Now, back to Nichols. From the interview: "we didn’t see COVID coming, or the way that the pandemic deepened the crisis of trust in knowledge. In the book, and in presentations I would give over the years, I predicted that a crisis would probably alleviate some of this problem as people turned to science for answers and help, and I was wrong. So I thought it was important to look at the past few years more carefully and
ask why things got worse.
Isabel: You write in the excerpt that “when the coronavirus arrived, a significant number of Americans were already primed by the media, their political leaders, and their own stubborn narcissism to reject expert advice during a crisis.” When do you think America’s faith in experts began to plummet?
Tom: It’s almost a cliché to haul off easy answers and say “Vietnam and Watergate,” but even clichés contain some truth. It really is the case that the crisis of expertise began in the early 1970s, for several reasons. The misconduct of a president and several executive-branch agencies produced a feeling that U.S. institutions were no longer led by wise people. And a war that we couldn’t seem to win had a profound effect on trust and social cohesion."
And from his book: "Experts hate to be wrong. When I first started writing about the public’s hostility toward expertise and established knowledge more than a decade ago, I predicted that any number of crises—including a pandemic—might be the moment that snaps the public back to its senses. I was wrong. I didn’t foresee how some citizens and their leaders would respond to the cycle of advances and setbacks in the scientific process and to the inevitable limitations of human experts.
The coronavirus pandemic, in particular, would prove the perfect crucible for accelerating the decline of faith in experts. Paranoia and appeals to ignorance have long been part of the American political environment, but they were especially destructive at a time when the U.S. was riven by partisan hostility. The pandemic struck at multiple political and cultural weaknesses within the edifice of American life: A mysterious disease—from China, no less, a nation that typically serves as a source of American anxiety—forced citizens to rely on the media, including outlets that many of them already distrusted, for scattered pieces of information from white-jacketed experts and relatively unknown government officials.
Many elected leaders, especially at the national level, failed in fact to lead. The dysfunction of President Donald Trump’s administration, on COVID-19 and on so many other issues, has been amply documented in numerous books and articles. Despite the undeniable success of Operation Warp Speed, the government’s crash program to work with private industry to develop a vaccine in record time, Trump and his people have much to answer for—including the hesitancy they engendered among Americans to take the very vaccines that his administration helped develop.
The road to America’s pandemic meltdown, however, did not begin with Trump. When the coronavirus arrived, a significant number of Americans were already primed by the media, their political leaders, and their own stubborn narcissism to reject expert advice during a crisis. The collapse of gatekeeping authority in the media, the explosion of worthless online sources, the emergence of celebrity pseudo-experts, and the unwarranted self-confidence of millions of people who believed that they could simply “
do their own research,” as the internet mantra has it, all combined to make a brutal outbreak of disease even more deadly."
