Gee, now here’s a surprise: Right-wing loons and Trump cultists are attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci. Makes perfect sense, right? Fauci is one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts, he’s currently the lead government spokesman on the coronavirus, and, as nonpartisan director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, he has advised every president since Ronald Reagan. Therefore, he knows stuff. Therefore, he shouldn’t be trusted.
It’s bad enough that we’re plagued by a lethal virus; it’s even worse that we’re encumbered by the virus of ignorance. As Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology, reportedly remarked this weekend, “There is this sense that experts are untrustworthy, and have agendas that aren’t aligned with the people. It’s very concerning because the experts in this are being discounted out of hand.”
I’m sure the loons and cultists would dismiss Bergstrom too; after all, he’s a professor – which automatically makes him a member of the “elite.” I get that all the time. My column is syndicated, and far-flung readers who don’t like it always seize on my affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania – which suggests to them that I’m educated, hence an “elitist,” hence automatically dismissible.
You see this mentality a lot. Health experts have devoted their lives to that field, but, bah humbug, what do they know? Everyday folks (including Trump) who think that vaccines cause autism are gonna believe their BS no matter what. An evangelical pastor in Florida who thinks the coronavirus is a crock, and who packs his church with worshipers in the midst of a pandemic, is gonna think he knows more than Doc Fauci no matter what. A pinhead religious university president who reopens his campus to kids in the midst of a pandemic, and quickly learns that at least 11 kids are showing symptoms, is still gonna trust some purported higher power over Doc Fauci.
Frankly, I’m fine with people who wish to be stupid – as long as they don’t impact the rest of us. The big problem, of course, is that their stupidity threatens to spread the disease to those of us who wish to be smart. Who prefer to heed Doc Fauci and respect science.
Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, and author of The Death of Expertise, has warned that “the implicit social contract between educated elites and laypeople – in which professionals were rewarded for their expertise and, in turn, were expected to spread the benefits of their knowledge – is fraying…A significant number of laypeople now believe, for no reason but self-affirmation, that they know better than experts in almost every field. They have come to this conclusion after being coddled in classrooms from kindergarten through college, continually assured by infotainment personalities in increasingly segmented media that popular views, no matter how nutty, are virtuous and right, and mesmerized by an Internet that tells them exactly what they want to hear.”
None of this is new, of course. There has always been a strain of anti-intellectualism in our culture; Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about that 185 years ago. But somehow the stupid gene seems to have grown more dominant in this new century. After all, Trump (who has called experts “terrible” and “phony”) is merely the alpha male version of Sarah Palin – who was last seen wrapped in a bear costume on a reality show, but who, you may recall, was once touted for the number-two job based on her knowledge of virtually nothing.
Indeed, her sudden stratospheric ascent in 2008 capped a decade of mediocrity in high places. George W. Bush seems saintly today when compared Trump, but lest we forget, his administration all too often dumbed down the standards for public service. Why needed experts to helm big jobs when anyone could do it?
And so (small sampling), we got Michael “Brownie” Brown heading FEMA during Katrina, based on his preparedness experience at the International Arabian Horse Association. We got Brownie deputy Patrick Rhode, a former Bush advance man whose preparedness experience was covering natural disasters as a local TV anchorman. We got Monica Goodling at the Justice Department, tasked with evaluating the performances of U.S. attorneys, based on her scant prosecutorial experience and her stint at a law school listed in the lowest “fourth tier” by the academic rankers at U.S. News and World Report. We got NASA appointee George Deutsch, who barred NASA scientists from talking about climate change, based on his nonexistent science background, his nonexistent college degree, and (a ha!) his political work on Bush’s reelection campaign.
And when people questioned whether Palin had the credentials to be a heartbeat away from the most powerful job on earth, the conservative Weekly Standard magazine sprang to her defense, accusing her critics of “status bias.” It posed this question: “If we implicitly think uncertified citizens are unfit for the highest offices, why do we trust those same citizens to select our highest officers through free elections?”
I know the answer! Because uncertified citizens like us will hopefully pick and trust people who are smarter and more qualified than we are.
The upside, right now, is that despite the nonsensical dissing of Doc Fauci on the rabid right – with social media tags like #faucifraud – he’s still on the job and leveraging his expertise with the dumbest president in living or dead memory. Earlier today, on CNN, he said that he and his medical colleague successfully persuaded Trump to extend the social distancing guidelines until the end of April (thus killing Trump’s delusional dream of packed churches on Easter):
“We showed him the data. He looked at the data and he got it right away. It was a pretty clear picture. Dr. Debbie Birx and I went in together in the Oval Office and leaned over the desk and said, ‘Here are the data. Take a look.’ He looked at them, he understood them and he just shook his head and said, ‘I guess we got to do it.'”
OK, that’s progress. Put your hands together for science and knowledge!
Now perhaps we should work on the 61 percent of Americans who can’t name all three branches of government. I hope it’s not “elitist” to say we should do better.