent to Salvadoran prison without being convicted of their supposed crime. Would you agree that every one of those is a pretty serious violation of due process?
There can be no entity less Trump-like whatever that means, than the big metro school district in our state capital with its 56% economically impoverished. By the same token that free lunches are given to all at the majority of campuses, so that no one must demonstrate need - the district has also waived enforcement of its own vaccination requirements. This subject came up after the Mexican Mennonites inadvertently spread measles about in a part of our state, though not probably for reasons of principle.
Even the lunatic young local Redditers, upon looking into it, were forced to concede that of the grade schoolers in the district who were unvaccinated (some 17%) only a small number were so because their parents filled out religious exemption paperwork.
No, it was just the 3rd world creeping into the first, and the authorities not wanting to rock the boat by demanding compliance.
Does this mean that the 100% blue city is -more RFK, Jr.-like than not?
*To their, ah, credit, the Redditers lost no face but were quick to jump to the suggestion that the schools district, with its $4 million budget deficit and numerous “failing” schools - should take on a new task, of operating as medical clinics also. The young folk are so bright, it’s really beautiful.
Respectfully
I think you've gone off on a tangent and are not truly addressing what the piece is really about
These issues are pretty fraught in a variety of ways. It's certainly not like what happened is that everything was going great with the world, then elites started making bad mistakes that undermined their credibility, and then there was a populist backlash. Sometimes it does seem like Dan W is saying something like that... charitably I think we should read him as saying something more reasonable.
Realistically, the whole thing was kicked off by 9/11, which simultaneously supercharged the latent currents of xenophobia and conspiracy-theorizing in American culture, and also set the stage for the GWOT that destroyed the credibility of conservative elites and made way for Trump to take control of the Republican party.
But the decline and fall of the Republican party did not lead them to become medical-science-deniers until pretty recently. RFK and the MAHA "crank sort" are very late steps in this whole process. In other words, RFK is not any part of the reason why elites originally became contemptuous of Republicans, and that contempt would still be pretty much as strong as it is now if there were no RFK--and even if there were no Republican anti-vaxers.
In other words, it's highly inaccurate to suggest that what's going on bears any resemblance to a world in which well-informed people woke up one day, noticed that Republicans were crazy about vaccines, and reasonably decided Republicans deserve contempt. Republicans do deserve contempt because of RFK, but that's not why elites have contempt for them.
No, this doesn't have anything to do with 9/11, or any single event. The Republicans have always, for at least more than a century, been the party of religious fanatics and anti-intellectualism. That's just a fact, and it's necessary to understand it to do meaningful analysis. It goes back, just for one example, to them trying to outlaw teaching Evolution in schools, and then the push for Bible stories, I mean Creationism. And note, the solution to this was not for biologists to be more humble and open and respectful to Creationists, and it's not that biologists are smug and arrogant so religious fundamentalists hate Evolution.
Now, what's happened over the past few decades is that the Republican Party have driven out the factions that weren't authoritarian in viewpoint, or had some sort of _noblesse oblige_ beliefs (the latter was Bush I and maybe Bush II). There's lot of punditry on this, it's mentioned in the article above. It's just another fact.
The result is that they've now distilled down in terms of factions to their most destructive aspects. And it is a sight to behold, the sort of thing which is an awesome spectacle to watch if you're not actually living through it. It's not just Trump, but all sorts of other powerful people will respond in highly serious contexts by in essence saying "My answer is simple - F* YOU!". Here's just one example, and bear with me, I'll show the relevance:
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/31/nx-s1-5418932/we-all-are-going-to-die-ernst-joni-town-hall-iowa-senator
"I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth," she continued, adding that she's glad she didn't have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy.
"But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," she said.
Note that last sentence. It's very important. Call it signaling, a tribal marker, whatever - she's appealing to religious fundamentalism. Not the washed-out spirituality of intellectuals. The real stuff, "everlasting life ... Jesus Christ" (Jesus Christ indeed!).
And, to finish this futile utter waste of time, my point is that it's both morally and factually wrong to suggest dealing with this by blaming the intellectuals for this anti-intellectualism.
Nobody is actually blaming the intellectuals as the dominant factor in this dysfunctional status game.
The dynamic Dan is describing is not blaming them and he did not he proposed as a remedy (which he does not purpose here blaming the intellectuals.
Also with respect, I disagree with you, hence my reaction. I read this piece has having a heavy amount of such blame, particularly in the last two paragraphs. Such aspects as stressing "social class and political tribe" sound too close to me to parody recommendation of (deliberately exaggerated for humor since this is a short comment) needing more Creationists in the biology department in order to more accurately reflect the intellectual diversity of the population. I'm well aware that I'm vulnerable to the accusation of misreading it, and I'm trying to be very careful on that point. But the context this is taking place, with repeatedly not considering how the massive right-wing lie machine interacts therein, and the sheer utter craziness of the Republican Party in e.g. anti-vaccine lunacy, has moved me to try to say something on this point, perhaps unwisely and intemperately.
Well look, I think there's blame to go around, which doesn't mean the blame rests equally on all those who have fallen short..
Compare the Ukraine war. A reasonable perspective (not the only reasonable one) would be to say "I mostly blame Putin, but it's probably also true that if GW Bush hadn't ineffectually pushed to get Ukraine admitted to NATO, the war would never have happened. So I also blame Bush to a lesser extent."
Similarly I'd say the right attitude is to blame the MAGAs themselves 90%, but recognize that maybe 10% of the blame rests with the intellectuals, who could have headed off the problem if they'd lived up better to their own ideals.
Ah, but this is exactly what I think is both factually false and blame-the-victim: "maybe 10% of the blame rests with the intellectuals, who could have headed off the problem if they'd lived up better to their own ideals."
I believe people who advocate this do not properly take into consideration the effects the right-wing lie machine. Note, the point is not that they deny it exists, but rather they don't factor it in properly as to why their supposed solution is wrong. It leads to punditry of the form (again, humorous, short comment):
"Intellectuals, if you were absolutely and completely perfect, flawless and saintly, then the right-wing lie machine would have no power. Thus, I will preach at you to be perfect. Oh, don't say I'm blaming you, I'm "helping" by detailing all the ways you could improve. Did you lose your temper when a Senator called for you to be jailed for war crimes? Bad intellectual! Your ideal is to always explain your position with humbleness and humility, and you didn't live up to it there. ..."
This is a loop which can be run endlessly. It's ideologically impervious to falsification, since one can always find something to criticize (I'm actually amused by the concept of needing scientific journals run by the poorly educated - there's something rhetorically intriguing in turning a logical paradox into a criticism, and even better, it's intrinsic fodder for a line of attack).
Yes
I respect your recognition you might have it
I think this is Sensitive area and many of us are triggered
So wait, do you think that if 9/11 hadn't happened we would still have had President Donald J Trump, or anything resembling the MAGA movement? I don't think there's any way you get Trump without the radicalizing shock to the system from 9/11.
I think you're conflating some things that are very different. Of course there have long been religious nuts clustered on the right, although they are a much smaller and weaker faction now.
But religious nuts are not MAHAs. RFK was a Democrat until recently. Republicans were more religious and religiously conservative 20 years ago. They were much less anti-vax 20 years ago. The anti-vax issue and the religious nut issue are not the same thing.
The idea that they've just "distilled down" to their worst aspects is belied by the fact that Republicans now are basically OK with gay marriage. It's true that on the whole they are more destructive now, but in very different ways than they used to be--Republicans weren't tariff nuts until Trump came along, and not really earnestly until 2025! They've gotten saner in some ways even as they've gotten much more insane in other ways.
Indeed, not 9/11, but I think Trump is an outcome of some very bad long-term trends regarding inequality, deindustrialization, destruction of civic society, and so on. This is pretty standard historical analysis, of what causes the rise of authoritarian strongmen.
And I stress one has to consider the history of political divisions. You're right, "religious nuts are not [MAGAs not MAHAs - typo?].". But the Republican Party is the party of religious nuts, and drove out countervailing factions. I'd also agree "anti-vax issue and the religious nut issue are not the same thing.", but the religious nuts are anti-intellectuals by nature, and this matters in terms of support for anti-vax.
That's *why* RFK Jr went to the Republicans. the Democrats would not give him any power, the Republicans named him Secretary of Health! That's a difference between the two parties in a nutshell.
The worse aspects was referring to actions such as the above. There was a time the Republicans wouldn't actually do something so destructive.
The issue of gay marriage is whole different topic. In one of his very early speeches, Trump said something along the lines of, paraphrased, gay-bashing is out instead we're going to be doing Muslim-bashing now. But this is long enough.
MAHA = "Make America Healthy Again" = RFK's movement
It certainly sounds like we rate the significance of 9/11 differently. The change in US conservative culture following that event was really dramatic, I thought. Foreigners and Muslims became the enemy within almost overnight.
I agree with this: "Republicans have an anti-vaccine lunatic as Secretary of Health, it is completely reasonable for intellectuals to express disdain and contempt for the Republican Party"
But ... If the Democrats have a senile intellectually incompetent politician as President and insist that anyone who points out this fact is peddling "misinformation," shouldn't it be reasonable for intellectuals express disdain and contempt for the Democratic Party too. Some of them do, but much fewer than those who express contempt for the Republicans.
I think those cases have orders of magnitude difference between them, and it's not reasonable to morally equivalence them. Though one of the things I'm curious about, do you believe that the White House physician who repeatedly gave Biden a clean bill of health, was in fact lying? And if you do, would you then grant it's reasonable to believe that there's a cover-up now of Trump's increasing dementia from perhaps Alzheimer's Disease?
Do you *not* think that any doctor who gave Biden a clean bill of health in 2024 was lying? It seems like the Tapper/Thompson book is pretty incontrovertible when it comes to this issue.
(I would be totally open to the possibility that Trump has dementia and it's being covered up, although I have doubts about whether his admin would be capable of that.)
What I try to figure out, really, is "what's true?". Tapper has every incentive to exaggerate to sell books and hype a story. There's an immense amount of lying and wolf-crying by the Republican Party. On the other hand, Biden certainly sounded terrible at times, and much more than for that debate disaster - no doubt about it, age and stress were taking a toll. Yet (I'll both-sides here, but I think it's relevant) Trump often sounds outright demented, is the oldest President ever elected plus has a family history of Alzheimer's Disease, and the Republicans don't care and apparently consider him fit for office - what's the standard? On and on.
My thinking is, for a novel idea, let's start with what's the absolute best sourcing, which is the White House physician's report. These reports consistently gave Biden a clean bill of health. Were they lies? I've noticed all the partisan ranting condemns Biden's aides, the media, the Democratic Party, etc. etc. - but they never seem to denounce those White House physician's reports. This seems very odd to me. It's repeated black and white statements he's fit for office, with a named person on the record, who is an actual doctor, who has in fact examined Biden. It seems to me that IF Biden was actually unfit, it necessary follows that these must be complete lies - but once more, I've never heard that said in any of the hate-machine output I've seen. Frankly, I don't understand this.
It does follow that the Republicans would have to be screaming there was an ongoing conspiracy to hide the mental deterioration of the President by falsifying physical reports. And maybe they don't want to go there for obvious reasons.
Sometimes you just can't find the truth of a controversy. But I do want to press on the physician's reports, given how little they seem to be mentioned (also, Trump/Alzheimer's is very worrying - I can't provide a scientific basis for this, but my impression is he's getting worse).
I agree there's an interesting question about what explains the doctor's reports.
A lot of sources have said that Biden was typically lucid for a 4-6 hour stretch in the afternoon. Perhaps the appointments with the physician were scheduled for that time period, and maybe they rescheduled them if he was having a bad day that particular day. Just one hypothesis.
It seems to me that Tapper and Thompson's incentives to exaggerate are counterbalanced by some pretty strong incentives to not get caught exaggerating.
Again, very happy to grant that Trump could have Alzheimer's. Anyone with eyes can see that he's got something going on mentally that's in many ways worse than Alzheimer's.
A thought provoking read that misses a very important point about the expert class. Back in the day when 5-10% went into tertiary education they likely were the intellectual elite, today when close to 50% do, the distrust should be understandable.
Education is not intelligence, it is more and more just received wisdom without questioning. The education system is pumping out more and more of these "experts" that we see patronising the peasants constantly.
Today the credentialled experts are lecturing us about "safe and effective", a century ago they'd have been middle managers in a cotton mill.
I think Nietzsche would have recognized resentment to be the same thing as contempt.
Three cheers for Nietzsche. (woot, woot, woot) It feels like we are going through a Nietzschean cycle and I'm surprised at the lack of resurgence in Nietzsche appreciation and awareness. Orwell is getting due recognition but certainly the Friedrich-Meister should be getting his piece too. For lack of a better explanation I blame it on pervasive misreading and misteaching of his intended message.
A great piece, Dan. I think this is your best work.
I want to emphasize what is at stake here.
It is instructive to examine a past period when an educated elite, a proud hierarchy who, despite continued expositions of humility, and with little or no respect for the perspective of those they dictated to, were challenged by a populist movement that dismissed elite interpretations of the world. This group of experts, with distinctive competence in interpreting the word of God, was the Catholic Church, and their flock were subject to regulatory overreach and massive value extraction. Resentment with theft, financial and moral corruption, and a suffocating definition of how one was to relate to God, spawned the success of Luther and the rise of Protestantism.
An excellent reason for exploring this parallel is to take stock of the gigantic cost this conflict inflicted on the people of Europe. This battle between established experts and a populist movement for personal religious freedom spawned the conflicts in Europe which originated in the Protestant Reformation and lasted for 130 years: (1517 Martin Luther's 95 Theses) until 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia.) And this was not the last of it. The death toll was gigantic - millions of people died in the wars, massacres, and persecutions and it spawned such disturbing institutions and repeated inquisitions with appalling torture as a means of extracting confessions.
There are non-trivial differences from our present circumstances to be sure. Our crisis has an ineradicable epistemic dimension which was largely absent from the above catastrophe. But
a populist rebellion against a caste of experts is not a new phenomenon and the costs incurred in such a rebellion can be gigantic. We should be worried. Very worried.
Great comment Pete - thanks
New here. In those 130 years of conflict, how much weight did Protestantism vs Catholicism have as the root cause of the violence, vs acting as a convenient cassus belli?
The thought came while watching Louis Theroux's latest doc. Property is so much more expensive in Tel Aviv than in the proposed West Bank settlements, that I wonder how much religious zealotry is emergent, acting as a veneer of justification for (ultimately) economic root causes.
Henry VIII’s “Protestantism” is a good example of such a veneer over material self-interest.
New here. In those 130 years of conflict, how much weight did Protestantism vs Catholicism have as the root cause of the violence, vs acting as a convenient cassus belli?
The thought came while watching Louis Theroux's latest doc. Property is so much more expensive in Tel Aviv than in the proposed West Bank settlements, that I wonder how much religious zealotry is emergent, acting as a veneer of justification for (ultimately) economic root causes.
Huge weight
I think, related to this, the social dynamics of "dunking" is highly complicated in a way that makes it unclear if it's good political strategy for the wider liberal/center movement or not. I remember after 2016 Trump/Brexit double upset there were a lot of think-pieces about "liberal smugness" and how it had ignited right-wing backlash. The argument went something like: "we need to stop sounding so smug about being more intelligent, more educated, more cultured and moral than these poor misled rural boomers". And even though that internal discourse was itself probably aggrivating for outsiders, I think there was a point to it. If you make someone feel humiliated they'd rather sink the ship you're both on than let you steer. Smugness is enjoyable (status affirming) for you but it means the targets of your condescension will never ever join your side.
On the other hand: The audience for a smug expert dunk can just as well identify with the dunker rather than the dunkee. It will all depend on the specifics of the situation. Experts raining down hellfire on these absolute idiots in a way that gives one the option to experience a vicarious status-boost can probably solidify trust in experts. They're my guys!
From a PR perspective the problem is that this type of content is usually directed at other highly educated people within the "professional managerial class". I remember one version happening often on science/statistics twitter before it collapsed; subjects of dunks (usually also academics to be fair) were treated as absolute rubes for not knowing niché methodological pitfalls. The message to the audience is implicitly "if you like/retweet this dunk you're *with it*". It's an effective message for a certain person, but for a wider audience it's just smug nerds trying to one-up each other. For me (the target audience) it made me more attentive to statistics (lest I get dunked on horribly in the future), so from my experience it worked, but there may be other experiences.
That is a sort of apolitical area for dunking, but the same goes for more politically loaded ones. It can be true that they both create populist backlash and also recruit and solidify establishment identification. I lean towards dunking/smugness being bad and the solution being friendly accessible educational contents that improve people's knowledge base and makes them feel the experts are friends. Feels warmer, and like it'd have less risk of a violent backlash.
Interesting - thanks for the comment. I agree these dynamics are complicated (and interesting)
I think you understate the extent to which the expert class has sabotaged itself. When it comes to, say, physics or aeronautical engineering, I’m fairly sure the experts have a pretty good idea what they are talking about. But take three examples.
1. Transgenderism. The “experts” tell us that trans women are women, despite the whole penis thing, and that trans female athletes can compete against biological females with no compromise of competitive balance or safety. They support dubious and unproven treatment of gender nonconforming children, despite the lack of evidence for the efficacy of such treatment. In the process, they reify gender stereotypes that, until about last week, feminists were trying to break down.
2. Diet. Based on ideological and aesthetic commitments, doctors at places like Harvard are advancing plant-based diets and denigrating meat. They do so based on flawed epidemiological research that does not meet basic scientific criteria.
3. Covid. During Covid, we were told not to mask and then to mask. If that had been based on new scientific information, that would be fine. But Fauci admitted that the change in guidance was based on mask availability, not any real evidence. And people were told to mask outdoors, where the risk of outdoor transmission is effectively zero. And in California, parks, public basketball and tennis facilities, and beaches were closed, despite zero risk, with nary a peep from the public health experts. Since California is habitable outside about eleven months out of the year, and since obesity is a Covid comorbidity, instead of closing parks, the government should have encouraged outdoor fitness activities!
Then, to make matters worse, the same public health authorities said BLM demonstrations were OK. And they were — the ones that didn’t involve arson. Because they were outside, and most outdoor activities were fine! But the sudden exemption for outdoor demonstrations (as opposed to swimming or running around a track) was clearly politically motivated.
To me, this status hypothesis sounds a lot like cope. People have lost faith in experts because experts have screwed up so badly in the last decade or so. You may protest, rightly, that there are areas and fields where experts genuinely know stuff. I agree! I think, for example, that most economists are right on tariffs and Trump is wrong. But how are people to distinguish between “experts” who know real stuff and charlatans?
As to Harvard, I am not sure people object to a real intellectual elite, which is joined based on real excellence. But I think you underestimate the extent to which opening the window on its admissions practices undermined the university. A large number of Harvard students are LADCs — legacies, athletes (often in aristocratic sports), dean interest people (rich donors, children of celebrities and the politically powerful), and children of faculty and staff. Then you have a group of people admitted under a racial spoils system. And finally some get in because they are genuinely capable. But honestly it looks a lot like “privilege laundering” as Scott Alexander called it. It starts to look like Harvard’s status is largely unearned.
You have some good examples, but its worth interrogating what's really going on. In two of them - treatment of trans people and diet - in what sense are we saying "the experts say such and such"? Because there isn't a clear consensus in favor of a plant based diet or in favor of early treatment of trans-identified youth, if you look at actual published research.
It seems really what is happening is that experts are pulled into the process of affective polarization Dan has described in earlier articles. Experts are, overwhelmingly, members of the professional managerial class and therefore members of the "left-wing" coalition (we really need better names, but none seems to stick). Once the idea that meat eating is bad for the environment enters the news, their social environment, both personally and professionally, will incentivize taking positions that oppose meat eating, even if the underlying data is ambiguous. Similarly, once the idea that youth gender dysphoria often causes suicidal ideation enters the mainstream, pediatricians calling out the weak evidence for most proposed treatments, lose professional status, regardless of the facts (and I should say I'm not taking a position on specific cases here beyond the bare facts). This gives the wider coalition the illusion of expert consensus where none really exists.
This seems like a case of a market like mechanism awarding social status for advocates of one side of a controversy regardless of the facts. Some rationalist writer had a name for this but I'll be damned if I can find it.
The widespread adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions during COVID, in spite of the very weak evidence that they work either previously or during the pandemic, is something books are still being written about. This was a worldwide phenomenon, and people will argue that NPIs did work in Australia and New Zealand and most of China. As I often do in these cases, I find much US criticism so parochial as to be almost self-invalidating. If people in the UK are being arrested for walking in the hills near their home (that almost happened to my parents) and people all over Asia are wearing masks everywhere, it doesn't say much that is useful to complain about particular CDC and CDPH decisions. If everyone everywhere (except maybe Sweden) is making the same kinds of mistakes, its not a problem with our government specifically, it is something systemically wrong with the way we are thinking about the problem.
What I think happened and I think fits the timeline is a kind of accelerated version of what's happened with diet and childhood gender dysphoria. At the very beginning it makes sense to tell everyone to stay home and implement NPIs because we don't have tests and we don't know how the virus is transmitted. All we know is that there is community transmission in California and in New York, there are over 6000 deaths in NY in the first month and even more in Italy, and there's a very strong public pressure on the public health community to do something.
But then very rapidly those of us who tend to do what experts tell us adopted NPIs as a social necessity, and at the same time the CDC and other public health authorities in their internal communications were not assimilating new findings as fast as they should. Once it was known that virus was airborne and only airborne, that most cases are asymptomatic or mild, and that most fatalities are in people 70+ the public health guidance should have changed quickly to focus on people at risk and relaxed most of the NPIs. That change should have happened in most developed countries around this time in 2020, and in fact if you look at the timelines it did - many counties in California had lifted their mask mandates and NYC had started to allow businesses to reopen, but when case numbers continued to rise, which was expected and not a counter-indication, NPIs were reimposed and remained imposed or even were tightened through the summer.
This was a mistake, but sociologically its a very interesting mistake that was made almost everywhere in the world at around the same time. Its not explicable by any specifically American personalities or institutions. What seems to have happened is that the public had accepted NPIs as a partial solution that made sense, at least the part of the public that interacts with infectious disease experts, and created a professional and social pressure for findings that supported NPIs. The public wanted fewer cases, they thought NPIs were a solution (because to be fair they had been told they were and the message lost some nuance somewhere) and so it became had for the experts who should have gone back to their original message that masks and social distancing were unlikely to be useful, to actually stick to that message.
Agreed!
I appreciate your thoughtful grappling with responses to expertise. It’s particularly interesting to read this piece on the heels of Krugman’s today, “Understanding inequality, part I.” My sense, on a first reading of each, is that yours and Krugman’s pieces are most helpfully read together to give us a fuller picture of why we are seeing such extreme discontent from so many quarters.
Right now, all but the very rich have been stripped of reasonable opportunities for hard work to gain them a comfortable life, and the further down the scale you go economically, the worse it gets. Those who are claimed as experts are reasonably understood not to have helped this situation, and are reasonably seen quite often to have made it worse. The handling of the pandemic by experts, as we all can see, was a mess, with vast, real world negative consequences for almost everyone. I wonder whether we may also do a disservice in seeing this as right wing/left wing—or “elite” vs. uneducated”—as the language of this piece might sometimes seem to suggest.
In a closing paragraph, you state: “Moreover, it suggests that rebuilding trust in experts means more than improving their reliability, as crucial as that is. Institutions dominated by a single social class and political tribe will inevitably face resistance and backlash in broader society, regardless of their technical competence.” That is definitely getting at something important, and the question is where to go with that thought. That observation itself may in fact lay bare at least part of our collective failure: that is, a failure to respect and recognize expertise that does not lie within the halls of academe and its ilk. I think, for example, of my failed attempt to use a mitre box to cut and fit crown molding. My respect for the expertise of carpenters has known no bounds ever since—and I always make sure to say so when the opportunity arises to appreciate a carpenter’s expertise.
What if, as a society, we treated one another with genuine mutual respect and worked hard to assure everyone had a fair shot? I am given to wonder whether that’s at least half the battle here.
Thanks for yet another incredibly thought-provoking piece.
There were many reasons behind the "expert" failure during the pandemic, but one big factor was the idea that public health experts' expertise extended into areas that in reality they had little expertise in, and in many cases that was class-based. For instance, they often seemed unaware that family visiting nursing home patients is an important factor in preventing medical errors, especially in nursing homes that are not high quality. Similarly, they were often unaware that keeping kids home from schools meant that parents had to quit jobs. And the inability to understand that people were not keen on wearing a mask for 8 hours a day when it was 95 degrees or in a workplace where being able to clearly hear what other people are saying is important for basic safety. There was a lot of skepticism about cloth masks coming from people who had to wear PPE in their jobs (science, manufacturing, construction) because they had first hand experience of what blocked what. I would also argue that the hard line taken against in-person religious worship was partly class-based given that educated Americans tend to be much more secular.
Each example you offer is excellent. Well said.
Thanks for a great comment as always Susan. I hadn't seen the new Krugman piece - I'll check it out.
This is an excellent essay. Without doubt at the moment in the US there is a considerably larger rejection of expertise on the right than the left.
However, it's worth noting that many people reject certain forms of expertise. People on the left frequently reject mainstream economics. They reject what nuclear scientists say about the safety of nuclear power. Quite a few people on the left now reject biology. Perhaps most people reject some forms of expertise that disagree with some of their priors.
"epistemic charity" ... I like that concept ... very interesting. Is it new?
Michael Sandel explores the same topic in Tyranny of merit. It’s worth your time, it’s a very well constructed argument which convinced me at least. Essentially, the elites (we can define them by status) must recognise that their success is not their own merit & also that the “plebes” lack of success if not their fault. This makes us all equal in “condition” (not in opportunity nor in outcome). We want to keep the experts but delete their moral desert.
Outstanding as usual Daniel. The bitter experience of life has converted me to the cynical or tragic view that you and David Pinsof espouse. But can your careful thought process and concern for the greater good be all based on vanity? I think there is a slight performative contradiction here... and I also suspect that David Pinsof is a *genuinely* nice guy. Seriously though - some people are high on the Honesty-Humility scale and concerned with truth and these are the ones (eg JS Mill) who helped establish the constitution of knowledge as we now have it. It's a kind of meta view, and maybe a minority taste of philosophical types.
Status is where it is at though, this has helped me understand anti immigrant sentiment here in Ireland, which is restricted to those excluded from cultural capital. People excluded from certain status games start new ones. I'm not sure TJ Scheff is in vogue any more, but his explorations of shame and violence are brilliant if you haven't come across them.
The case of gender in the academy is really a special one. The populist view - depending on your definition of gender - is more in line with biological science than the elite one.
Very interesting comment — thanks for taking the time to write it!
What you call the “cynical or tragic view” is the idea that most (all?) of what we do is driven by selfish psychological motives, even what appears to be disinterested altruism — is that right?
If so, would you agree that these motives are typically unconscious?
I was wondering whether this view might risk becoming a tautology, depending on how it's framed. For instance, if we're talking about unconscious or “hidden” psychological motives, are we saying anything more than: we do what we are programmed to do — which is essentially the behavioral code evolution has "given" us, applied to the environment in question?
Another related thought: could the dissemination of these kinds of findings from evolutionary psychology (i.e., selfish motives behind altruism) be considered a form of infohazard?
In the sense that learning about self-interested reasons behind seemingly unselfish actions might devalue those actions — and perhaps even discourage them?
Thanks for reading my comment Flavien. I'm still working out my considered view on these things! I could be more accurate by calling my view simply naturalist. I think Dan Williams would say that as evolved mammals, no genetically-based traits that operate against our reproductive interests will survive after multiple generations, or something like that. So in that sense, natural selection establishes a tautology. It is not so much selfish interest as 'inclusive' or kin interest. But traits have latitude in how they are expressed. Pro-social traits that have been naturally selected might have side effects beyond kin, and we can say that the wide scale co-operation we see in modernity would be an example of that.
I do think that some actions dressed up as altruism are less pure than they appear, and only next to our ability to fool other people is our ability to fool ourselves - see the work of Trivers on that point.
These reductionist explanations of behaviour might be a hazard - this is a general problem with naturalism. Traditional metaphysics posited some transcendent reasons for moral prescriptions. Without the transcendent do social mores etc, eventually falter? I believe this is called evolutionary debunking. But from the lived experience perspective, valuing and choosing between alternatives is unavoidable.
On a more positive note, I don't really see things as zero sum selfish versus altruistic, nor as strategic and instrumental as some evolutionary accounts suggest. The difference is seeing the interpretive and intersubjective side of human nature which is relational in a way that is irreducible to a third person perspective.
I see human moral and political systems as an example of niche construction, and human meaning making as within that context. Theorists tend to understate this dimension of human experience because it is hard to quantify. For instance they confuse the organism with the self. The self is inherently relational, plugged into an inherited web of intersubjective stuff (attachment, recognition, symbolic meaning making, mutual attunement).
The importance of reputation was already recognised by Adam Smith, long before Veblen. See the quotations from Smith in https://kantandsmith.substack.com
I wish elites will frame their messaging like Dan, because the social shaming and moral condemnation they engage in doesn’t seem to work right now. The theory of populists refusing helpful advise to keep their pride and status is plausible, sad but one we can have a possible cure for. The problem is maybe even that won't work now, the loss of trust and the rising power of social media makes the solution harder to implement. I see some people get triggered in comments by a double standard where Dan condemns both elites and populist equally because the latter is way worse. But the reason for that is Dan's criticism is gonna be perceived by the educated class more productively, it is not like RFK or Musk read this blog. Populists are small minded , have less trust of academic prestige and their opinions are harder to shake. Whereas people who already agree with his views are more likely to take his feedback into account. For elites to exercise their authority they have to accept a higher responsibility and standard of public judgement. Provided democratic norms are intact.
Let us not forget that experts are not only offering knowledge but also policy which necessarily assumes values.