It’s useful to think about the behavioral differences between the right and the left because it helps us gain insight into the way American politics operates. One of the greatest influences on human behavior in all of history is the climate adaptation that developed to promote survival 100,000 years ago, before politics existed. That adaptation created liberal and conservative behaviors.
One of the more interesting differences between the two groups is their beliefs about human control. The left believes humans do not have control over their lives. The right believes humans do have control of their lives. The left believes that human society needs experts to tell us how to live. Those on the right are individualists who want the freedom to plot their own course in the world without help from others.
How does religion play into this? If conservatives believe that they can control their own lives, why is religion so important to them?
Most religious conservatives (especially Christian conservatives) believe that God created a moral universe, humans have free will within it, and individuals are responsible for their choices. So personal responsibility isn’t a rejection of God—it’s evidence of God’s design. You control your life morally, not metaphysically.
The left has a high percentage of atheists. The atheist vote is 95% Democrat.
In addition to requiring experts, the left also believes they are more intelligent than those on the right. By their telling, people on the right are dumb and anti-science. This fixation blocks their understanding of Trump’s election victory last year. In their minds, Trump was dangerous, and Kamala would have been a great president. She was the candidate of the “smart people,” so why didn’t she win?
The subject of experts came up in a recent Supreme Court hearing. In oral arguments recently for Trump v. Slaughter, the high-impact Supreme Court case over the right of the president to fire the Federal Trade Commissioner, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the following:
BROWN JACKSON: You seem to think that there’s something about the president that requires him to control everything as a matter of democratic accountability, when on the other side, we have Congress saying we’d like these particular agencies and officers to be independent of presidential control for the good of the people. We’re exercising our Article one authority to protect the people by creating this independent structure. And I don’t understand why it is that the thought that the president gets to control everything can outweigh Congress’s clear authority and duty to protect the people in this way.
SAUER (attorney for the president): Congress has a broad authority in structuring the federal government. What it lacks the authority to do is create these headless agencies, agencies that have no boss and are not answerable to the voters.
BROWN JACKSON: Having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the Ph.Ds and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States… These issues should not be in presidential control.
To Justice Brown-Jackson, experts should be running the country. She doesn’t want experts replaced by “dumb” loyalists. Of course, the reason Trump brought in loyalists is that the deep state is a corrupt left-wing enterprise, which needed to be purged. If the deep state were more non-partisan, he wouldn’t have taken that approach.
Justice Brown-Jackson’s view is a channeling of Woodrow Wilson’s technocratic belief system. Wilson wrote a paper in 1887 titled The Study of Administration. He proposed that trained experts run the government, separate from politics, and that elected officials set policy goals.
Wilson and the progressives of his era believed that social problems could be studied scientifically and that government could be made efficient, rational, and non-partisan. Expertise was superior to tradition, localism, or patronage.
It took until the 1940s for social scientists to realize that the scientific method does not apply to their disciplines. Introducing human behavior into a subject negates the idea of precision. It also renders the idea of an efficient, rational, and non-partisan government a naïve concept.
There are two reasons why a government run by experts cannot work.
First, a technocracy conflicts with the principles of a representative democracy. Technocrats are appointed based on expertise and not elected by the people, so they are not accountable. If power is vested in a specialized elite, citizens are excluded from the policymaking process, which alienates the citizenry. When FDR tried to implement elements of a technocracy in the 1930’s, the public became suspicious of his intent. Did he intend to replace our democracy with something else?
The second reason is the theory’s practical and ideological flaws. Governance involves complex ethical, social, and value judgments. Technocrats often struggle with the political aspects of leadership, such as negotiation and building popular support, because they assume that data and logic alone are sufficient to justify policies. Experts are human and bring their own biases and self-interest to the table. Without proper checks and balances, this can lead to corruption, regulatory capture by special interests, and decisions that favor elites at the expense of the general public.
There is a difficulty in defining “expertise.” Who is the best expert for a complex role, given the degree of academic specialization today? The criteria used can be manipulated to create an aristocratic or oligarchic system.
Technocrats may become so attached to their models and expertise that they ignore ground-level realities or refuse to admit mistakes, making the system rigid and slow to adapt to changing circumstances.
Consider the federal bureaucracy today. It’s not a technocracy, but its bloat and inefficiency are a direct result of some of the same factors. Congress passes laws in a hurry, and they are often incompletely written. More importantly, they lack enforcement provisions. The bureaucracy’s sole job is to execute the law: not to be efficient, not to be customer-focused, not to be free from corruption. As the bureaucracy grows, it becomes less efficient and more partisan. Trump is attempting to do something no previous president has even tried: cut the bloat, save taxpayers’ money, and mitigate partisanship.
He has plenty of “experts” to help him.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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There is a new term, 'scientism'. When a special interest wants to force their beliefs on the rest of us, they simply refer to their beliefs as science. The trouble is, it's usual not science, it's scientism, a belief system dressed up to look like science.
That's why Jackson can't explain what a woman is. Anyone who can't explain what a woman is, is someone who has rejected science in favor of scientism. I fear that Jackson doesn't recognize that her 'scientists' are the very party loyalists that she fears that Trump is bringing in.
Which reminds me of the song, "Send in the clowns."