The Death of Expertise: The Assault on Establishment Knowledge and Why it Matters, Second Edition

Review from the New York Times (First Edition)
Donald J. Trump’s taste for advisers with little or no government experience; his selection of cabinet members like Scott Pruitt and Rick Perry, who have expressed outright hostility to the agencies they now oversee; and the slow pace of making senior-level appointments in high-profile departments like State, Treasury and Homeland Security — all speak to the new president’s disregard for policy expertise and knowledge, just as his own election victory underscores many voters’ scorn for experience.

This is part of a larger wave of anti-rationalism that has been accelerating for years — manifested in the growing ascendance of emotion over reason in public debates, the blurring of lines among fact and opinion and lies, and denialism in the face of scientific findings about climate change and vaccination.

“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” the scholar Tom Nichols writes in his timely new book, “The Death of Expertise.” “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

“The Death of Expertise” turns out to be an unexceptional book about an important subject. The volume is useful in its way, providing an overview of just how we arrived at this distressing state of affairs. But it’s more of a flat-footed compendium than an original work, pulling together examples from recent news stories while iterating arguments explored in more depth in books like Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason,” Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason,” Robert Hughes’s “Culture of Complaint” and, of course, Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Nichols’s source notes are one of the highlights of the volume, pointing the reader to more illuminating books and articles. MORE

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He was a professor of national security affairs for 25 years at the U.S. Naval War College, and is the author of the first edition of The Death of Expertise (Oxford 2017) as well as books on Russia, the Cold War, nuclear weapons, and the future of armed conflict.

He is also an instructor at the Harvard Extension School and an adjunct professor at the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies. He is a former aide in the U.S. Senate and has been a Fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City, a Fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University, and a Senior Fellow of the Graham Center for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto. Previously he was a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.