Discover more from Tilting At Windmills
Despite my best efforts, I’m an optimist. I like to see things in a positive light whenever I can and I tend to view others in that light. When I try to understand motives, I look for the most benign motive that would explain a given person’s actions because, most of the time, that seems to be what’s going on.
Or at least what they claim when confronted.
Yet my optimism hasn’t just taken a hit lately. It’s been smacked around like a pinata at a birthday party.
Why?
Because I figured that experts were worth listening to. They didn’t just become experts overnight. They had to know something.
Only, they don’t.
Time and time again, they’ve blown it. We’ve seen it, and not just the expert predictions and polling on the 2024 election. Think about COVID for a moment.
We were told that we needed to do all of these things or else this virus was going to kill tens to hundreds of millions of people. They lied to us and said masks wouldn’t help, right up until they said everyone had to wear a mask. The N95s weren’t useful, all we needed with a face panty and we’d be fine.
We needed to stay inside, to keep our kids from school, to not go into work, to not keep our businesses afloat, right up until it was suddenly more important to protest “racism.”
Over and over again, the lied to us. They got things wrong. They botched it nine ways to Sunday.
Glenn Reynolds, over at his Instapundit Substack, offered this in response to Nate Silver seemingly waking up to this reality:
Yes, that’s what got Nate’s attention. The experts weren’t just losing, they were dragging the Democrats down with them. (And I suspect public opinion on “the pandemic, January 6, and all those crimes and misdemeanors” was colored by doubt that those made Trump look as bad as the expert class kept maintaining, given that all three were basically expert-class creations.) The postwar academic/media/bureaucratic ruling class is in trouble. “Its institutions serve the public increasingly poorly — but it’s also increasingly losing politically.”
Well, it deserves to. By its fruit the tree is known, and the fruits of our ruling class, which has long based its authority on an assumed, and increasingly implausible, expertise have not been impressive. The election of 2024, as Silver rightly notes, represents a repudiation of those failures. As Joel Kotkin notes, the working class, having ceded much political power to the experts in the postwar era, is taking that power back. And there are signs that this may be happening elsewhere, as, for example, Germans grow restive under the economic calamities wrought by green energy policies that are popular with the laptop classes, but that wreck the fortunes of farmers and factory workers.
And it’s a good that the working class is taking power back. Leaving aside the undemocratic nature of technocracy, technocracy has failed the ultimate in technocratic tests: It doesn’t work. Putting “smart” – which turns out to mean “credentialed” – people in charge of everything, and letting them run things with no real constraints except the blinkered and self-serving opinions of other members of their social class, has turned out not to work very well. Whether in agriculture or in governance, monocultures are unstable, and our ruling class monoculture has been a narrow and increasingly incestuous one. Its performance has failed to justify its existence.
And the working class is recognizing its power and that’s a damn good thing.
Look, I consider myself a working-class guy. I’m a tradesman, after all, even if my medium is the English language rather than wood or iron. I learned my trade on my own and parlayed that into making a living.
So I understand the working class far better than the Washington elite do.
Working class is not now, nor has it ever been, a synonym for “stupid.” Working-class folks know what’s happening in their lives and what’s happening in their friends’ and neighbors’ lives. They know what policies led to these results and who is responsible for that.
The entire campaign season was filled with “experts” trying to tell us that the economy was just swell and that we shouldn’t believe our lying eyes.
The problem was that power corrupts and experts, when handed power, are no less resistant to misusing that power than anyone else.
Now, let’s also consider who anoints these “experts.”
For the most part, as Reynolds puts it, these “smart” people are really just “credentialed.” In other words, they went to college and completed a program. The more I see of people who are highly credentialed, the less benefit I see in it. I mean, I don’t fault someone getting a master’s degree or a PhD, especially if it translates to more money at work, but that doesn’t mean they somehow understand the lives of regular people.
In fact, college treats them like they’re better than folks like you and me. It treats the working class as if there’s something wrong. It warns that simple tradesmen and women are lacking somehow, like they’re less than.
It’s why so many of my fellow journalists have embraced credentialism themselves.
But you can only take a dump on people for so long, lie to them and say you’re looking out for them, before they wake up and realize who you really are.
The 2024 election may well be the rise of the working class.
And, ultimately, that’s good for everyone. What’s good for the working class is what’s good for everyone. Making life better for the working class might well encourage some to get off their butts and join them. Whatever you do shouldn’t make life worse for anyone else, but if the working class is hurting economically, making light of it as “being upset over the price of eggs” isn’t exactly going to be a winning strategy.
We’re done being talked down to by the so-called experts. There are more of us than there are of them, and it’s time we knock them off of their pedestals. They need to get over themselves and recognize they went to college. They’re not God.
God has a better track record, after all.
Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. You can also check out our check out our store. Your support is greatly appreciated.
Subscribe to Tilting At Windmills
Politics, culture, a dose of snark, and a profound love of personal and economic freedom.
Amen, Mr. Knighton! I have an undergraduate degree in English and planned on attending law school, but got married and had 3 children instead and I'd never trade that for the world. I went to trade school, got my paralegal certificate and billed $80 an hour for my research (most of which went to my law firm, but still...). It wasn't a doctorate, but my husband was, at the time, the most celebrated shark and sportfishing captain in the Keys and we did very well for ourselves.
When Obama took office, the regulation began hitting the fishing industries *hard*. We went to a meeting with every sportfishing captain in town and attempted to talk to the government representative about how large the cut of the current proposed legislation would effect us. King Mackerel is a gray meat fish that tastes like sardines with a bucket of blood thrown on it. It's nasty, but cheap and we made excellent commissions for their sale. The last regulation of it said we could catch and sell 2 Kings for each person on the boat including the captain and mate. The new regulation cut the captain and mate out of the equation. That equals out to about $11,000/year per boat and that's a big pay cut for a middle class family like ours. The craziest part is Kingfish are a Pelagic species, so the US regulates them tightly. They then swim south to Latin America which doesn't regulate them at all, slaughters them indiscriminately and then sells them back to America for twice the price! It's regulatory insanity.
Back to the bureaucrats, they said sportsfishing boats had to be regulated because we caught and sold so many King Mackerel, so we signed up to speak at the meeting, naively believing we could reason with these stooges. When I got up to speak (my husband has a phobia about public speaking), they asked who I represented and I gave him our boat name, i.e. business name, of which I was half owner. The gov't rep told me sportsfishing boats only catch 0.50% of all Kingfish caught in the US and therefore, we weren't allowed to speak on the matter! I pointed out that if that's the case, we shouldn't have to be regulated so tightly, but the government disagreed and proceeded to pass the rule without opposition from the rest of the governmental representatives.
That's how the "experts" drove a thriving community in the Florida Keys out of business and, in the case of many, out of town due to rising real estate prices and being unable to earn an honest living as 5 generations of my husband's family did. It's broken my husband. He's a quieter, grayer personality than the man I married. That's a prime example of how the "experts" made America into a country that's less free, less affordable and where you're less able to pursue your happiness guaranteed to us by our forefathers.