This is the second of two blogs on the subject of “experts”

This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Yesterday, I wrote a blog about how to avoid relying solely on certain experts, even as you form your own views, especially on political issues.

As examples of “experts,” I used President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who have engaged in an aggressive war of words over voting laws in the United States, especially in Georgia.  And they fancy themselves, surely, as “experts.”

Today, I follow-up with another blog on the same subject – expertise.

In this second installment, I use, as food-for-thought, a column yesterday by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post.  It appeared under this headline:

The GOP celebration of covid ignorance is an invitation to death

His main point:  Avoid relying on any “expert” who peddles lies.  Which, often, means Donald Trump and his acolytes.

Here is how Gerson started his column:

“When the future judges our political present, it will stand in appalled, slack-jawed amazement at the willingness of GOP leaders to endanger the lives of their constituents — not just the interests of their constituents, but their lungs and beating hearts — in pursuit of personal power and ideological fantasies.”

And, it could be added, these individuals fancy themselves – and promote themselves – as experts.

Gerson identifies what he labels “three varieties of GOP political necromania.”

• The first, practiced most vigorously by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, uses an ongoing pandemic as a stage for the display of ideological zeal.  In this view, the covid-19 crisis — rather than being a story of remarkable but flawed scientists and public health experts deploying the best of science against a vicious microbe — has been an opportunity for the left to impose “authoritarian, arbitrary and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions.”
• A second type of the Republican romance with death comes in the vilification of those most dedicated to preserving the lives of Americans.  Public officials such as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul invent a conspiratorial backstory to the covid crisis and depict the most visible representatives of the United States’ covid response as scheming, deceptive deep-state operatives.  Any change in emphasis or strategy by scientists — an essential commitment of the scientific method — is viewed as rich opposition research.
• A third category of Republican death wish is the practice of strategic ignorance.  In a case such as Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson — America’s most reliable source of unreliable information about covid-19 — such ignorance might not be feigned.  He might well believe that gargling with mouthwash call kill the coronavirus, and that thousands of people are regularly dying from vaccine side effects, and that a pandemic that has taken more than 800,000 lives in the United States is “overhyped.”

Gerson says Johnson offers his lack of intellectual seriousness as an element of his political appeal — “similar to handing out a résumé with the firings and felonies highlighted.

“Johnson is not only making dangerous statements about the coronavirus. He is using his willingness to cite stupid things as the evidence of his independence from the rule of professionals and experts.  He is defining democracy, in the words of Tom Nichols, author of “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters,” as unearned respect for unfounded opinions.”  

Johnson, Gerson writes, is practicing strategic ignorance.

And, Gerson adds:

“During a pandemic, the celebration of ignorance is an invitation to death.  Public health depends on social cooperation.  If a significant group of Americans regard the musing of a politician such as Johnson as equal in value to Fauci’s lifelong accumulation of expertise, the basis for rational action is lost.  And the result is needless death.”

And, it also underlines the best advice for us – choose wisely the “experts” on whom you rely as you go through the process of forming your own views.