Rightwing Populists Opposing Experts & Professionals Since Thatcher & Reagan
'Why do rightwing populist leaders oppose experts?' Jan-Werner Müller. The likes of Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson have denigrated professionalism but Reagan, Thatcher and other neoliberals led the way. The Guardian, March 26, 2020.
It is conventional wisdom that populists are against “elites” – and experts in particular. But rightwing populists aren’t opposed to all elites – they only denounce professionals who claim authority on the basis of special knowledge. Their perverse version of rightwing anti-authoritarianism implies that there is nothing wrong with the wealthy; in fact, the latter can be superior sources of wisdom. Trump putting the advice of “business leaders” above that of infectious disease experts is likely to yield deadly results. But it’s important to understand that the systematic denigration of professionalism started not with the populists – Reagan, Thatcher and other cheerleaders for neoliberalism led the way.
Populists are often criticized for being great simplifiers, when the world is in fact highly complex. For those who take Trump to be the paradigmatic populist of our day, it’s easy to conclude that populists are constantly lying and ushering in a “post-truth” era, in which falsehoods exclusively produced by the daily White House reality TV show are literally turning out to be deadly. But this picture is itself simplistic. Populists are not by definition liars. They are only committed to one particular empirical falsehood: the notion that they, and only they, represent what populists often call “the real people” – with the implication that other politicians are not only corrupt and “crooked”, but traitors to the people, or, as Trump has often put it, “Un-American”.
- President Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease expert.
More important, it’s not true that today’s rightwing populists are indiscriminately against all elites. They only denounce professionals. Trump supporters did not find it scandalous that his cabinet was full of Wall Street figures. The base does not resent the rich – rather, it aspires to be rich. In their eyes, the wealthy have earned their money, an objective indicator of their “hard work”, or the fact that they really produced something (never mind that the likes of Ross and Mnuchin have never created anything and only shifted money around). These supposed movers and shakers contrast starkly with professionals who claim authority on the basis of education and special licensing – think lawyers, doctors and professors. Such figures can automatically be maligned by rightwing culture warriors as “condescending” – after all, they tell other people what to do, because they claim to know better. According to Nigel Farage, for instance, the World Health Organization is just another club of “clever people” who want to “bully us”.
Is the success of the Trumps, Bolsonaros and Johnsons of this world proof that the people can always be seduced by demagogues – and simply don’t know what’s good for them? Distrust of professionalism does not come out of nowhere. Neoliberalism paved the way for these attitudes. Margaret Thatcher memorably held that academics didn’t really do any work; in fact, they all – with the possible exception of scientists – seemed to be lefties wasting taxpayers’ money...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/26/rightwing-populist-leaders-oppose-experts-not-elites
- 'You don’t make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline,’ says Dr. Anthony Fauci.' Market Watch, March 25, 2020.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/you-dont-make-the-timeline-the-virus-makes-the-timeline-says-dr-anthony-fauci-2020-03-25