In April 2016, during a campaign speech, then presidential candidate Donald Trump told an audience in La Crosse, Wisconsin, “You know, I've always wanted to say this—I've never said this before with all the talking we all do—all of these experts, ‘Oh we need an expert—’ The experts are terrible.”1 In June 2016, British Conservative politician and then justice secretary Michael Gove echoed Trump's sentiment during a Sky News interview in which he supported the leave campaign during the Brexit vote, stating, “people in [Britain] have had enough of experts.”² These two statements—coming from politicians who have since succeeded in realizing their agendas—speak to the way an attack on experts is an integral part of the global turn to a populist form of democracy. But not all experts are elites, and the association between the very idea of expertise and elitism has become a dangerous myth that has become a valuable rhetorical tool in the hands of populists.

There are two interrelated issues at stake. First, Trump and Gove are not far wrong. The experts, in their technocratic incarnations, have been terrible and people have had enough of them. As the economist Wolfgang Streeck, hardly a partisan of Trump or Gove, has noted, “with the neoliberal revolution and the transition to ‘post-democracy’ associated with it, a new sort of political deceit was born, the expert lie. It began with the Laffer Curve, which was used to prove scientifically that reductions in taxation lead to higher tax receipts.”3 It is everyday people who suffer because of such lies. But this problem has created a second one that has permeated our culture: the justifiable backlash against experts has fostered a deeper distrust of the very idea of truth. After all, experts claim privileged access to the truth. The populist forces that imperil democracy have employed the critique of experts as a way to assault truth. This has devastated the status of science in our society. The neoliberal economic expert gets painted with the same brush as the climatologist. For example, Daniel Dennett, discussing debates over intelligent design (ID), has observed:

Biologists have been quick to respond, issuing incisive rebuttals to the various claims about the scientific integrity of ID, but these denunciations create the impression that an elitist scientific establishment is smothering an underdog, and a virtuous and plausible one at that—a theory quite literally “on the side of the angels.”⁴

The content of the scientist's claims becomes irrelevant because what matters is their status as purported elites. The fact that most biologists are experts of a very different stripe than the technocrats advocating austerity programs, and, consequently, hardly elites in any meaningful sense, is beyond the point. All expertise becomes synonymous with elitism and, thus, truth—that with which the expert is supposed to concern herself—is seen as a tool of the elite.

In the populist rhetoric of our time, the assault on experts as elites has become cloaked in the language of democracy. This is an ill that affects left-wing discourse no less than right-wing discourse. In the sections that follow, I shall offer synoptic accounts of how the assault on expertise feeds into an assault on truth and advocacy for a populist conception of democracy on both the Left and the Right. However, it is crucial to keep in mind that on the Left the assault on truth has largely come out of the realm of a convoluted postmodern theoretical tradition that has done more to stultify Left politics. In contrast, the Right has enjoyed alarming success in building a political movement that has relied heavily on the assault on truth. Though my discussion of right-wing activism is largely focused on developments in the United States, it would be a mistake to ignore the ways this attack on truth has fueled the global shift to the populist Right.5 I conclude by proposing that both science and democracy retain values with practical import that can respond to the extremes of technocracy and populism.

THE POSTMODERN ASSAULT ON TRUTH AND EXPERTISE IN THEORY

Ironically, laying blame on postmodernism for just about everything has become a favorite pastime of both the defenders of science as well as the resurgent right-wing critics of expertise. The defenders of science get the critique of the epistemological assumptions broadly correct, but they also miss the political implications of the ideas. In contrast, for its right-wing critics postmodernism has less to do with the substance of the ideas. Rather, postmodernism is a euphemism for all that is wrong with academic elites who employ nonsensical jargon. To the extent that they comprehend the ideas, they object to its relativistic position on values. Yet, what many of them miss is that postmodern theory is perhaps the most sophisticated defense of their brand of populist democracy. Postmodern theory is, perhaps, the theory the right-wing political activists need.⁶

While constituted by a byzantine set of theorists and theories, three thinkers appear to me to be especially relevant to explicating the anti-science and populist undercurrents of postmodernist thought: Michel Foucault, Paul Feyerabend, and Ernesto Laclau.

Foucault, perhaps the best known and most widely cited of the three, is one of those rare thinkers one is likely to encounter in nearly every discipline. The central theoretical claim that runs throughout his work, that knowledge claims are imbued with power relations, speaks directly to the assault on expertise and the notion that experts are elites. As Foucault puts it,

The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.7

Gone is the notion of any objective conception of truth. Yet what is significant about Foucault's argument and makes it so thoroughly damning for the notion of truth is the notion that truth is permeated by power. It's not simply that elites or technocrats make use of their knowledge to promote their agendas, which would constitute a critique of technocracy. Rather, it's that each and every knowledge claim entails an ordering and categorizing of society that is at one and the same time a disciplining of society. It is for this reason that a large part of Foucault's work shows a special interest in the way historically specific manifestations of knowledge categorized mental illness and institutionalized people as a result (and, as an aside, I might note that I am not entirely unsympathetic to the significance of Foucault's findings; it his deeper epistemological claims to which I object). However, Foucault confuses the historical manifestations of scientific practices with the very nature of science itself.

Hence, there is no objective truth in Foucault's theoretical schema, only regimes of truth. Of course, the scientist is a natural target for Foucault because of her reliance on objectivity and sees an intimate entwinement between the birth of the modern expert and a politics that entails the disciplining of subjectivity. He writes,

The “specific” intellectual derives from…the savant or expert…. No doubt it's with Darwin or, rather, the post-Darwinian evolutionists that this figure begins to appear clearly. The stormy relationship between evolutionism and the socialists, as well as the highly ambiguous effects of evolutionism (on sociology, criminology, psychiatry, and eugenics, for example), marks the important moment when the savant begins to intervene in contemporary political struggles in the name of a “local” scientific truth—however the important the latter may be. Historically, Darwin represents this point of inflection in the history of the Western intellectual.8

So within Foucault's thoroughgoing assault on truth there is an important place for an attack on expertise, especially the expert in the natural sciences, as tied to the way society is ordered. In a sense, then, there are two levels of Foucault's attack on objectivity. The first is the obvious issue of the expert whose claims have an impact on the ordering of society. Of course, there is much historical and contemporary evidence to back this up. Foucault is not wrong about this. The second, more radical, claim, that truth is imbued with power, goes a step further. It is this claim that is consonant with our world of “alternative facts” and the idea of the “post-truth society.” It is this claim that is consonant with the fragmentation of society into private spheres where, since all truths are expressions of power, each becomes equally valid.

In one sense, Foucault's argument can be utilized as a critique of the powerful and their claims. This is what the Left has most commonly picked up on in his thought. Yet, at its deeper level, Foucault's argument leaves one without any objective basis to challenge the powerful. Your truth is just as imbued with the attempt to order society as their truth. So it becomes a competition of truths with no appeal to some objective state of things. It is in this respect that current encouragement to get individuals to “speak their truth” is so irksome. It is a kind of trickling down of Foucauldian ideas into the popular parlance. It contains within in it the notion that there are, indeed, multiple truths, and no one's account of the truth should be conferred special distinction. What is important about the theory is the kind of commitments people are automatically making when they invoke it—commitments to a highly relativistic conception of truth that denies its very importance as anything other than wholly subjective. At one and the same time, truth's relation to power becomes a tool for the critique of power as well as a defense of my private truth. Further, my private truth becomes a source of my empowerment when I oppose your truth. The implications for democracy become worrisome because it becomes a way to doubt objectivity as well as a way to valorize the truth embraced by factions, with no prospects held out for reconciliation or the correction of incorrect views. The role of the expert as an authority is totally denigrated.

Such implications of Foucault's thought are carried forward in the philosopher of science Feyerabend's more direct discussion of the relation between science and democracy. Building off of his more theoretical work, Feyerabend argues for a purported privileging of democracy over truth. In an argument that ought to appeal as strongly to the libertarian as the anarchist (which Feyerabend saw himself as), he writes:

In a democracy an individual has the right to read, write, to make propaganda for whatever strikes his fancy. If he falls ill, he has the right to be treated in accordance with his wishes, by faithhealers, if he believes in the art of faithhealing, by scientific doctors, if he has greater confidence in science. And he has not only the right to accept, live in accordance with, and spread ideas as an individual, he can form associations which support his point of view provided he can finance them, or find people willing to give him financial support. This right is given to the citizen for two reasons: first, because everyone must be able to pursue what he thinks is truth, or the correct procedure; and, secondly, because the only way of arriving at a useful judgment of what is supposed to be the truth, or the correct procedure is to become acquainted with widest possible range of alternatives.9

Such claims make sense as the only conception of the relation between science and politics if one follows the political implications of Foucault's theory. Indeed, Feyerabend works within the framework of the same leveling of “truths” as Foucault's theory implies. And Feyerabend's extreme individualism leads him to pit the individual against truth. For this reason, and building off of his claim that the real advances of science came from outsiders who resisted expert opinion, Feyerabend advocates the democratic oversight of decisions in the sciences by laypeople: “If the taxpayers of California want their state universities to teach Voodoo, folk medicine, astrology, rain dance ceremonies, then this is what the universities will have to teach. Expert opinion will of course be taken into consideration, but experts will not have the last word. The last word is the decision of democratically constituted committees, and in these committees laymen have the upper hand”.10 Such an argument—based on a conception of extreme individualism's logical conclusions—is far more persuasive a grounds for teaching intelligent design or refusing to vaccinate your children than any fostered by either movement's supporters. And it, much like Foucault's ideas, is built upon an argument against the objectivity of truth. Truths are decided upon, not discovered.

Neither Foucault nor Feyerabend have a thoroughly worked out theory of politics. Rather, we only get a dim sense of what kind of politics either would endorse based on their theories of knowledge. For both, it would involve just about anything that would challenge prevailing norms and social orders. Yet what is important to emphasize here is that their opposition is not focused on regime types or political systems. Rather, it is against systems of knowledge. That, for them, is where the oppression lies. Not in authoritarian governments or capitalism run amok. So this raises the question as to what kind of politics postmodernism can ultimately endorse.

It seems to me that the clearest formulation of a postmodern politics comes out of the work of Ernesto Laclau. Along with his frequent collaborator Chantal Mouffe, Laclau sought a conception of politics that could unify the idea of difference that lies at the heart of postmodern politics.¹¹ He found it in a theory of populism. In a world defined by extreme differences, what can unite people amidst their differences so that they can engage in the kind of coordinated action necessary to politics? For Laclau it is the idea of the people. As Laclau explains, “a certain identity is picked up from the whole field of differences, and made to embody this totalizing function.”12 For a social world in which difference is the prevailing characteristic, something needs to stand for the unity of the group, i.e., embody the totality. Yet, for Laclau, it is a unity that does not dissolve differences because it is more abstract idea than concrete manifestation of an alliance of political interests. “The ‘people,’” Laclau explains, “is something less than the totality of the members of the community; it is a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality.”¹³

For Laclau, populism is the true essence of politics. As Laclau argues, “Since the construction of the ‘people’ is the political act par excellence—as opposed to pure administration within a stable institutional framework—the sine qua non requirements of the political are the constitution of antagonistic frontiers within the social and the appeal to new subjects of social change—which involves, as we know, the production of empty signifiers in order to unify a multiplicity of heterogeneous demands in equivalential chains.”¹⁴ The idea of the people is a kind of necessary social construction to make up for the fact that social life is defined by difference. It becomes the most encompassing political category because it reduces politics to its essence, antagonism, us versus them. This lends itself to a conception of politics as the people versus the elite. However, elites need not be identified by any particular characteristic. The “they” are whoever works within the framework of institutionalized political practices.

Much leftist thought that stands in opposition to postmodernist thought bases itself on a clear conception of who the elites are, what their interests are. They are clearly identifiable based on who actually wields material, concrete power. For Laclau and his postmodernist compatriots, there is no analytically precise definition of what makes someone an elite. It is simply the “they” who stand in opposition to the “people.” What exactly it is that someone stands for and the reasons why they stand for it cease to matter. Politics is reduced to its barest us versus them idea. And the “them” is anything that seeks to homogenize society. The “people” become an abstract symbol—an “abstract signifier” as Laclau puts it—that represents a thoroughly differentiated society. It is a symbol of the totality without actually being a concrete unity because it is the most encompassing category. It is not encompassing because it is pluralistic. Rather, it is encompassing because it defines a break between two great warring camps, the elites and the people.

Using Foucault, Feyerabend, and Laclau as my reference points, I am suggesting that there is a link in postmodern thought between the rejection of truth and supposed celebration of difference and a certain conception of populism. At issue is the way the loss of any conception of the value of reason in binding society together paves the way for a conception of politics in which our social bonds are based on abstracted notions. Moreover, what is evident in all three thinkers is a disdain for an elite, but an elite that has to be abstractly defined because it is the truth-regime that is the locus of power rather than particular agents or groups. Indeed, one of the things that make these arguments so interesting for the purposes of the discussion in this volume is that the only way these thinkers can arrive at such claims is by divorcing their analyses from anything grounded in objective structures.

What has escaped the purview of critics of postmodernism coming out of the natural sciences is that they tend to miss the fundamental nature of the claim about knowledge that informs postmodernist thought. They are not merely advocating social constructivism, relativism, or, for that matter, celebrating irrationalism. Nor are they simply making a claim for the expansion of democracy in the name of difference. This is to subsume their thought in categories that are perhaps too familiar. On the contrary, they are fundamentally hostile to the notion of knowledge because it entails oppression, the splitting apart of an inherently differentiated world into clean categories. Indeed, many of postmodernism's critics, on both the Right and the Left, mistakenly argue that the postmodern conception of power is grounded in the idea that there is an interest behind knowledge production. In fact, the point, as particularly evident in Foucault, is that knowledge itself is a form of power. Postmodernism divorces itself from any concrete conception of interest. Knowledge itself is disciplinary. There is no place for interested agents in the theory. This is the critical move that makes it impossible to try to reconcile the kind of thinking that those with sympathies leaning toward the natural sciences embrace with the kind of thought espoused by postmodernism. It is also the kind of thinking that leads Laclau to embrace that most nebulous category, the “people,” which stands in opposition to an equally nebulously defined elite.

While such jargon-laden talk has been influential among theorists on the Left, it is also true that it has had little actual political impact. Such texts generally do not reach audiences far beyond graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences or select reading publics in urban centers. Postmodern theory is hardly the kind of thing that gets people marching in the streets. If it were, people would not even know what it is they are marching against. There is every reason to worry about the influence of these texts, but to say that they extend beyond high-academic circles would be to exaggerate their political impact. If their impact has been anything, it has largely been the paralysis of Left political movements. Postmodern theory has done more to push the Left into an intellectual morass than to inspire political activism with any clear agenda. Therein lies the cause for concern. Certainly, this has a deleterious effect on educational systems and has plunged debate into the realm of the nonsensical. It has, to adopt a distinction articulated by the political theorist Jon Elster, produced more waste than harm.15 Perversely, the political manifestation of the high theory espoused by the postmodernists has asserted itself most clearly on the Right.

THE RIGHT-WING ASSAULT ON TRUTH AND EXPERTISE IN PRACTICE

Going at least as far back as the Counter-Enlightenment, a critique of intellectuals has long been a hallmark of political conservatism. Conservatives have often defined themselves in terms of their skepticism of intellectuals who they think have sought to undermine values that stabilize society.¹⁶ Their talk hinges on a defense of Western civilization against philistinism. Thus, in the mid-1960s, Russell Kirk could write, “At this hour when Communists and other totalists are busy ripping to shreds the ‘wardrobe of a moral imagination,’ certain people of a different cast of mind have turned tailors, doing their best to stitch together once more the fragments of that serviceable old suit we variously call ‘Christian civilization’ or ‘Western civilization’ or ‘the North Atlantic community’ or ‘the free world.’ Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by the subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.”17 It is the kind of worldview that made traditional conservatives, like William F. Buckley, rush to attack scientists and support creationism as a way to defend Christian civilization.¹⁸ But the guarding of tradition and the kind of conservatism that people like Kirk and Buckley built, complemented its assaults on intellectuals with its own intellectual elitism. They tried to stave off the Far Right in their mid-twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct the conservative tradition.¹⁹

The contemporary political Right of people like Steve Bannon has revolted against the elitism of that generation of conservatives in favor of a right-wing populism. Still, the trope of the critique of the intellectual in the name of defending established, unchanging values remains a part of the rhetoric of the current Right. In this respect, Kirk and Buckley's worldviews undoubtedly persevere. Nevertheless, the internet has assuredly changed everything. Just a little under a decade ago, the internet was being hailed for its democratization of knowledge. Leftists readily rejoiced at the work of hackers seeking to foment chaos for the “lulz,” thinking this exemplified democracy in action.²⁰ On the contrary, the internet has emerged as an excellent tool for feeding right-wing paranoia, developing its own world of truths, and serving as device for uniting people with fringe beliefs or recruiting people to Far-Right causes.²¹

The internet has cultivated a world where wildly popular right-wing provocateurs like Anne Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, and the psychologist Jordan Peterson, climate-change deniers, or the so-called “citizen journalists” of Breitbart News reign freely. Some engage in the dissemination of patently false information, while others, particularly Coulter and Yiannopoulos, simply revel in the pleasures of sophomorically thumbing their nose at authority by tossing around insults. Yet undergirding all of these activities is a worldview that bears a striking resemblance to that of postmodern theory. Whether promulgating misinformation or tweeting racist, sexist, or homophobic comments, all of these people see themselves as engaged in a battle against regimes of truth perpetuated by shadowy intellectual cabals trying to discipline society.

Despite the fact that postmodern theory as taught in some university humanities departments is often their target, they are themselves, in fact, postmodernists without the sophisticated epistemological theory. They are vulgar postmodernists. I say vulgar because they claim to identify an actually existing elite, when their definition of the elite is as nebulous as that of postmodernism. Yet this fiction has helped inspire right-wing populism's myriad conspiracy theories, and it is under the influence of such conspiracies that the modern Right is mobilized. Because examples of this are too many to catalog in the space of this chapter, allow me to focus on two phenomena that illustrate the way the internet has facilitated the promotion of a right-wing conception of truth regimes that has also fueled political mobilization.

The frenzy over a purported malevolent reshaping of the meaning of truth informs the notion of being “red-pilled,” which has become part of the cryptic parlance of the alt-right. A reference to the film The Matrix, in which the protagonist takes a red pill and becomes aware that the world he lives in is an illusion constructed by devious computers, being “red-pilled” refers to being awakened to the truth and converted to a right-wing world of conspiracy theories.22 Young men are often “red-pilled” on the internet after searching for relationship advice. On websites like Reddit, they are exposed to a host of conspiracy theories that attribute their relationship failures to a feminist agenda to emasculate men. This, in turn, often quickly leads to venomous misogynistic postings on community message boards and the promulgation of conspiracy theories about Jews, African Americans, global elites, and the standard cast of shadowy figures manipulating the world order.

In an environment where disillusioned young men scour the internet for answers, it is no accident that the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has found an enthusiastic audience for his many YouTube postings among the alt-right as he inveighs against the supposed machinations of women's studies programs, postmodern theorists, and so-called cultural Marxists (by which he actually means the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose members, Peterson's acolytes are often quick to observe, were mostly of Jewish descent).23 All the more ironic then that such visions of a constructed truth regime, as allegedly promoted by women's studies departments and cultural Marxists, sounds so much like Foucault's regimes of knowledge used to oppress and reorder society. The truth that red pillers come to recognize is a quasi-spiritual epiphany that everything they thought they knew is false. This “truth” is totally barren with little to support it other than the bare assertion that there is an elite trying to reshape the way you think as a way of disciplining society.

Like red-pilling, the rise of so-called “citizen journalism” is a phenomenon linked to the rise of the Far Right and has been well-cultivated by the internet.²⁴ Websites like Breitbart News and Alex Jones's InfoWars decry the pernicious influence of the Mainstream Media (MSM), encouraging people without any journalistic credentials (and part of having solid credentials as a journalist entails an education in professional ethics and methods) to conduct their own investigations.²⁵ Once again, one enters a world of conspiracy theories where unchecked sources are used to substantiate claims about destroyed election ballots and Hillary Clinton's membership in a child molestation ring based in the backroom of a pizza parlor. The rise in popularity of such right-wing journalists/political agitators has only been enhanced by the power of social media, where outrightly false stories are more likely to circulate than stories by established news outlets.²⁶ Add to this the promotion of such stories by Fox News and a president who dismisses any story that is critical of him as “fake news” and we have arrived at a situation where people see any story coming from authoritative news sources as propaganda promoted by a shadowy elite.

The rise in popularity of notions like red-pilling and citizen journalism represent a major shift in right-wing assaults on the idea of truth. Just a few years ago, the assault on objective knowledge from the Right appeared more focused on the natural sciences, especially the teaching of evolution or the fact of climate change. However ridiculous and unqualified opponents of the teaching of evolution and so-called climate skeptics are, they tried (and continue to try) to promote their ideas by proposing competing theories.27 Such were the tactics behind absurd claims about intelligent design or historical cycles of climate change. They were trying to beat the scientists at their own game, albeit through what, more often than not, seemed like a deeply distorted understanding of how scientific inquiry is practiced. Today, the situation is much worse. The very concept of truth is treated as an ideological construct. Truth is increasingly treated as the enemy of the people. It is seen as meant to discipline the common person. It is taken as an affront to established beliefs and as part of a campaign to humiliate people's intelligence so that they will blindly accept what they are told. This is the point where the equation between power and knowledge and populism meet. If arguments based on fact are associated with an elite cadre of experts, then it is only that nebulous force, the people, which can stand up in opposition to it.

Some may take exception to my focus on the Right in the assault on knowledge. Of course, many on the Left have long been susceptible to conspiracy theories. There is also plethora of seemingly apolitical forces promoting falsehoods. The claims of anti-vaccination activists and self-help gurus are no less culpable in cultivating a culture where one person's opinion is as valid as any other. Undeniably, the crisis of truth and the increasingly fragile position of the expert is part of a broader social crisis. Yet the Far Right has distinctively positioned itself to turn the assault on truth into a political force. Gwyneth Paltrow's absurd and dangerous claims about women's health²⁸ do make her as harmful as an Alex Jones. Deepak Chopra²⁹ and Jenny McCarthy³⁰ make claims about science that are as uninformed as any climate-change denier. The popular left-wing theorist Slavoj Žižek's pseudo-theories³¹ are no more open to actual objective inquiry than the creationist's theory of irreducible complexity. The difference is that the Right has carried this anti-truth and anti-science project in a direction where it has become a genuine threat to democracy.³²

It is the Right that has built a political movement around falsehoods. Trump's “Make America Great Again” slogan has become a rallying cry for the people to rise up against the elites who purportedly peddle in “fake news.” Indeed, part of Trump's continued fixation on the number of attendees at his inauguration betrays the authoritarian populist's need to show that his will is identifiable with the authentic will of the people. In the populist distortion of democracy, the will of this nebulously defined “people” dominates all else. This is the actual realization of what it means when one, as Laclau does, approvingly talks about the people as “abstract signifier.” Were he alive, Laclau would certainly have objected to the brand of populism now running rampant across the globe. It is often pregnant with xenophobia, racism, and misogyny in ways that Laclau would undoubtedly oppose. Yet, that is precisely the problem with “abstract signifiers.” They can be made to signify anything. Consider, for example, the white nationalists marching in defense of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville. Regardless of the fact that these monuments were erected decades after the Civil War in the context of the reasserted racism of the Jim Crow era, it is a more benign Southern cultural heritage that the apologists for such monuments claim that they signify.33 It's the peoples’ word against that of the historians.

So what explains the rise of the assault on truth by the Right? Certainly, the internet has proven an exceptional mechanism for the dissemination of falsehoods and the Right has become more expert at using it to mobilize and indoctrinate people. There are also clear vested interests in opposing the findings of natural scientists, especially with respect to climate change, on the part supporters of certain economic interests and religious beliefs. Still, this does not explain the appeal. Ultimately, the views disseminated on the internet or funded by wealthy elites have to resonate with the population at large.

The German sociologist Max Weber famously argued that modernity, with its increasing emphasis on rationality, entails the “disenchantment” of the world. Science and its focus on objectively valid claims is one of the major contributing factors to this disenchantment. It dismisses belief and dogma in favor of rationally grounded ideas. But this is an old story that goes to the advent of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It was an emphasis on the superiority of reason versus belief that animated opposition to the Enlightenment by established authority, whether of the church or the crown. It was also precisely this authority of reason that postmodern theory, in its various stripes, sought to dethrone.

In a certain respect, there is nothing new about the assault on truth that is occurring today. Take for example the response of Derwin, a Louisianan interviewed by Arlie Russell Hochschild, to the industrial pollution of the Bayou d'Inde: “In the Garden of Eden, ‘there wasn't anything hurting your environment. We'll probably never see the bayou like God made it in the beginning until He fixes it himself. And that will happen pretty shortly, so it don't matter how much man destroys.”34 The recent director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, shares these sentiments.³⁵ Such viewpoints are echoes of William Jennings Bryan's response to Clarence Darrow while under examination during the infamous Scopes Trial. Bryan told the court, “The purpose [of Darrow's examination] is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.”³⁶ In terms of belief, there is little separating Derwin and Pruitt from Bryan.

What has changed is the scope of the assault on truth. In our thoroughly technologized world, the internet has proven an excellent tool for expressing opposition to truth. Opposition to the idea of truth never went away, but it has now gained a new platform. One of the most disturbing and fascinating things about the online world of the Far Right is its use of symbols. With something as ridiculous as a cartoon frog named Pepe, the Far Right has revitalized a world where symbols become imbued with deep meanings. Even the term “red pilling,” with its reference to a science-fiction movie, is a striking example of how a vocabulary derived from the world of fantasy is utilized to describe reality. However inane these examples are, they are indicators of a kind of “re-enchantment” of the world. What matters is the fact that this jargon and these symbols are so deeply invested in by the people who use them to make sense of the world. Pepe the frog is no less an abstract signifier for the people opposing a phantom-like elite than Laclau's “people.” It is a world in which evidence that does not appeal to people can be discounted as alternative facts promoted by the mainstream media.

Postmodern theory and the contemporary politics of the Right have an elective affinity. With the condemnation of truth as any kind of objective referent to how the world is, the only kind of democratic politics that can emerge is one in which everyone is governed by belief. Today, out of dismissal of truth, has arisen a world where belief governs political decisions. The Right, in its long emphasis on traditional belief, finds a natural base among people who see the authority of reason as a threat to belief. While I very much doubt that Kirk or Buckley would endorse the politics of the contemporary Right when they set about reinventing conservatism, contemporary conservatives of their ilk, like Nicholas Kristol, John Podhoretz, and the late Charles Krauthammer, readily cringe and have come out against this new wave of the Right. But the invective of a Steve Bannon against establishment Republicans may be a case of the revolution coming to eat its own. This is a base that conservatives have long cultivated and their turn toward displaying themselves as the protectors of Kirk's “Christian civilization” gave them a base that helped them win elections. As Ronald Reagan famously told evangelicals, “I know you can't endorse me. But I endorse you.”37 Indeed, invocations of the people were already evident in Richard Nixon's talk of the “silent majority,” which was later appropriated by the Trump campaign.

TOWARD A RENEWAL OF THE SCIENTIFIC ETHOS AND THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF EXPERTISE

I have raised two concerns in this chapter. The first is that there is a justifiable suspicion of the experts. The second is that this justifiable distrust has paved the way for a populist assault on truth. The solution to both problems lies in renewing the promise of science and democracy.

“Science,” the physicist Richard Feynman suggested, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”³⁸ Feynman's definition sides with that great tradition of modern science as a form of resistance to established belief. Ostensibly, this is a definition that could be vacuously invoked by Feyerabend or a climate denier in defense of what they are doing. After all, they believe the experts are ignorant. However, Feynman's definition is not a naive invocation of the value of doubt. An apt warning precedes his definition of science:

Science…teaches the value of rational thought, as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true. You must here distinguish…the science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. It is easy to say, “We write, experiment, and observe, and do this or that.” You can copy that form exactly. But great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same it is possible to follow form and call it science but it is pseudoscience.39

We ought to question the experts, but science has a particular reliance on the use of rational thought. Science discriminates against ignorance, whether of the expert or the demagogue.

The rhetoric of our sociopolitical climate applies Feynman's definition unevenly and discriminately. In believing in the ignorance of experts, people have failed to believe in the ignorance of the demagogues and pseudoscientists. Science is an inherently democratic enterprise in that the reasoning and procedures that undergird it are available to all. It is in its self-conscious exposure to the doubts of others, by making its reasoning and procedure transparent, that a scientific claim can be subject to correction. The same cannot be said of the claims of those who deny truth and, consequently, do not have any reasons or procedure that substantiate their claims. It is when no reasons are given that we should suspect that ignorance, in its most pernicious form, is governing.

Recovering that scientific ethos that seeks to expose the ignorance of authority is crucial as a bulwark against the technocrats, dogmatists, and populists. However, experts still play a vital role in our society and it is crucial that trust in experts be restored because of all the good they can do.⁴⁰ This trust, however, must be warranted. Here, a kind of renewal of the democratic ethos is necessary. Democratizing expertise does not mean setting up Feyerabend's non-expert citizen review panels. Rather, it means having experts who are actually responsive to the issues they are supposed to address. The public perception that the experts have become a self-contained class is not incorrect. In his critique of contemporary liberalism, the social critic Thomas Frank has pointed to the history of the Democratic Party as a party that has severed its ties with working people and increasingly become the party of the professionalized and managerial elites. As Frank observes, “Liberalism itself has changed to accommodate its new constituents’ technocratic views. Today, liberalism is the philosophy not of the sons of toil but of the ‘knowledge economy’ and, specifically, of the knowledge economy's winners: the Silicon Valley chieftains, the big university systems, and the Wall Street titans who gave so much to Barack Obama's 2008 campaign.”41 Indeed, when Trump and Gove raged against the experts, they had such people in mind.

In opposition to the model of turning to the experts of the professionalized class for guidance, Frank looks to the example of Franklin Roosevelt's administration. “Unlike the Obama administration's roster of well-graduated mugwumps,” Frank writes, “the talented people surrounding Franklin Roosevelt stood very definitely outside the era's main academic currents.”⁴² This paved the way for a group of heterodox innovators who sought new solutions to the country's woes. The ignorance of experts, like Andrew Mellon, the wealthy banker turned Treasury Secretary who counseled Herbert Hoover to do nothing in response to the Great Depression, was recognized. This rejection of an established elite based on their failure to provide solutions to real problems is an example of both the democratization of expertise and the scientific ethos in practice.

One implication of everything I have suggested is that one of the great affinities between science and democracy is that both practices rely on the challenging of illegitimate authority. The wrong claims and bad administrators get weeded out. When science and democracy fail to perform these functions, there is every reason to retreat into the worlds of irrationalism, myth, and demagoguery. The scientists have proven more skilled at fending off bad ideas than the politicians. But it is possible to make a connection between how loss of public confidence in the experts of one sphere can turn the public against experts in another.

As the historian Richard Hofstadter argued over fifty years ago, a certain anti-intellectual strain has been a persistent feature of American life.⁴³ There is little reason to think that it will go away. Nevertheless, it is possible to prevent it from embedding itself in the broader norms of our society and the values of our political institutions. Scientific and democratic values can play an urgently needed role in combating the populist tendencies of our age, as well as providing us with the experts we need.