It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened?
“Citing evidence, ignoring appeals to authority, reserving judgment, demanding more research—these are potentially exhausting traits in a conversational partner, but they’re also marks of a scientific mind. Rather than being “anti-science,” [Robert F] Kennedy [Junior] seems enchanted by it. His accusatory book “The Real Anthony Fauci” (2021) is packed with discussions of clinical studies, and it bears a blurb from a Nobel-winning virologist. (Anyone worried about the lack of public appetite for complex writing should contemplate the fact that this nearly five-hundred-page, data-drenched work of nonfiction has sold more than a million copies.) Kennedy has published two books with the subtitle “Let the Science Speak.”
If Democrats had hoped for a showdown between learning and ignorance, this wasn’t it. It looked more like learning versus learning, with each side dug in and lobbing citations toward the opposing trench. Kennedy’s rise represents a growing epistemological rift in the country. Increasingly, “left” and “right” don’t just describe divergent political judgments but also sealed-off understandings of what is true and how we know it. For all his unfounded beliefs and suspicions, Kennedy’s revolt isn’t against research but against the power long held by scientific insiders like Fauci. And in this he might have a point.
Why do these heated battles over knowledge arise? The sociologist Gil Eyal offers a compelling account in “The Crisis of Expertise” (2019). We imagine science as an open-ended pursuit in which doubt is encouraged, new evidence is welcomed, and theories are revisable. The basic sciences operate roughly like that. But “regulatory science,” in which conclusions are required on a deadline, works differently. A drug must be approved or not, a level of pollution pronounced safe or not. In these circumstances, Eyal explains, the authorities must at some point close the case, push errant facts aside, and draw a line. Such moments generate “inevitable friction.”
Eyal’s theory about certain sciences rings true for intellectual life generally. There’s not much hostility toward experts in unhurried realms of inquiry like numismatics or number theory. It’s when uncertainty collides with urgency that the authorities enter the fray, convene commissions, and issue findings. Those who accept the sanctioned conclusions gain official backing. Those who don’t are ruled out of bounds. No longer recognized as colleagues with legitimate hypotheses, they risk being treated as crackpots, deniers, and conspiracy theorists.
Drawing a line is necessary: at some point, you have to declare that the Holocaust happened, that vaccines don’t cause autism, and that climate change is real. The philosopher Bernard Williams noted that science isn’t a free market of ideas but a managed one; without filters against cranks, trolls, and merchants of doubt, knowledge production “would grind to a halt.” But in science, and in intellectual inquiry more broadly, where you draw the line matters enormously. Keep things too open and you’re endlessly debating whether Bush did 9/11. Close them too quickly, though, and you turn hasty, uncertain conclusions into orthodoxies. You also marginalize too many intelligent people, who will be strongly encouraged to challenge your legitimacy by seizing on your missteps, broadcasting your hypocrisies, and waving counter-evidence in your face. [..]
Which skeptical views merit consideration? Which are denialism? Those questions haunted the Kennedy assassination and the early AIDS crisis, and they returned with COVID-19. As before, the gravity of the situation reduced tolerance for open-ended inquiry. “Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts,” the Washington Post’s Peter Jamison wrote. “But it can be disastrous in public health, which depends on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.”
The experts would require a lot of trust, because they were recommending astonishing measures. It was no small thing to issue stay-at-home orders, shut schools, close businesses, and mandate masks. But early reports from China, where authorities were physically sealing off apartment buildings, were encouraging about the efficacy of such tactics.
It was a moment of choice—did you trust experts or not?—and there was a clear partisan skew. The previous Democratic President, Obama, had been a Harvard-trained law professor who had used the word “smart” to justify his policies more than nine hundred times. The sitting Republican President, Trump, was a blunt businessman who had declined to nominate a science adviser for more than a year and a half.
[..] Although “The Real Anthony Fauci” was an energetically researched best-seller on an important topic by a well-known author, it was nearly impossible to find a review of it in a major periodical. Russell and Patterson [Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson, authors of “The Weaponization of Expertise”] regard such deplatformings as “intellectual tyranny.” [..]
There was a reason that medical dissent stirred so much hostility. People were dying, and the urge to take swift, decisive action was overwhelming. Anyone refusing to go along was an impediment, or, worse, a vector. It was a panicked moment, when erroneous ideas could actually kill.
Still, enforcing a “consensus” risks purging the countervailing views that make intellectual inquiry work. Fauci and his colleagues had benefitted from the adversarial pressure of ACT UP. Yet they had little patience for COVID activists. Did this closed-mindedness lead them into error?
“In Covid’s Wake” (Princeton), by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, offers a revelatory look back on the pandemic. Its conclusions are devastating to both the left and the right; most of us got big things wrong. (I certainly did.) Given this omnidirectional confusion, the imposition of a tight orthodoxy—more J.F.K. assassination than AIDS crisis—retrospectively seems to be one of the most unfortunate choices in a sea of them.
The establishment’s rigidity is most evident with respect to COVID’s origins. Might it have come from the Wuhan laboratory that was experimenting with bat viruses? This was “so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this kind of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” the biologist Kristian Andersen wrote to colleagues investigating the matter in early 2020. Yet blaming the lab risked angering China, stoking racism, and embarrassing U.S. health agencies that had funded the Wuhan research. After hearing from Andersen’s group, Fauci declared the lab-leak possibility to be “in the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.” With Fauci’s guidance, Andersen’s group published a paper that declared, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Facebook duly banned lab-leak posts. (By the end of Joe Biden’s Administration, the F.B.I. and the Department of Energy had cautiously accepted the lab-leak hypothesis.) [..]
The U.S. pattern of “one country, fifty regulatory environments” allows Macedo and Lee to compare the effects of different policies. Vaccination clearly worked, which is why blue states generally had lower COVID death rates. But in the eleven months before vaccines were available it was another story. Macedo and Lee examine how quickly states adopted lockdowns, how long lockdowns lasted, how often public schools closed, and how generally stringent restrictions were. Some of these measures might have lessened the burdens on crowded hospitals in the early weeks, but it’s chastening to learn that none of them visibly affected pre-vaccine death rates over all. People in California, where public-school classes were rarely held in person, were roughly as likely to die from COVID as those in Florida, a beacon of openness. Before vaccines, blue-state mortality was in fact higher, though not enough to be statistically significant.
And masks? They worked in laboratories, especially N95s fitted properly and changed frequently. (Masks used for too long clog with moisture from breathing, and the air moves around them.) Yet everyday practice was nowhere near that ideal. Although masks and other precautions seem to have virtually obliterated the 2020-21 seasonal flu, evidence that mask recommendations or mandates helped protect against COVID at the population level is “extremely limited,” Macedo and Lee write. [..]
Kennedy started his campaign as a Democrat and ended it as a Trump supporter. Did he carry part of his substantial base toward MAGA? Either way, Trump was ultimately the pandemic’s clear winner. Inflation, fury at élites, and disdain for experts propelled his reëlection. “I am your retribution,” he promised.
There are two ways to replace an orthodoxy: with openness or with another orthodoxy. Trump’s most meaningful gesture toward transparency has been ordering documents concerning the assassinations of the two Kennedys and of Martin Luther King, Jr., to be declassified. So far, though, the data dump has revealed no major secrets, just unredacted Social Security numbers.”
Full article, D Immerwahr, The New Yorker, 2025.5.19