How far can a government go in harming its own people before it loses support? And what does it mean if this form of harm happens via an attack on public knowledge institutions, from universities to meteorological services, in which expert knowledge is hosted? Even if you are not a friend of such institutions (and one could write many blogposts about what they could do better), isn’t there a basic sense in which they fulfill public functions in modern societies that should receive cross-partisan support? And shouldn’t there be some kind of recognition, on the part of lay people – which we all are, in the overwhelming majority of areas – that we need to trust the expertise of others for many public and private decisions?
A few months ago, Matteo Santarelli from the University of Bologna had kindly invited me for a workshop on my book Citizen Knowledge. I got a set of excellent comments and questions from a number of colleagues. But one line of the discussion in particular stayed with me and has bugged me since, as the attack by the Trump administration on universities and other expert institutions unfolds in the US.** It came out in the second half of the workshop, when Maria Regina Brioschi and Chiara Loschi gave their comments (kudos to them!).
One question that I had discussed in my book, and which has become ever more salient with the second Trump administration, is the relation between “normal citizens” and “experts”. In the book, I had proposed a “partnership model” of mutual responsibility between society and expert communities. But as Maria Regina rightly pointed out, there might really be different logics between scientific inquiry and everyday experience, and it might require more thought what it actually means to translate between scientific expertise and the lived experiences of lay people. Matteo brought in some arguments from Geertz about the ways in which elements of scientific inquiry can become part of common sense, but then do not function according to a scientific logic anymore. But at least, one might say, this is a way in which lay people come to integrate certain fundamental facts about the world from science into their own belief systems.
However, Chiara had also raised the issue that second Trump administration had started a huge onslaught on many forms of expertise, for example cutting down sources of information from the Center of Disease Control. This points to a second way in which expert knowledge functions in society, and which had often functioned relatively undisturbed: via channels between expert institutions, e.g. centralized health institutions and local hospitals. And whether or not they might have “trust in experts” in an abstract sense, many people follow the advice of medical stuff in a local hospital. They may not be aware of it, but in this way expert knowledge benefits them in very concrete ways, e.g. if a new therapy becomes available for a sick family member.
Which means that one can expect some “when the rubber hits the road moments”: what will happen if Trump voters interact with medical staff who tell them that they cannot offer them optimal treatment anymore because the government has shut down certain sources of information, or the development of new drugs has been stopped for lack of funding? To put it polemically: How many measle epidemics will it take before it might dawn upon people that these kinds of anti-expert policies harm them, and that the life and health of their families are at stake?
On my optimistic days, I think that we cannot be very far from the day when a majority of Trump voters sees how disastrous such policies are. This might happen via the route of medical expertise, or it might happen if Trump ignores expert views on the relation between tariffs and inflation, or in many other ways. This could lead to an electoral land shift away from Trump, and maybe, as a consequence, some major shakeup of the party landscape.
On my pessimistic days, I think that at least two other kinds of scenarios might then play out. Scenario 1 is that individuals in such a situation will prioritize their allegiance to camp Trump even over their own bodily interests. Maybe the administration will “help” them by providing an alternative explanation, e.g. scapegoating particular groups in society for the ills people experience (“the immigrants brought the measles”).
Scenario 2 is that even if individuals, on the ground, get it, and are angry and disappointed with the government, they will not have any media for sharing their grievances, because all corporate and social media that they are aware off are in camp Trump. Scenario 1 and 2 might also function in some kind of combination, to quell whatever resistance to Trump’s anti-expert policies might arise.
At the same time, and to move to a meta-level: I feel uncomfortable about the “now see what you did to yourself” flavor of my arguments. It smacks of a kind of arrogance that is precisely why a lot of resentment against expertise arose in the first place, I guess. People do not like being patronized and being told what’s good for them. If they perceive this as an attack on their dignity, they might resist it, even in cases in which this might save their life and health.
So, in the imagined scenario between a doctor and a Trump voter, I’m torn between decrying the latter’s unwillingness to see how their own interests are being harmed by Trump’s policies – and admiring, in a strange way, the willingness to put one’s own dignity even beyond one’s own interest, in the sense that one does not want to be patronized by someone who (one thinks) looks down upon one’s own values and lifestyle.
There must be ways for bringing the message that we all need the expertise of others across that avoid the perception of this being an arrogant attack on one’s dignity. There must be ways of creating meaningful relations between experts and citizens that avoid this. I don’t know what the best way is, but I am certain that it involves a great dose of epistemic humility on the part of experts, and probably a lot of effort to leave the ivory tower, to the places where people can be met personally. It might also involve, in the long term, a repositioning of expert institutions, with more openness towards parts of the public who currently feel alienated from them.
Or are (some?) Trump voters in a space in which all claims to expertise, simply as such, are already perceived as an attack on their dignity? Then some versions of the negative scenarios become all the more likely. Let’s hope that this is not the case!
** I do not mean to say that this is the most horrible aspect of what the Trump government is doing. I can’t even start to make a list of all the things that are far worse. Many are normatively completely overdetermined, and the question is not how to analyze them philosophically, but how to resist them most effectively…
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