The Mythical Liberal Past

In a recent piece, Joshua Rothman suggests that the internet is transforming political speech. He contends that the spontaneous, short-form nature of online commentary has encouraged an anti-elitist crowd that eschews careful messaging. Instead, the current moment has called for podcasts, entertainers, and endless improvisation--doing whatever works in the moment. The result has left Democrats on the outside, pining for someone to Make America Great Again for liberals. He writes,

The new information environment rewards improvisational politicians and punishes message-based ones. It makes nostalgia for the old world—the one in which people trusted experts, institutions, and the media—politically dangerous, because messages drafted by institutions don’t rise above the sea of information. What’s required is a kind of political-content factory. Not a ninety-minute play, followed by a Q. & A., but a chatbot, producing endlessly.

I'm pretty skeptical of takes that suggest technology is transforming us. But, in this case, I think the fundamental mistake is simply historical: there was no period when people trusted experts, institutions, and the media. The problem is that "experts, institutions, and media" seem to think there was such a time.

The illusion likely comes from the fact that seemingly all the experts and institutions lined up against Trump. But this posed its own problem for non-experts, since they (by definition) lack expertise in the relevant field. All they have to go on is the track record of the experts and institutions when in power.

This is easy in the case of someone like Obama who positioned himself against the Iraq War crowd, or George W. when he rejected liberal interventionism, or Bill Clinton when he rejected anti-globalist leftists in favor of third-way politics, or Reagan and the social welfare state, or whoever. Voters didn't need to know the truth; they just looked at who they could trust. And if the experts in power weren't doing a good job, they could just vote against them.

And, of course, they did in 2024. The "establishment" consisted of every loser of the last 40 years: the free-traders who approved NAFTA and China's ascension to the WTO, the pro-intervention neo-cons and liberal internationalists, the pro-finance crowd that got bailed out in 2008, the academics behind all the crumby education fads of the last few decades, and so on. Effectively, if anyone had power in the last 40 years, they joined the anti-Trump party.

Rothman assumes the anti-Trump parties problem is messaging. But a simple theory is that they had a crappy message. Obama was popular without getting off message, but his message--hope, change, and turning the page on war and terror--was really attractive. And Trump is less extemporaneous than he seems; his rallies did involve a weird stump speech, involving discussions of Hannibal Lecter and sharks. What made him attractive was a promise of returning us to the time before Biden--and, more broadly, before Clinton and NAFTA.

The bigger problem liberals are facing is that experts who are commonly wrong don't count as experts for most people. Academic disciplines are different; a bad paper that doesn't replicate looks bad, but it isn't the end of the world. But little hangs on my papers. The world keeps spinning if I look foolish. But if my theory is that Iraq has WMDs and I run the government, people die. If I think a modest stimulus will hold unemployment to 8% but it spikes to 11%, that means people will suffer. If free trade destroys tens of millions of jobs instead of less than 100,000, that is an unconscionable error.

If you screw up that bad, your expertise just wasn't worth much. If institutions like the NY Times push us into war, they show a lack of judgment that should cast doubt on them. If these experts do this regularly, they should probably take down their credentials and retire. The problem isn't Democrats messaging, lecturing, or data-intensive work; Heritage and the Claremont Institute have that, too. The problem is that Democrats embraced fools.