The Rev. Greg Morgan offers one in a series of articles on contemporary trends in America for people of faith.
The American Revolt against Expertise: How it Happened and Why it Matters
(Based on Daniel Immerwahr, “Doctor’s Orders: It used to be progressives who distrusted experts. What happened?” The New Yorker, May 26, 2025)
Daniel Immerwahr’s recent essay in The New Yorker (see source information and full title above) on the recent revolt against expertise in American society provides a particularly comprehensive answer to the how question, so I think it’s well worth reviewing the case he makes for the origins of our distrust of the official authorities we normally consult for answers to questions of substance. As it turns out, the how can be explained by carefully examining the history of our relatively recent past (the approximate 60+ years of our communal life extending backwards through the 1960s). More important, his examination leads to a troubling (though perhaps also hopeful) conclusion: that there are no easy answers to who or what did this to us and that there is plenty of blame to go around on all sides. This appears to be a case of a combination of communal complicity and the vagaries of the complex way in which reality is shaped by events and actions being piled upon others in no particular order or any consideration for how what results from such a process will impact events or individuals. The result is a new reality, no doubt unexpected and certainly unwelcome, which we are now required to re-shape for the sake of the welfare of the whole of society.
To understand how this process works, a good place to start is with the life of Robt. F. Kennedy, Jr. whose proclivity for claiming that the experts frequently reach incorrect and even irresponsible conclusions is well known. Critical events in his personal life which were beyond his control have left a critical imprint on his psyche. Specifically, the assassinations of his uncle (1963) and his father (1968) in the turbulent decade of the 1960s —- have left an indelible mark which has resulted in a view of expertise not yet shared by a plurality of the general population. After all, the conclusions of the Warren Commission (that JFK was shot by a lone gunman) have never been fully accepted by the American people, and even Lyndon B. Johnson thought it was a conspiracy and considered the commission’s conclusions to be greatly distorted by fears of exposing the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. to scrutiny which would have called into question their very existence, a possibility that was viewed with horror by those in power. For LBJ, “the point of the investigation (leading to the commission report) was to defeat such dangerous speculations” and shore up the official story (that Oswald acted alone). And what would the skepticism surrounding the Warren Commission report have done to shape RFK, Jr.’s view of what occurred in 1968 to his own father? Clearly, it would not have resulted in securing his faith in the trustworthiness of the federal government’s proposed explanation of the shape of current events.
However, not all of his views have an anti-expertise character. When asked if there was any one major event in past decades for which he believed the official explanation, he answered: the moon landing {1969}. But even here, his response did not seem be to reach a permanent or universal judgment: he said his agreement with the official explanation had a lot to do with the fact that he “went skiing with Buzz Aldrin every year.” Idiosyncratic, then, describes his agreement with some popular assessments despite his overall skepticism of much accepted wisdom. Additionally, he has done more in his professional life than question accepted views on vaccines. He has also written a nearly five hundred-page “data-drenched work of nonfiction” which has sold over a million copies — not bad for someone with a reputation for off-beat, sometimes shockingly unorthodox, views on topics of particular interest to new parents. Additionally, he sometimes reveals such characteristics as “citing evidence, ignoring appeals to authority, reserving judgment, demanding more research” which are the marks of a scientific mind. So much for demonizing those with divergent views from those of a left-leaning political orientation. What Kennedy really seems to represent is “a growing epistemological rift in the country” which makes categorizing people more difficult than we have imagined.
The current heated battles over the role of knowledge in American society often have more complex origins than typical political biases would dictate. We think of science as “an open-ended pursuit in which doubt is encouraged, new evidence is welcomed, and theories are revisable,” and that is largely the way the basic sciences work. But “regulatory science,” in which conclusions are required on a deadline, works differently. When a drug must be approved or not, a level of pollution pronounced safe or not, “the authorities must at some point close the case, push errant facts aside, and draw a line.” There isn’t much hostility toward experts in “unhurried realms of inquiry” such as numbers theory. It’s when “uncertainty collides with urgency” that the authorities enter into the debate, “convene commissions, and issue findings” which result in those who accept the “sanctioned conclusions {gaining} official backing,” while those who don’t are “ruled out of bounds” and “risk being treated as crackpots, deniers, and conspiracy theorists.” So, again, things can be more complex than they at first appear to be. If you keep things too open, “you’re endlessly debating whether Bush ‘did 9/11’, for example” If you close things too quickly, you can “turn hasty, uncertain conclusions into orthodoxies” and “marginalize too many intelligent people who will be strongly encouraged to challenge your legitimacy by seizing on your missteps, broadcasting your hypocrisies and waving counter-evidence in your face,” which is in some ways “the story of the past six decades” of our history. While the Kennedy assassination “sent dark suspicions swirling through the national psyche” in the decade of the 1960s, distrust of experts “crescendoed again in the 1980s” with the appearance of a mysterious new disease.
And this is where Anthony Fauci enters the scene. The suspicions which had arisen at the time of the President’s death in Dallas surfaced once again two decades later in the AIDS crisis, “another opportunity for rumors and conspiracy theories to grow and multiply.” Much of the animosity toward Fauci arose in this period because he was the central figure in “crafting AIDS policy.” Since he had tremendous power to decide which treatments would be tested, he became the “intense focus of activists who distrusted his judgments.” Thus, long before the Covid pandemic appeared on the scene, Fauci was already in the crosshairs of a segment of the population. In 1990, Act Up burned him in effigy. Whether it involved AZT which turned out to be crucial to the development of the first antiretroviral treatment (though it was largely infective as a cure in practice) or Compound Q which was abandoned because of its dangerous side effects, it took awhile for Fauci to accept “offroad researchers as collaborators rather than cranks.” But when he made an about-face, he began referring to Act Up members as “intelligent, gifted, articulate people” who were coming up with useful ideas. With some difficulty, Act Up and other skeptical groups pushed the FDA to approve “aerosolized pentamidine (a vital treatment for a deadly opportunistic lung infection) and to allow fast-track access to experimental medicines for those not in formal drug trials.” Fauci himself finally admitted that “activists bring a special insight” to puzzling medical dilemmas. All the same, ultimately Fauci and many prominent activists “closed ranks against heterodox theories.”
With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in the 2020s, “the gravity of the situation reduced tolerance for open-ended inquiry,” and the ranks of those who were skeptical of the established medical experts grew accordingly. Since public health depends on “people’s willingness to trust those same experts,” this would prove disastrous. The measures the experts were calling for required a lot of trust because they were measures that were very difficult to propose in an environment of panic: stay-at-home orders, the closing of schools and businesses, and mandated masks. Additionally, China appeared to be taking even more drastic measures such as sealing off entire apartment buildings. So, did one choose to trust the experts or not?
Whereas liberals continued to venerate expertise, conservatives more and more tended to side with politicians like Donald Trump who “declined to nominate a science adviser for more than a year and a half.” Supporting the leading experts in the field of public health “veered toward dogma” and venerated the likes of Fauci as a kind of religious creed; he became the “pope” of that side of the debate. On the other hand, an apostate like Robt. F. Kennedy, Jr. began pushing public health policies “no matter their plausibility.” For example, he publicly pondered questions such as whether cellphones cause cancer or if tainted tap water might “lead to sexual dysphoria.” In short order, he became “the pandemic’s leading skeptic.” He opposed lockdowns, masks and vaccines and supported the use of off-patent, cheap drugs while spurning expensive antiviral drugs which enjoyed the support of Fauci and others. The more he suspected pharmaceutical firms and supported unsanctioned medications the more he came to resemble Act Up’s Larry Kramer (one of the more widely known AIDS activists in that era) except that Kennedy’s ideas were treated like contagious diseases, while serious works by Fauci were shunned by many readers. There was good reason why medical dissent stirred up a lot of hostility: people were dying and the urge to find remedies was becoming “overwhelming.” In retrospect, political scientists Macedo and Lee in their book In Covid’s Wake conclude their look back at the pandemic by finding both left and right guilty of gross errors at the time: most of the experts on either side of the political spectrum “got big things wrong.” For example, the medical establishment’s persistence in dismissing the “lab leak” thesis (the idea that the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory in China rather than a “wet market” there) as being “in the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis” because blaming the lab “risked angering China, stoking racism, and embarrassing U.S. health agencies that had funded the Wuhan research” can be seen in retrospect as particularly wrong-headed. Vaccines clearly worked which is why blue states tended to have lower Covid death rates, but in the eleven months prior to their availability, it was a different story: the evidence now points to measures such as long lockdowns in public schools like other drastic measures as not visibly affecting pre-vaccine death rates, and there is very little reason to believe that masks prevented the spread of the virus because they were so widely ignored, clumsily applied, or simply of the wrong sort to be truly effective. The cost of applying desperate measures to arrest the spread of the virus was sometimes ruinous: “small businesses were decimated, the government’s taking in less and paying out far more (created) a new level of debt, fueling inflation, education floundered, substance abuse spiked, and mental health frayed.” By contrast, Sweden which largely defied the trend toward closure wound up having “the lowest excess death rate in Europe.”
Nevertheless, when 46 celebrated scientists issued a warning about the “devastating effects” of lockdowns, Fauci and others urged “a quick and devastating takedown” of the premises of the warning and called its authors “fringe epidemiologists.” And, in part this resistance to warnings about the costs of lockdowns were ignored or spurned because “elites were insulated from them.” Well-off experts tended to have their children in private schools which mostly stayed open and had employment which permitted stay-at-home parenting. Working class parents were “more likely to go to work while their children stayed home.” When people protested the stay-at-home orders, “hundreds of health experts signed a letter condemning the demonstrations as ‘rooted in white nationalism’.”
There were political costs to all of this turmoil, many of which would become apparent only after considerable time. Kennedy started his campaign as a Democrat and “ended it as a Trump supporter.” In the end, the clear winner politically when the dust settled was Trump: “inflation, fury at elites, and disdain for experts propelled his re-election (‘I am your retribution’)”. So, to return to the question of why the American revolt against expertise matters, we have only to look around at the political consequences of the turmoil which has engulfed the republic over the past sixty-odd years. The consequences are there for anyone to see in present-day America: an administration bent on vengeance, aggressive attacks on higher education, slashed research funding, demands that the nation’s premier cultural institutions remove any evidence of the promotion of “diversity, equity and inclusion” as though these were un-American values, ICE snatching up students because of their political views, and “the most science-smothering administration’” in U.S. history. Recognizing all of this is relatively easy. Trying to assign blame is the hard part. Communal complicity may be the only reasonable answer, and it is a difficult one to consider, because most of us have political biases that don’t yield easily to evidence which does not buttress our private political leanings. Accepting a theory that is not friendly to our own values can be very difficult to accomplish. All of which does little to patch up divisive quarrels or calm troubled political waters. Like so many other political divides, this one seems to have staying power.
As for the larger question of why any of this matters, a glance at the nation’s current divisions and generalized malaise can provide a ready answer, however incomplete. No matter what the origins of the revolt against expertise, there are costs associated with semi-permanent political divides, because hurt feelings have a way of lingering and continuing to roil the waters of communal life. And sometimes it appears we have no real clue how to heal wounds that go this deep.
{*In support of his argument, Immerwahr calls upon the testimony of a number of important books, most of which are quite recent: Gil Eyal, The Crisis of Expertise; Robt. F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci; Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics; David France, How to Survive a Plague; Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show; Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson, The Weaponization of Expertise; and Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In Covid’s Wake.}