From WaPo today:
[Senator Rand Paul (R-KY)]: “I think government health experts during this pandemic need to show caution in their prognostications. It’s important to realize that if society meekly submits to an expert, and that expert is wrong, a great deal of harm may occur when we allow one man’s policy or one group of small men and women to be foisted on an entire nation.”
That sure reminds me of former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who once said:
“That is the key difference between ourselves and the progressives: We do not believe we should be governed by elites. We do not believe that there are experts or elites who should steer us in their preferred direction. We see that sense of organization as condescending, paternalistic, and downright arrogant. We know it’s wrong. […]
“Because we believe that all of us are equal, we believe there is no problem that all of us – working together – cannot solve. We believe every person has a piece of this puzzle, and only when we work together do we get the whole picture.”
Why distrust experts? Because they might have an opinion at odds with your favorite ideological tenet. Rand may sound like he’s being reasonable, but in the end he’s terrified that some expert may, in fact, say that the traditional way we lead our lives that he loves are leading to more and more deaths; or an expert on gun societal dynamics will say that Second Amendment absolutism does not result in a peaceful society; or an expert on taxes will not agree that lowering taxes is always a good thing.
As members of the Republican Party, neither Ryan nor Rand can actually afford to have their Party’s tenets questioned, much less left in tatters, because quite often it’s exactly those tenets that have drawn members to the Party. So when Rand brays about experts being wrong, he’s not warning about the last time an expert was wrong – that would be Republican icon and repetitive failure Arthur Laffer, I might note – but an attempt to fend off someone who might dispute, and successfully, with a pillar of the Party.
Because the Republicans – and, for that matter, the Democrats – build their ideology on a set of pillars, promises made to the base, not to be questioned, experts become the enemy. Climate scientists, pollution experts, tax analysts, more and more and more, unless they toe the Republican line explicitly and loudly, they become the frightening enemy – not because they may be wrong, but because they may go against the prevailing ideological tenet.
And that is something with which they cannot up with put. A convincing expert could cost the Party dear in terms of membership.
And so we’re given the drama of a Party that takes idiotic positions, such as the above: discard the experts, because they might make us look bad!
That’s one helluva slogan.
