Agnostic.com

0 0

QUESTION Tom Nichols, "Death of Expertise" author, is profiled | Harvard Magazine

From the beginning, discussion of The Death of Expertise was inextricably bound up with Donald Trump. The book appeared less than six months after the upheaval of the 2016 election, and barely three months into the new presidency, and it seemed to have been composed with Trump in mind: a man, Nichols wrote, who quoted The National Enquirer as a reliable source of news, traded in conspiracy theories, and remained willfully and persistently uninformed about basic issues of public policy. Nichols recalled how a candidate with less experience in public service than any president in the nation’s history had disdained experts and elites during his campaign and promised to banish them from his administration. He cited a Wisconsin rally in early 2016, where Trump had declared, “The experts are terrible. They say, ‘Donald Trump needs a foreign policy adviser’…But supposing I didn’t have one. Would it be worse than what we’re doing now?” Trump’s eventual victory, Nichols wrote, was “undeniably one of the most recent—and one of the loudest—trumpets sounding the impending death of expertise.”

zblaze 7 Mar 12
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:36008