Just the Facts | inquisitive Issue #6 "Limits"

A new book argues that the “weaponization of expertise” by elites has fueled widespread distrust among ordinary Americans

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Mike Coughlin, a tavern owner in Carol Stream, Illinois, defied Gov. JB Pritzker’s order to close his restaurant in November of 2020. If he closed again, he said, the restaurant would go out of business. Pritzker had closed down Illinois restaurants at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, had re-opened them in the summer, and was now closing them again. In the face of widespread protests like Coughlin’s, the governor defended his actions by going on TV with a University of Chicago infectious disease specialist, who claimed that “there was no way around” the shutdown order. According to this expert, a restaurant could be safe one moment and a “superspreader event” the next, if someone infected with COVID were to walk in.

The closing order would remain in force through early February 2021—a triumph of science over politics, one might suppose. Only it wasn’t—as Jacob Russell and Dennis Patterson argue in The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism. In fact, it was one more example of politicians and experts behaving badly, dismissing very reasonable lay skepticism of expert opinion—expert opinion that extended well beyond what the state of knowledge about the effects of quarantine on COVID could possibly warrant and wielded by politicians to selectively shut down some forms of association while leaving others alone.

Russell and Patterson, who are both professors at Rutgers University Law School, taught a course entitled “Populism and the Law” for three years, out of which the ideas in this book emerged. As they and their students learned about populist opposition to political and cultural establishments, it became clear to them that populists often get a bad rap. Popular skepticism of establishment orthodoxy and expert opinion, far from being a sign of ignorance or anti-intellectualism, is often warranted and sometimes closer to reality than what is being put forth by the experts. And the experts, rather than carefully and impartially bringing their expertise to policymaking, often disguise nakedly political judgments as expertise.

The book draws most of its examples from American policy responses to the COVID epidemic, but its analysis extends back 40 years to British nuclear scientists overplaying their hand in predicting levels of radioactive contamination after the Chernobyl disaster. In case after case, we see elites and experts overreaching, populists resisting, and elites doubling down on their error. It should be no surprise, the authors suggest, that there has been a breakdown in trust between establishment elites and the broader population in Europe and North America in the past 10-15 years. And the fault lies squarely with the elites.

This is, of course, a contrarian position, and the authors take considerable trouble to rebut many of the most vocal critics of populism and science “denialism.” Skepticism of establishment consensus on climate change, vaccines, Brexit, the origin of COVID, and other hot button issues, these critics suggest, amounts to a rejection of “facts” and truth in favor of conspiracy. Public intellectuals such as Jonathan Rauch, Naomi Oreskes, and Cass Sunstein each come in for sustained criticism for their overconfidence in expert impartiality and for presuming the possibility of technocratic solutions to political disputes. The elite error, the authors contend, is in supposing that facts are obvious and readily ascertainable by experts; that they, the elites, have succeeded in ascertaining them; and that the resulting policy prescriptions should therefore simply be accepted by the rest of us.

On the contrary, say Russell and Patterson: Far from being immune from values, facts are born in value frameworks, as we seek and find the facts we need to support our values. And our “facts,” whether factual or not, are far more resistant to empirical disconfirmation than our theories. To drive home this point, the authors quote Stanford University legal scholar Mark Kelman:

“People lose faith in their theories because they’re incredibly intellectually incoherent. They fall back on beliefs about the empirical world that are fairly badly grounded, but they can’t be shaken out of them regardless of the level of proof. I think this is a fairly general tendency of people with strong political beliefs.”

Russell and Patterson seek to complicate a common view of how knowledge informs policy: Knowledge, it is presumed, is built up from facts grounded in experience out of which issue valid prescriptions when combined with values. If we start by getting our facts right, values held in common will lead to the right policies—hence the vogue of elite fact-checking and of labeling opponents as purveyors of “misinformation.” They argue that our actual modes of proceeding are far removed from this common view.

Far from simply emerging from experience, facts are constructed from experience as shaped by values and ideology. We see the world not as “some kind of prepolitical neutral playing ground consisting of bare-bones facts, nothing more,” but instead through the lens of our prior understanding of how the world works and what in that world is important. What are or are not “facts,” that is, assertions that are true by virtue of the way the world is, is context-dependent and often reflective of the reaction of authoritative members of a community to a data point, as philosopher Richard Rorty would argue. Furthermore, it is important to remember that in science, facts are always provisional—open to revision as our scientific knowledge evolves.

Rather than seeking to shut down debates purportedly over facts but actually over facts “embedded in cultural values about which there are genuine, good faith disagreements,” the authors argue that elites would do better to exhibit a little humility. Unpacking disagreements about the benefits or harms of school closures during COVID or the genuineness of Hunter Biden’s laptop might actually generate light rather than heat, as the contending politics and values implicit in opposing judgments of fact are laid bare. What’s more, lay “common sense” may sometimes have something to offer to experts. The authors are not optimistic that elites will take their advice, prone to “intellectual tyranny” as they are—the presumption that doubt and dissent reveal error at best and, likely, bad faith in those with the temerity to question expertise.

Russell and Patterson are sharp observers and their targets are vulnerable. Unsurprisingly, however, they are not themselves infallible. In explaining the rise of populism, they give too much credence to doomsayers about increasing inequality in the American economy. While the problem is real, urban affairs writer Joel Kotkin’s argument that a “new class of serfs” is being created in the American economy, cited approvingly by the authors, is hyperbole. Economic growth of the last 40 years has been shared much more widely than is now commonly supposed, as economist Russ Roberts recently pointed out in an essay in Medium. Still, their broader indictment of elites for supposing that expertise can settle what are actually political disputes is persuasive—even though there are many who will not be persuaded.

This book is a salvo in an ongoing battle. It joins other notable exposés of recent expert folly, such as David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions and Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s In COVID’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us, both from 2025. The experts, however, are not backing down. To many in the public health community and to stalwart defenders of expertise, such as Atlantic Monthly staff writer Tom Nichols, it may be that some mistakes were made by experts in authority during COVID, but overall the expert record was good and the “facts” were the facts.

As the COVID Crisis Group noted in 2023, a key predictor of deaths in each state was “the share of people that voted for President Trump in the 2020 election.” All we need to do better next time is to give deference to “reality-based understandings” rather than to Trumpian “comorbidity,” as Nichols recently wrote. With attitudes like these still the norm rather than the exception among elites, Russell, Patterson, and their allies have quite an uphill fight ahead of them.

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