I don’t sneer at experts, expertise and the ruling elite. I don’t think this crowd is any more likely to be wrong or bad than any other group. Sometimes the experts are right and sometimes the people are right. Truth and righteousness does not lie with any group. I’m not a populist nor an elitist.<\/p>\n
When not listening to experts leads to immediate disaster, we should always listen to experts (engineering, air traffic, etc). When there’s no clear reason to believe that the experts are more likely to be right than non-experts, we should be suspicious of expert claims. For example, the academic discipline of Economics relies on differential equations to make sense of the world, and those parts of reality not reducible to such equations should not be governed by economist claims (such as international trade, invention, operating businesses). <\/p>\n
In their 2025 book, Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, Ian Fletcher and Marc Fasteau write<\/a>:<\/p>\n “A major problem with mainstream economics, once one gets past recitations of free-market theology and looks at the actual scholarship, is that it is only good at understanding things that are well suited to mathematical modeling, such as price setting in freely competitive markets.37 It has weak insight into organization, management, corporate strategy, R&D, engineering, workforce development, the origins of technology, product design, policymaking by governments, and the strategies nations use to compete. None of these reduce to equations well, but they are central to how modern firms, governments, and thus economies function. Even some fields that do mathematize well, such as finance and international trade, are prone to oversimplifications that lead to false conclusions.”<\/p>\n Robert Lighthizer writes in his 2023 book, No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers<\/a>:<\/p>\n * All the great economies were built behind a wall of protection and often with government money. The British industrial revolution was aided by a wall of tariffs. Likewise, the late – nineteenth – century explosion of American industry was the product of protectionism and often subsidies. Can anyone imagine the great American railroads being built without the grant of free land per mile? Similarly, the manufacturing countries of Japan, Germany, and now China all benefited during their development from tariffs, other barriers, and subsidies of one kind or another. It is important important to remember that no country became great by consuming. They became great by producing.<\/p>\n * Advocates of free trade frequently argue that enhanced international trade corresponds with greater international peace. This point of view traces back to the post \u2013 World War II period. Before World War II, tariffs were high by contemporary standards. From the 1820s until the late 1940s, the weighted average US tariff (which measures duties collected as a percentage of total imports) rarely dipped below 20 percent. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Congress ushered in a period of relative tariff liberalization in the 1930s, but even then the tariff rate remained in the mid – to high teens throughout the decade. After the war, however, both Democrats and Republicans came to champion tariff reduction as a means of preventing yet another conflict, arguing that trade fostered interdependence between nations. Trade liberalization came to be seen not just as a tool of economic policy but also as a path to perpetual peace. Indeed, Cordell Hull, the secretary of state from 1933 to 1944 in the Roosevelt administration and lead architect of its trade policy, claimed that his philosophy centered on the idea that \u201cunhampered trade dovetailed with peace; [and] high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war.\u201d * Some cite efficiency as a rationale for free trade. For adherents of this faith, the sole objective of trade policy is market efficiency. Lower tariffs and nontariff barriers reduce the costs of producing and distributing goods and services; that, in turn, makes society as a whole better off \u2014 or so the argument goes. Of course, there are advantages to lower prices when considering Americans as consumers. The problem is that adherents of this view seldom consider how this single – minded pursuit of efficiency affects the men and women who actually do the producing. If this Trump Middle East peace plan works out, it will undercut the expertise claims of the foreign policy elite. Ross Douthat writes in the NYT<\/a>: “The fact that figures like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have seemingly done better \u2014 or at the very least no worse \u2014 than credentialed diplomatic professionals has striking implications for how we think about expertise in foreign policy.”<\/p>\n ChatGPT says: If real-estate developers or business elites (like Witkoff, Kushner) appear to do \u201cno worse\u201d than career diplomats or national security professionals, that suggests several things:<\/p>\n Erosion of the prestige of technocratic expertise<\/p>\n It signals that credentialed expertise is less politically privileged. If nonexperts can replicate or outshine experts, the boundary between lay leadership and professional specialization weakens.<\/p>\n Delegitimizing expert authority<\/p>\n The success (or apparent success) of nonexperts challenges the moral standing of experts, fueling populist narratives that experts are overpaid, disconnected, or elitist.<\/p>\n Risk of overconfidence \/ hubris<\/p>\n Nonexperts may underestimate complexity. The illusion that one can manage foreign policy through transactional instincts or deals is tempting \u2014 but fragile in crises.<\/p>\n Power re-distribution<\/p>\n If policy is less constrained by bureaucratic or institutional norms, political actors (or their inner circle) gain latitude. That amplifies the role of personality, loyalty, and improvisation.<\/p>\n Democratic and institutional stress<\/p>\n Democratic legitimacy often depends on a mix of representative, technocratic, and institutional checks. When nonexperts encroach on domains traditionally reserved for specialists, institutional norms and accountability may erode.<\/p>\n Selective \u201csuccess stories\u201d bias<\/p>\n The claim assumes we don\u2019t see the many failures. Survivorship bias: we remember the deals that worked, not the ones that blew up. If nonexperts occasionally get lucky, that isn\u2019t evidence of parity overall.<\/p>\n Shifting criteria of legitimacy<\/p>\n The yardstick of \u201ceffectiveness\u201d may shift from deep, sustained stability to headline deals, spectacle, or symbolic wins. That favors actors adept at optics more than substance.<\/p>\n So Douthat is warning that the lines distinguishing expertise, merit, and authority in foreign policy may be dissolving \u2014 with unpredictable consequences for governance, institutional memory, crisis handling, and norms.<\/p>\n LF: Over the past nine months, I’ve read many articles in elite publications decrying the Trump administration’s lack of foreign policy expertise.<\/p>\n 1. The collapse of boundary maintenance<\/p>\n In Turner\u2019s framework, modern states depend on institutional \u201cboundary work\u201d separating expert domains (science, diplomacy, law) from lay or political judgment. Trump\u2019s foreign-policy model, by privileging personal trust, business intuition, and loyalty over credentialed specialization, represents the deliberate erosion of those boundaries. 2. Patronage replaces epistemic authority<\/p>\n Turner begins The Politics of Expertise with the observation that governments fund, rely on, and thus patronize experts whose knowledge they can\u2019t easily evaluate. In Trump\u2019s case, the traditional patronage circuit (State Dept. \u2192 diplomatic corps \u2192 think-tank ecosystem) was bypassed. Patronage shifted to personal networks \u2014 Kushner, Witkoff, Barrack, etc. 3. Output legitimacy versus process legitimacy<\/p>\n Turner distinguishes between output legitimacy (results justify trust) and process legitimacy (procedures justify trust). 4. Knowledge aggregation and its breakdown<\/p>\n Turner\u2019s central insight is that politics requires the aggregation of distributed knowledge \u2014 the organization of many partial knowings into coherent decisions. Bureaucracies, advisory councils, and interagency committees exist for that purpose. 5. The democratization (or populist redefinition) of expertise<\/p>\n Turner doesn\u2019t romanticize experts; he sees expertise as a socially contingent form of authority. In that sense, Trump\u2019s populist dismissal of the \u201cblob\u201d reflects a democratic impulse to reclaim decision power from unaccountable elites. 6. The long-term consequence: institutional amnesia<\/p>\n Turner often warns that when expertise is delegitimized, states lose epistemic memory \u2014 the accumulated knowledge stored in procedures, archives, and norms. Replacing the diplomatic corps with deal-makers risks precisely that: the destruction of knowledge infrastructures that can\u2019t be rebuilt quickly. 7. Synthesis<\/p>\n In Turner\u2019s terms, Trump\u2019s foreign-policy style is not \u201canti-expert\u201d but post-expert \u2014 rule by uncredentialed networks that claim direct access to truth or \u201ccommon sense,\u201d bypassing institutional mediation. Here\u2019s how \u201cWilliam and the Musician<\/a>\u201d maps onto our expertise thread (Douthat + Turner):<\/p>\n \u201cWilliam and the Musician\u201d is one of Richmal Crompton\u2019s Just William stories, a farce about class, pretension, and luck.<\/p>\n William, day-dreaming on a hill, meets a down-on-his-luck Punch-and-Judy man, Se\u00f1or Manelli, who mistakes William\u2019s childish boasting for truth and believes the boy owns the grand estate nearby. William, improvising, \u201chires\u201d him to perform at an upcoming garden party supposedly hosted by \u201cLord Faversham.\u201d In reality the house belongs to Mrs Bot, a social-climbing hostess desperate to impress the local gentry with a recital by the modern violin virtuoso Zier.<\/p>\n Manelli takes the promise seriously, practices, and turns up at the Bots\u2019 party with his dog and puppet stage. Zier, meanwhile, quarrels with himself, misses his transport, and ends up playing privately for William in a hayfield, imagining he has discovered a prodigy. At the hall, chaos turns to triumph: the bored guests, expecting an avant-garde violinist, roar with laughter at Manelli\u2019s Punch-and-Judy show. Lord Faversham declares it the best entertainment in years and books Manelli for another engagement. Mrs Bot, stunned, assumes her husband arranged it; her social status soars.<\/p>\n Later, the newspapers report that Punch and Judy are fashionable again and that Zier has published memoirs romanticizing his \u201cmusical child\u201d encounter\u2014clearly William. William listens, grins, and says nothing.<\/p>\n In short:<\/p>\n Themes: illusion, class anxiety, the accidental triumph of the uncredentialed over the credentialed.<\/p>\n Moral: expertise and pretension can be outflanked by luck, charisma, and timing.<\/p>\n Tone: comic inversion\u2014Crompton\u2019s satire of the social and cultural hierarchies of early-20th-century Britain.<\/p>\n Status-seeking patronage<\/p>\n Mrs. Bot is the archetypal patron. She buys legitimacy (the hospital donation, Lord Faversham, the \u201cfamous, terribly modern\u201d violinist). Turner: expertise rides on patronage networks; legitimacy is socially produced, not just earned.<\/p>\n Boundary work gets scrambled<\/p>\n The \u201cproper\u201d expert is Zier (credentialed high culture). The \u201cimproper\u201d entertainer is Se\u00f1or Manelli (Punch & Judy, a dog). The boundary between high\/low, expert\/lay collapses when Manelli steals the show. Douthat\u2019s observation: non-credentialed operatives (Witkoff, Kushner) sometimes \u201cdo no worse\u201d than the pros.<\/p>\n Output vs. process legitimacy<\/p>\n Process legitimacy = curated tent, front-row gothic chair, the whole ritual of expert performance. Output legitimacy = did the guests actually value it? Manelli delivers joy; Zier flakes. Turner: when process fails, audiences re-anchor legitimacy in outputs.<\/p>\n The optics economy<\/p>\n Mrs. Bot wants prestige optics (modern violinist before a bored lord). The audience wants relief. The \u201cwin\u201d is what lands with the crowd and the top patron (Lord Faversham laughing). Douthat\u2019s point: leaders who optimize for optics sometimes appear to beat technocrats measured on longer-term metrics.<\/p>\n Survivorship narratives<\/p>\n Zier no-shows, then rewrites the day in his memoirs as a sublime encounter with a \u201cmusical child.\u201d That\u2019s expert self-exoneration through storytelling. In politics, post-hoc rationalizations make impulsive calls look like genius. Turner: experts and institutions bond reputation through narratives as much as results.<\/p>\n Personal networks over institutions<\/p>\n William\u2019s offhand, fantastical \u201cbooking\u201d of Manelli overrides the whole institutional booking of Zier. Trumpworld parallel: personal channels, back-doors, and informal envoys displacing formal interagency process.<\/p>\n Populist revaluation of knowledge<\/p>\n Punch & Judy = \u201cout of date\u201d to the taste-policing class, yet it\u2019s what the mixed public actually values. Populism reframes which knowledge counts. Turner: expertise\u2019s authority depends on audience trust; if the audience prefers different forms, the crown slips.<\/p>\n Institutional amnesia risk<\/p>\n If every Mrs. Bot learns \u201cskip the experts, hire the clown,\u201d institutions forget how to source, vet, and stage complex performances. Works today; hollows capacity tomorrow. Turner warns about consuming epistemic capital faster than you rebuild it.<\/p>\n Luck and contingency masquerading as theory<\/p>\n A bus breaks down; a boy stalls a prima donna; a crowd laughs; a lord applauds. Then everyone invents reasons. In politics, contingent \u201cwins\u201d can be mistaken for a doctrine (\u201csee, nonexperts beat experts\u201d). Turner: beware mistaking fortunate draws for a new epistemic model.<\/p>\n Elite endorsement flips the field<\/p>\n The crowd follows Lord Faversham\u2019s laughter. Once an elite gatekeeper blesses the \u201clow\u201d act, it becomes the right act. That\u2019s how boundary work is renegotiated: not by truth alone but by who laughs (or nods) first.<\/p>\n Bottom line<\/p>\n Crompton stages Turner\u2019s core claim: expertise is a political-social arrangement\u2014patronage, rituals, stories, and audiences\u2014not just skill. Douthat\u2019s implication lands here: when institutions falter and patrons chase optics, non-experts can appear to match or beat experts. Sometimes that\u2019s genuine re-discovery of undervalued know-how; often it\u2019s contingency + charisma + a friendly gatekeeper. The long game still hinges on aggregation, memory, and accountable process\u2014the stuff that keeps you from betting your state dinner (or your state) on a lucky Punch and Judy.<\/p>\n LF: Trump reminds me of William.<\/p>\n ChatGPT says: Here\u2019s the clean mapping:<\/p>\n \u2022 Fantasy \u2192 mandate \u2022 Personal channels over institutions \u2022 Optics > process \u2022 Non-experts who land the moment \u2022 Gatekeeper blessing flips the script \u2022 Post-hoc mythmaking \u2022 Crowd-pleasing short term, capacity risk long term \u2022 Aggregation failure masked by charisma \u2022 Populist revaluation of \u201cwhat counts\u201d \u2022 Moral: when \u201cWilliam-style\u201d works vs. breaks I don’t sneer at experts, expertise and the ruling elite. I don’t think this crowd is any more likely to be wrong or bad than any other group. Sometimes the experts are right and sometimes the people are right. Truth … Continue reading
\n The need for the United States to temper the often uncritical post \u2013 World War II enthusiasm for interdependence at all costs has never been greater than it is now, in the face of the Chinese threat. We need to remember that, historically speaking, interdependence does not always lead to peace. In the United States, economic ties between the North and the South did not prevent the Civil War. Global trade grew rapidly in the years right before World War I; exports as a percentage of global GDP peaked at nearly 14 percent in 1913, a record that would hold until the 1970s. Likewise, it would be hard to argue that the rise of Germany as a major exporter in the late nineteenth century helped pacify that country in the first half of the twentieth. Japan\u2019s dependence on raw materials from the United States motivated its attack on Pearl Harbor. More recently, as we will discuss in chapter 4, China\u2019s accession to the WTO in 2001 \u2014 which was supposed to make the country a model global citizen \u2014 was followed by massive investments in its military capabilities and territorial expansion in the South China Sea. And certainly the great trade between Ukraine and Russia did not stop Putin\u2019s invasion in 2022.
\n On the flip side, conflict over trade is not always destabilizing or a threat to broader foreign policy objectives. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance survived the tariff hikes associated with both the 1960s \u201cchicken war,\u201d when the United States clashed with France and West Germany over poultry duties, and the 1970s \u201cNixon shock,\u201d when the United States effectively abandoned the Bretton Woods system. The United States and Japan fought about trade in the 1980s, but their bilateral bilateral security alliance stayed strong.
\n Countries, like people, compartmentalize between separate issues. There may be situations when it is appropriate to make concessions on trade to achieve broader diplomatic aims, but one should keep in mind that such bargains can prove costly in the long run. Letting India join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the precursor to the WTO) in 1948 with nearly a third of its industrial tariffs unbound, for example, no doubt made sense to Cold Warriors, who thought that it would help bring India into the US camp. Yet the negative repercussions of that decision persist to this day, now that India has become one of the world\u2019s largest economies and, at times, a troublesome trading partner for the United States. Over the years, such concessions have piled up.<\/p>\n
\n According to the definitions preferred by these efficiency – minded free traders, the downside of trade for American producers is not evidence against their approach but rather is an unfortunate but necessary side effect. That\u2019s because free trade is always taken as a given, not as an approach to be questioned. Rather than envisioning the type of society desired and then, in light of that conception of the common good, fashioning a trade policy to fit that vision, economists tend to do the opposite: they start from the proposition that free trade should reign and then argue that society should adapt. Most acknowledge that lowering trade barriers causes economic disruption, but very few suggest that the rules of trade should be calibrated to help society better manage those effects. On the right, libertarians deny that these bad effects are a problem, because the benefits of cheap consumer goods for the masses supposedly outweigh the costs, and factory workers, in their view, can be retrained to write computer programs. On the left, progressives promote trade adjustment assistance and other wealth – transfer schemes as a means of smoothing globalization\u2019s rough edges.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\nForeign Affairs<\/h2>\n
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Foreign Policy<\/h2>\n
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Washington Post (Opinion)<\/h2>\n
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Financial Times<\/h2>\n
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The New Yorker<\/h2>\n
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Policy Institutes<\/h2>\n
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Stephen Turner\u2013Style Analysis: \u201cThe Politics of Expertise in Trump\u2019s Foreign Policy\u201d<\/a><\/h2>\n
\nHe would see this as not just an administrative change but a reorganization of knowledge and authority \u2014 shifting decision power from knowledge-holders to political patrons.<\/p>\n
\nTo Turner, this is a reversion to pre-bureaucratic forms of knowledge trust: legitimacy through personal loyalty rather than institutional vetting. It doesn\u2019t abolish expertise; it privatizes it.<\/p>\n
\nTrump\u2019s model rests entirely on output legitimacy \u2014 deals, headlines, perceived \u201cwins.\u201d Traditional diplomacy depends on process legitimacy \u2014 norms of consultation, interagency review, alliances.
\nWhen the process basis collapses, \u201cexpertise\u201d becomes indistinguishable from success theater. That creates volatility: the moment output fails, legitimacy disappears.<\/p>\n
\nTrump\u2019s style (intuition + small trusted circle) short-circuits aggregation. Fewer voices means fewer knowledge inputs; policy becomes dependent on individual heuristics rather than structured synthesis. Turner would call this a \u201cfailure of aggregation\u201d\u2014a normal accident of expertise.<\/p>\n
\nBut Turner would say that this legitimacy-by-disruption only works if new forms of expertise or trust mechanisms replace the old. In Trump\u2019s case, those substitutes were thin \u2014 charisma, family ties, business analogies. Without institutional scaffolding, expertise doesn\u2019t vanish; it metastasizes into ideology or loyalty.<\/p>\n
\nHe would likely see this as part of a broader Western trend: populist regimes consuming the epistemic capital built by prior technocracies faster than they can regenerate it.<\/p>\n
\nThat shift doesn\u2019t eliminate expertise; it redistributes it from professional systems to personal hierarchies, undermining both democratic accountability and expert autonomy. It\u2019s a reversion to what Turner calls \u201cpatron-client epistemology\u201d: trust in the ruler replaces trust in the process.<\/p>\n
\nWilliam rules the world in his head; Trump governs as if personal will can substitute for process. Grandiosity stands in for institution-building.<\/p>\n
\nWilliam \u201cbooks\u201d Manelli on a whim; Trump elevates loyalists\/back-channels (Kushner, Witkoff) over the professional corps.<\/p>\n
\nMrs. Bot wants prestige; the crowd wants fun. Trump optimizes for headline wins and spectacle; process legitimacy gets sidelined.<\/p>\n
\nManelli delights; Zier no-shows. Trump\u2019s non-credentialed envoys sometimes deliver visible \u201cwins,\u201d reinforcing skepticism of experts.<\/p>\n
\nLord Faversham laughs \u2192 everyone laughs. Elite endorsement reframes \u201clow\u201d as \u201cright.\u201d In politics, one televised nod can reset the field.<\/p>\n
\nZier writes a heroic memoir about a \u201cmusical child.\u201d Trumpworld turns contingencies into doctrine (\u201cOnly I can fix it\u201d), recoding luck as strategy.<\/p>\n
\nPunch & Judy saves the day\u2014but if every patron bets on clowns, institutions forget how to do complex things. Turner\u2019s warning: you burn epistemic capital.<\/p>\n
\nWilliam\u2019s improvisation bypasses the system that aggregates knowledge; Trump\u2019s style does the same. It works\u2014until you hit problems that won\u2019t yield to vibes.<\/p>\n
\nPunch & Judy was \u201cout of date\u201d until the audience voted with laughter. Trump channels that revaluation against the foreign-policy guild.<\/p>\n
\nWorks: symbolic politics, discrete bargains, media cycles, adversaries susceptible to theater.
\nBreaks: crises needing deep bench\/alliances, sustained implementation, coalition management, unglamorous maintenance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"