“The Death of Expertise” is a good book.
The thing is, the GOP got to the point where the experts disagreed with major aspects of their policy… And instead of doing what a rational person does, when the facts don’t match their opinion, instead of changing their opinion… they just abandoned the facts. Since they couldn’t get real experts to support their arguments anymore, they were forced to abandon the notion of expertise itself.
They needed to attack the notion that someone could know more about something than you… and frankly, it was a frighteningly easy sell. Turns out, dumb people like the idea that they’re just as smart as anyone else. If I’m already as smart as everyone else, then I don’t need to actually bother educating myself, and that’s cool because that shit is hard!
From the “thought” leaders of the right wing, this was critical to their success, because it eliminated the need to provide coherent, competent plans for policy.
The thing is, when doing any actual policy planning, plans are complex and most people won’t even understand the details. It’s the experts who will dig into the guts and find out the problems. So if you get everyone to hate the experts, then you insulate yourself against those kind of attacks.
Then, you’re able to craft super simplistic policy plans that won’t actually work, but which SOUND good, and are easy to get idiots to understand. In practice, making such plans is easier to do than making the kind of complex plans that actually work in the real world, because REAL plans will always have bad things in them, because that’s how the real world works.
It’s an effective strategy if you can get people to take that first step abandon the requirement that shit be real. The soviets were very big into this kind of strategy, and the GOP has absolutely adopted it.
