WHAT TRUMP AND COVID REVEALED:
Many Americans resisted from the beginning the government’s heavy-handed response to the virus. Now that the extent of the hysteria, and the damage from the overreaction, are becoming clearer, Americans are feeling betrayed, confused, and angry. The COVID response imposed by the “experts” has reinvigorated the radical questioning of our elite’s political authority and legitimacy that animated the election of Donald Trump. That crisis of legitimacy shows no signs of abating as we approach the 2022 midterm elections.
Trump’s explicit criticism of the leadership of both parties—as well as his challenge to the ruling class—helps explain his broad working-class appeal. His criticism resonated with that part of the electorate that thought America faced a crisis of economic, political, and moral decline. On the other hand, those who opposed Trump denied the seriousness of the crisis and saw Donald Trump himself as the greatest danger.
For more than a century, America’s intellectual class and political elites have joined forces to defend a specific kind of expertise or technical rationality as the basis of their authority over the direction of society and the lives of American citizens. This expert authority lays claim to specialized scientific knowledge, and confidence in a fixed, irreversible historical progress. Continuous human progress is assumed by these elites to be determined by a rational process, and this process culminates in and authorizes the rule of technical experts. This view is radically different from the American founders’ commonsense understanding of moral and political reality.
Trump opposed the intellectual orthodoxy promoted by the ruling class. He advocated change that is not understood in terms of inevitable progress or technical knowledge. He challenged the presumptions of the experts and their promises not on the basis of a future good, but the good of the past, a specifically American past. He wanted to make America great again.
Trump’s failures as well as successes found their source in his stated attempt to transform the moral and political landscape of the national government. His agenda depended on finding a ground of public authority outside of the Washington establishment. He found it in the people. He believed the electorate to be the only sovereign authority capable of establishing political legitimacy. Trump’s success would have required the formation and perpetuation of a new majority consensus, based not on historical progress or technical expertise, but on the consent of the governed, the source of all the “just powers of government.”
The principle of constitutional democracy or republican government depends on the people being sovereign.
Yes. Read the whole thing.
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.