Radio Free New Hampshire: An Expert Opinion

Confession: I don’t know how computers work. When mine goes south, I stab random buttons. I turn it on and off. I swear out loud. It usually works again after a while and then I move along. Ditto for my phone, ditto for my car, ditto for the other machinery on which I rely any given day.

Ditto for our social systems. Though I studied both politics and economics in school, I read as widely as I can, and I listen as much as I can, this column still proceeds on more thin ice than I prefer to admit. To be truthful is to be profoundly modest. A peasant from the tenth century, living in a world lit by fire, understood more of that world than I do of my own, with every bit of artificial light I can find. He was just more afraid of the dark.

Modernity requires experts and we live and die by them. They keep our phones humming, they keep our bodies working, they keep our businesses prospering. So when those experts fail, we feel pain: physical, social, economic.

Donald Trump became president because our experts have been failing lately. Economic experts not only impoverished our workers for the benefit of China, they also paid for Wall Street crashes with taxpayer funds, ensuring the rich would stay rich while the poor stayed poor. Technology experts fractured our nation into a thousand rabid pieces, then invented AI to fling our future into the whirlwind. Even our medical experts have caused harm. They’ve given us long lives capped with years of dependent misery and myriad new procedures to plaster over our spiritual poverty and make us want painkilling of every sort imaginable.

Our experts have also stopped talking to each other, or to us, or to even make sense on their own terms. Academia took all the progress we’ve made in civil rights and used it to propagate the most egregious example of dead-end thinking a satirist could imagine: gays for Hamas.

It’s therefore no wonder that he has stacked his administration with passionate amateurs instead of lukewarm professionals. As always, his most valid role is to act as the measure of past neglect. For every doctor who told us to mask up and stay home, except if you were protesting George Floyd, a vaccine denier was born. For every economist who explained why the good of our country required free trade, who wore silk ties from France while the rest of us choked on cheap plastic, a class warrior came to be. And for every politician who ignored these developments, an election denier gained credibility.

Hegseth at Defense, Kennedy at Health, Musk, whatever he did before he quit, and more. Most have been awful (Kennedy couldn’t put a band-aid on a child’s knee). Some have done okay (two cheers for Caroline Leavitt, whose politics are raw but who does her job with flair). William F. Buckley’s old jab about preferring to be governed by the first two hundred names in Boston’s telephone directory than by the professors of Harvard College comes to mind. Common sense is worth more than any degree and real world experience helps too.

Yet not just avoiding but vilifying expertise is a dangerous game to play. Our president’s line on scientific research makes zero sense and hands China an open promise; his energy policy is similarly short-sighted; his tariff threats make our allies doubt our sanity. As those things are all abstractions, though, their true effect won’t be felt for years. It has taken Minnesota to drive it home.

As a criminal defense attorney, I watch police video regularly. I see our officers show tremendous patience. I see them lose their temper. I see them take down suspects with speed and force, sometimes for good cause, sometimes for less. I see them show a fairly complete range of human emotion; but importantly, I don’t see a complete range. Far from it. While there are always exceptions, our police officers largely hold themselves in check. They pride themselves on being professional. They pride themselves on self-control.

The video coming out of Minneapolis shows the opposite. Undisciplined, trigger-happy, violence-prone men, seeking their own safety in cowardly anonymity while seething with contempt for the people around them. This is not law enforcement. It’s amateurism run amok. It’s also childish behavior in a grown-up world.

Take this as Trump’s gays-for-Hamas moment. His underlying theory of governance must give way to common sense before more people die. And once that happens, let’s hope that common sense takes root. Our world needs leaders who are not afraid of the dark.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.