Expert Tease
How does a center-left expert class serve a center-right country?
I just wrote yesterday about how while I consider myself a conservative in a temperamental or philosophical sense, going to grad school for public policy and then getting into housing and land use issues made me less politically conservative. (Well, that was just part of a long intro bit—check out yesterday’s long piece if you haven’t yet.)
What I meant by that was really that when you study public policy issues, you realize that there’s a need for experts and expertise. I’m not saying I’m an expert, but the idea that everyone can just figure out what’s best for themselves, with no need for government, just isn’t how things work.
I think a lot, though, about why it seems that in the “old days,” we had so much less of a regulatory state and many fewer “experts,” and yet we got so much accomplished. Maybe the cost was too high (“regulations are written in blood” is a saying for a reason). Maybe a developing country, like we were a century or more ago, just has a lot more mojo. And relatedly, maybe when a country gets rich, maybe it just demands a certain level of order and predictability, even at the cost of dynamism and entrepreneurship. Maybe we need an expert class, a technocrat class. Maybe zoning comes down not so much to “I don’t want poor people in my nice neighborhood” and more to something like “I paid a million dollars for this house, and I can’t control whether my neighbor opens an auto garage?!”
I’ve written about some of this before. It’s actually my biggest point of skepticism with the Strong Towns approach to urbanism, which is very bottom-up and incremental, a sort of localism/libertarianism fusion. It basically describes the way in which all our legacy cities and towns came to exist. But I wonder—will a rich country tolerate that process? Is the collective psychological need for that order and predictability simply insurmountable? I’d like to think not.
But I want to talk a little bit about experts/elites. One of the things my right-wing colleagues used to say, back at my old magazine job, was “We need better elites.” In other words, they were trying to avoid the “just get rid of government and everything will be fine” line, but they wanted elites who, I guess, were more friendly to their politics and values.
This in turn gets into a tough question of how much the expert class and the political and policy elite, such as they exist, should accept the people they serve as they are, versus failing to understand them or resisting them, i.e. trying to “improve” them.
I’ve written this before. Here: “If it’s true that you go to war with the army you have, you also do public policy with the people you have.” And here: “At some point, instead of finding the values of the majority defective, you have to make some concessions to their preferences.”
In other words, I think to the extent that it’s true that we’re a center-right country with a center-left elite—and it obviously is at least partly true—that does kind of pose a challenge to everyday people’s perception of expertise.
You saw this with the pandemic, for example. Sitting where I sit politically and culturally, I and many others could have told you that closing churches would have led to a big backlash. That it might not be worth absorbing that backlash, and we should just exempt churches and other houses of worship from the rules. That the elites’ less religious tendencies shouldn’t get in the way of the sense solidarity we were trying to craft. But of course, to anyone except a devout believer, exempting houses of worship from rules everyone else has to follow would itself seem like a violation of solidarity.
Frankly, I thought closing them was the right thing, because we were all in this together, and a lot of churches voluntarily closed, including my own. (A lot of Catholics were upset at the bishops for “caving” and closing the churches, in fact!) My point, though, is as far as I could tell, it seemed like the people doing public health policy either didn’t care about the backlash from religious people upset at their churches being closed, or were unaware of how seriously a lot of Americans took religion. This divide ended up turning a public health crisis into a full-blown culture war.
So I think there really is something to the conservative complaint that the American elite is too narrow a slice of the country to really serve it humbly and representatively. That a lot of people in the “elite class” basically look down on the majority, and perhaps feel that serving it as it is would be to compromise their own enlightened values.
I think about this in general sometimes—during the pandemic, I thought about it a lot—but it’s also one of those more abstract issues that’s always in the background when we argue over housing and land use. One of the things I’ve gathered in my years of writing on these issues is that trust is a big barrier.
I’ve had folks say to me something like, “I agree with urbanists, but I don’t trust them.” And people will think about the churches being closed during the pandemic, or the public health commentators who exempted protests for progressive causes from quarantine, or be afraid that kids and large families will be sidelined in some way. There’s a lot of distrust, some of it more legitimate or less legitimate.
I don’t know how you restore some trust in experts, and get a wider class of experts. Some progressives will say this distrust is fomented by right-wing media and in some sense isn’t “real.” Maybe. But what’s the answer?
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Related Reading:
Why *Does* It Feel Like Things Are Always Getting Worse?
How Much Of Urbanism Is Poverty?
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When I'm feeling optimistic, I think the lack of trust comes down to a mis-alignment (or mis-understanding) of priorities. (For example: which is more important - religious gatherings or protesting against police violence? Safe roads for children or unhindered travel for commuters? Childcare cheaply available to all or restrictions that make all childcare "high-quality" and very safe but expensive?)
I wonder if most leaders used to be better about understanding "both sides" or if it's always been this way.
Society always has and always will have elites. To be effective and well respected, though, they must at minimum really like the populace, and care about what they value. That’s been increasingly untrue in western societies now for a few decades. There’s in fact a real, tangible hostility toward anyone outside elite circles. And since elites make the policies that rule people’s lives, that will inevitably lead to bad policy, over reach, and a fierce reaction against them. Beyond that, the smart class will never, ever admit that the “dumb” people were right about something, and there’s rarely consequences for elite failure anymore. I think you have to understand that whole context to understand why people react the way they are now. If a regular person does a crappy job at whatever they do, there are consequences. If a public health person keeps your kid out of school for a year beyond what many other places did, no one gets fired, and there’s not even any “whoops, sorry, that was wrong and we won’t do that again.”
Beyond all that, I think there’s a lot more to explore about what a less technocratic approach to urbanism could look like. I agree we’ve a) completely forgotten the historic legacy of how and what we built and b) society might not accept that today because we are too wealthy.