FAQ

Here are some questions we’re frequently asked about our argument.

What do you mean by “elite”?

The term refers to the professional-managerial class. The hallmark of an elite is educational credentials—college graduates—not wealth. Elites hold positions of authority in society that give them considerable power and influence.

The term bothers some readers, but it has a long pedigree in sociology and political science. If you’d prefer, substitute “professional-managerial class.” Like any sociological or class group, the term has blurry edges, and elites are not a single, homogenous group.

What’s a populist?

Populism is a set of globally ascendant ideas, with long historical roots, that pit the masses against distant and corrupt elites. Populists distrust elites. When we talk about populists, we mean populist voters—not the often imperfect politicians they elect. Populists can lean to the political left (Bernie Sanders) or the political right (Donald Trump), but they are united in their critique of elite failure.

Populism is often portrayed as irrational. We see it instead as a rational form of politics, a tactic that responds to elite overreach and to a powerful sense of voicelessness. Proponents of globalization and neoliberalism themselves admit this, quite proudly, when they proclaim the inexorable march of neoliberal progress. To take two famous examples, both the UK’s Margaret Thatcher and Germany’s Angela Merkel famously declared that voters had “no alternative” or were “alternativlos.” Populism is how voters respond when elites tell them, “You have no choice.”

How do elites “weaponize” expertise?

Elites call for evidence-based policy, but phrases like “follow the science” or “listen to experts” are troublesome. Nobody disputes that evidence matters. The question is how much of public policy should be arrogated to the experts, as opposed to being subject to democratic politics. When elites claim the mantle of expertise, they are not so much using knowledge to inform policy, as wielding credentials to shut down dissent and debate.

Expertise rarely offers an immediate, complete answer to a complex public policy question. Policy is informed by values, which are not the purview of experts. Policy also involves inevitable tradeoffs, which can be informed, but not decided, by science. Real experts know this, but too often what we see in the public sphere is a diluted, hubristic simulacrum of expertise.

The pandemic—with its poor policy making, rush to judgment and to foreclose conversations about complex issues (school closures, lockdowns, the origin of the virus), and its frequent reversals of conventional wisdom—offers one tragic case study that we explore in the book. The plerophory of elites during the pandemic was as alienating as it was foolish. It failed to obscure their clear failures to evaluate evidence intelligently or to be honest about uncertainty. In the end, elites succeeded at only one thing: undermining trust.

How did this dynamic play out in the 2024 election?

All too painfully. The diploma divide is becoming a central feature of politics. Harris won most voters with a college degree, while Trump won those without. Trump made significant gains in many of the conventional constituencies of the Democratic party, including younger voters, Latino voters, Black voters, and women.

Trump honed a message that focused on the grievances of ordinary Americans, such as inflation. The Democrats countered with statistics and complex arguments, which essentially amounted to “trust the experts.” Needless to say, this was not a winning message.

But isn’t misinformation responsible for populism?

No. Despite the headlines, most social scientists who study misinformation don’t think we face a monumental misinformation problem. There are a number of reasons for this, which we explore in the book, but a critical one is this: most political judgments are formed on the basis of values that come prior to information. Misinformation tends to be taken in to confirm one’s priors, not to establish new positions.

While we don’t mean to give misinformation a free pass, an excessive focus on it is quite troubling. It is not only a distraction from the real value divides that explain our partisan age, but it can easily lead to some dangerous paths of censorship. Misinformation and conspiracy theories have been features of the American political landscape since the dawn of the republic—and are a bipartisan phenomenon—and there is no evidence that our time is unique.

Trust in institutions, including academia and journalism, that are meant to provide neutral, open fora for discussion is at an all-time low. Those who run those institutions would do well to engage in some self-scrutiny, rather than merely casting blame.

But Trump is bad! Are you defending Trump?

Our book isn’t a defense of Trump or his policies. Instead, we’re providing partial explanation for how we got here – and to explore a self-reflective critique that elites ought to take seriously. (We would note that Trump isn’t the same as his electorate; and his electorate isn’t one big homogenous mass. So far, Trump’s least popular policies include those aspects that would appeal least to populists – like giving too much power to a technocrat like Elon Musk.)

Our book isn’t “political”, and the authors have diverging political views from one another. Our subject is discourse in the public sphere and how it should be conducted. We believe that restoring informed, substantive, open political discourse should be of interest whether you lean right or left.

What is to be done?

We have no easy solution. It would be incongrous to hold ourselves out as possessing the one quick trick to fix democracy. Many of the more promising ideas—more engagement at the local level, more grassroots movements, more participatory rulemaking—are neither easy to implement nor destined to succeed.

Our main aim in this book is to reassert a basic, moral claim about democracy: that political judgment belongs to all of us. Politics isn’t something to be afraid of, or to repress with technocratic judgment. We have written this book primarily in the hope that we, and our elite friends, might engage in a bit of self reflection, about mistakes we make in assessing and judging our fellow citizens.