Readers of The Free Press are smart, opinionated, and ideologically diverse. That means we get a lot of really fascinating letters. We can’t publish all of them, but every month we print a handful that have us talking in the office.
First up this month, Rob Henderson responds to Tyler Cowen’s recent column defending intellectual elitism. “Too many who despise ‘the elites’ do not look closely enough at the dissidents—or assess what they get right and wrong, and how they got there,” Cowen wrote. Henderson, on the other hand, says that mistrust in elites arises more out of a disconnect between “experts” and elites:
In reflecting on the collapse of institutional trust during the pandemic, one moment stands out: The summer of 2020, when many officials and media figures who had urged strict lockdowns pivoted to endorsing mass gatherings for Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
This sudden shift created widespread confusion and suspicion. If Covid was so dangerous that funerals and family visits had to be canceled, why were mass protests permitted? It seemed as though the rules weren’t grounded in science but in politics. Many interpreted this double standard not just as hypocrisy but as a revelation: If the cause was fashionable, restrictions were negotiable. Some people refused the Covid vaccine not out of ignorance, but as a way to object to what they saw as a double standard. If mass gatherings were permissible for political causes, then perhaps the threat wasn’t as grave as claimed.
Tyler Cowen recently argued that the “real elites”—the expert scientists—remained closer to the truth and that critics of elites aren’t looking far enough up the hierarchy with regard to Covid transmission and vaccinations. But this misses a crucial point. People too often conflate experts and elites. They are not interchangeable. When elites don’t care about a topic, the experts rule. But once elites turn their attention to an issue—especially when it carries strong moral overtones—elite opinion usually overrides expert consensus.
Elites like to portray their views as aligned with expert analysis, but this is often a mirage. Elite opinion is shaped more by prestige than by technical knowledge. And when moral righteousness enters the mix, it often supplants reasoned, evidence-based guidance.
This disconnect—between what the experts recommended and what the elites declared—helps explain why trust eroded. Many Americans weren’t rejecting science. They were rejecting what looked like elite political manipulation dressed up as science.