The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance

All of this was predictable and predicted

The so-called experts ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims during the 2024 campaign that he would bring grocery prices down on Day One and cut energy prices in half.

The so-called experts said that Trump’s tariffs would raise consumer prices while failing to bring back manufacturing jobs.

The so-called experts said that Trump appointee Pete Hegseth’s emphasis on “warrior ethos” rather than competence and his purge of officers he doesn’t consider sufficiently loyal to Trump would degrade the U.S. military and be disastrous in a war.

The so-called experts warned that Trump’s attack on Iran would lead us into a quagmire and cause a global energy crisis.

The so-called experts said that Trump’s contempt for international agreements and his threats to friendly nations would undermine the world’s trust in America, and that we would find ourselves without allies when we needed their help.

The so-called experts were completely right.

Right now inflation is surging; manufacturing employment is down; the Strait of Hormuz remains closed; and Trump is traveling to Beijing as a supplicant, in effect begging China for help getting out of his Iran mess.

But it would be foolish to expect Trump and his minions to learn anything from their humiliation.

To be fair, experts aren’t always right. For example, many prominent military analysts have been repeatedly, profoundly wrong about the Russia-Ukraine war, grossly exaggerating Russian strength and vastly underestimating Ukrainian resilience. Many economists, myself included, understated the risks of inflation in 2021. Many prominent economists, this time myself not included, then greatly overestimated the costs of getting inflation back down.

But political figures who think that they know better than the so-called experts are much more likely to be wrong than right. And they’re especially likely to be wrong if their rejection of expertise stems from wishful thinking, personal obsessions and, last but by no means least, corruption.

Trump is, of course, a perfect example of the kind of political figure who absolutely shouldn’t disregard experts and absolutely will. When deciding to take us to war with Iran he dismissed warnings about what could go wrong and insisted that it would be easy. His economic policy reflects his decades-old fixation on tariffs; his energy policy is still shaped by his anger over a wind farm that he thought spoiled the view from his golf course; his Iran policy has been driven in large part by a determination to reject everything Barack Obama achieved. And on all issues what he does is strongly influenced by who is able and willing to offer the biggest bribes.

Yet the catastrophic stupidity of current U.S. policy shouldn’t be attributed purely to Trump’s personal unfitness to lead. Willful ignorance and rejection of expert advice have characterized the U.S. political right for many years. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” a warning about the growing extremism of the Republican Party, fourteen years ago. Even then they wrote that

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; scornful of compromise and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. [My emphasis]

Trumpism may represent the apotheosis of willful ignorance as a political principle, but we’ve been heading here for decades.

Why does the right hate expertise?

The rejection of science, like so much of the U.S. political landscape, has a lot to do with the influence of the fossil fuel industry. Warnings about climate change threatened that industry’s profits, so it was necessary to attack climate science, and this generalized into hostility toward scientific research as a whole.

Beyond this specific issue, anti-democratic movements have an inherent distrust of expertise, of anyone who knows what they are talking about. Experts can’t be trusted, because they might think independently. In her classic book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote that

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

The Trump administration isn’t a full-on totalitarian regime, at least not yet, but its instincts obviously run in that direction. The degradation of the federal government’s competence, the gutting of American science, and the epically bad judgment that led to Operation Epic Fury are all part of the same story.

So how will Trump and his party respond to their string of high-profile policy failures, from Iran to inflation? Trump may find a way to accept defeat in the Persian Gulf while claiming victory, although that’s looking harder by the day. But there’s no reason to believe that policymaking will get any better, that the experts and the grownups will be let back into the room. The beatings — and the willful ignorance — will continue until morale improves.

MUSICAL CODA