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Trusting the science

Previously, he called climate change a “hoax.” And he’s far from the only Republican who’s skeptical, if not blithe, about the scientific consensus on climate change. Steve Scalise, the U.S. House of Representatives’ majority leader, for instance, said that “it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature.”

Climate change is just one issue where the question of expertise has become political in America. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Democrats and Republicans fought incessantly over public health. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, claimed that his strategy of keeping schools and businesses open was a “tremendous success,” while Democratic critics called him “DeathSantis” for not having “followed the science.”

At the same time, American opinion of public-health experts—not least of Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2022 and a key figure on the White House Coronavirus Task Force—has split along partisan lines: 79 percent of Democrats thought public-health officials were doing a good or excellent job in responding to the pandemic, while only 44 percent of Republicans thought so. Why has the idea of expertise lost so much credibility on the American right?

David A. Hopkins is an associate professor of political science at Boston College and co-author of Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Hopkins says that on one level, the phenomenon is simple enough: These days, governing a country requires more and more specialized expertise; and policy experts have become increasingly liberal—creating both a greater role for expertise and a natural distance between the experts who provide it and conservative sentiment.

But there’s also been a complex chain of cause and effect from there: Experts increasingly weigh in publicly on the liberal side of politically contentious issues, even issues outside their areas of expertise; Republican politicians increasingly exploit a resulting alienation among their voters toward experts as a class; and liberals increasingly see Republicans as willfully ignorant.

It’s all conspired, Hopkins says, to drive not only a deep shift in American politics—with the Democrats becoming more and more the party of credentialled elites and the Republicans, more and more the party of the non–college-educated—but a vicious cycle in U.S. democracy that’s delegitimizing actual, specific expertise on vital challenges facing America and the world …

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• “In America, there’s an increasingly technocratic bent within the Democratic Party—a lot of authority invested in experts—and an increasing resentment of technocrats, in turn, within the Republican Party. So the idea of experts as the ultimate source of good public-policy ideas—the ultimate source of superior wisdom to guide us—is politically super-contested. And it has to be said, one of the main reasons for that is simply that many conservatives see experts as liberals; they see scientists, intellectuals, and policy experts as coming predominantly from the political left. It also has to be said that this is not an unfounded perception. On the whole, pubic-policy experts are liberal. It’s a fact. Not only that, but they mostly weigh in on the liberal side of ideological debates. Which doesn’t help persuade conservatives.”
• “[American public-policy experts] tend now to think their expertise on one issue gives them an authority to weigh in on others. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, there was a whole class of experts urging caution, telling people to wear masks, stay home, and avoid gatherings in public places. But then, when the Black Lives Matter movement organized mass protests, not only did a lot of these public-health experts not criticize the movement, but many of them explicitly endorsed the protests. Instead of warning that public gatherings might spread the disease, they said, Public health is about standing up to racism. They saw it as their job as public-health experts to urge people to have more progressive views on civil-rights issues. That’s the kind of thing that—whatever you might think of its merits—feeds into the conservative critique of experts as partisans exploiting their credentialled status to impose liberal ideology on the public.”
• “There’s been a change in American conservatism since Reagan. Liberals certainly aren’t the only ones indulging in ideology at the expense of reality. A lot of conservative leaders inhabit a social world where they’re rewarded for making liberals upset; they’re rewarded for waging a conservative culture war on well-educated metropolitan bourgeois elites. They’ve made liberal intellectuals and experts into the enemy. But then, when you make someone the enemy, you can’t expect them in turn to take you seriously. And so it goes.”

So everything The Signal does starts with good questions, and every answer leads us to more of them.

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‘Illegal ideologies’

Three years earlier, under direction from the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, Hong Kong officials shut down Stand News—which had been investigating what it saw as local-government failures—along with other pro-democracy media outlets.

Authorities arrested Chung and Lam in December 2021, detaining them for almost a year before releasing them on bail. Now Judge Kwok Wai-kin, who’s overseeing their case, has sentenced Chung to an additional 21 months in prison, and Lam—who suffers from a rare kidney disorder—to time served.

Harsh security laws have largely wiped out freedom of expression and other civil liberties in Hong Kong, and many pro-democracy activists have been arrested or fled the country. So why is China still sentencing journalists to jail time?

In July 2021, in the middle of the crackdown, Minxin Pei explored how Beijing had turned Hong Kong into just another Chinese city—taking control over local officials, elections, even textbooks, and leaving the enclave in an atmosphere of fear.

—Michael Bluhm

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