Contempt for Experts/Contempt for Facts

So, negotiations with Iran have failed, purportedly over the nuclear issue -- the US team wanted Iran to give up all uranium enrichment and Iranians refused.  Trump's negotiations with the Iranians have consistently failed, at least in part, because Trump's team lacks the nuclear expertise to know what will and will not actually be an adequate safeguard to keep the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons. 

But can we face facts here?  Donald Trump doesn't want a deal that meets the technical standards needed to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.  He wants to be able to boast that he held firm and never made any concessions.  Or if we absolutely must come up with a deal, he wants a deal that he can sell to people completely ignorant of the technical details (Trump, say) as something that can ensure Iran will never get a nuclear weapon.  They will never trust anything that rests on technical fine points that Trump and company don't understand.

And this leads to a major failing of Donald Trump and, indeed, of the Republican Party and rightwing politics in general.

I previously wrote about someone who described GW Bush as:

• More egotistical than Johnson
• More vindictive than Nixon
• Stupider than Ford
• Less competent than Carter
• Lazier than Reagan
• Less honest than Clinton.

In the clear light of hindsight, this was grossly unfair to GW Bush, who was not particularly egotistical or vindictive.  (Also to Ford, who was not stupid).  Instead, GW Bush's capital flaw (which was related to laziness and incompetence and made him appear dishonest) was that followed his gut-level instincts and treated facts and evidence as optional.  

And that, in turn, is an extreme version of a longstanding tendency among right-wingers toward anti-intellectualism and distrust of expertise.  And I can sort of understand it.  It is certainly annoying to be told "I know better than you."  When an expert is telling you something based on highly technical knowledge that you are not qualified to evaluate, you are being asked to rely on blind trust because you have no way of telling whether the person is being truthful or not.  Not to mention experts' frustrating tendency to disagree with each other, and not to be as infallible as they claim.  

And yet, in a society as complex as what we have now, there is really no choice but to rely on experts for many things.  

Furthermore, right-wingers let a somewhat understandable distrust of experts and expertise turn into a general distrust of learning, and a distrust of learning turn into a distrust of all knowledge, and a distrust of knowledge turn into a contempt for facts and evidence in favor of gut-level intuition.  And yes, I do understand that experts who focus on an exceedingly narrow specialty can develop a sort of tunnel vision.  Sometimes an outsider perspective and offer new ideas a specialist never thought of.  And (as I understand it), an inspired guess is recognized as a sometimes being a scientifically valid approach.  But the inspired guess is one made by someone familiar with the data, and has to be empirically tested to see its validity.

GW Bush and his supporter missed this critical part and relied on their gut-level intuitions that Saddam Hussein just had to be an intolerable threat, and removing him just had to work out well.  Wrong and wrong!  GW Bush lost all standing in the conservative movement as a result.

Unfortunately, the lesson that right-wingers took away from the Iraq debacle was not that gut-level intuition is no substitute for facts and evidence, but that GW Bush's gut level intuition was not good enough, and that they needed someone with better gut-level intuition.

So they chose Trump.