In his Atlantic column on Monday, The Death Of Government Expertise, Tom Nichols included an entertaining, albeit sick, line about Stalin demanding Soviet scientists “plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter but… the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died.” Let me come back to Stalin in a moment. He’s hardly the first or only authoritarian with problem with experts.
Authoritarians have a long history of attacking expertise because experts—whether scientists, economists, educators, legal scholars—can serve as obstacles to authoritarian control by offering fact-based critiques of policies, exposing corruption, or simply maintaining standards that interfere with the regime’s agenda. Almost a century before the loutish and uneducated Trump came along, the loutish and uneducated Hiter dismissed or persecuted scholars, including physicists like Albert Einstein, who thankfully, fled Germany. The Nazis rejected Einstein’s theory of relativity as “Jewish science” and promoted pseudoscience aligned with their racial ideology. In 1933, the Nazis famously burned books by progressive, socialist and Jewish intellectuals.
OK, back to Stalin and his war on expertise, starting with the Great Purge from 1936-38. His paranoia led him to see educated professionals— engineers, military officers, scientists and even doctors— as threats to his rule. Hundreds of leading Soviet scientists were imprisoned or killed on fabricated charges of “sabotage” or “espionage.” He also wiped out most of the Soviet military’s high command, executing three out of five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, and thousands of officers— just years before WWII, leaving the Soviet Union vulnerable when Nazi Germany invaded in 1941.
In Stalin’s time experts were forced to confess to absurd crimes in staged trials, then executed. Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist, rejected the principles of genetics, claiming that plants could be trained to change their traits—essentially denying Mendelian and Darwinian science. Stalin embraced Lysenko’s pseudoscience because it fit his own crackpot ideology, leading to a suppression of genetics with prominent geneticists arrested and executed, genetics labeled “bourgeois” and outlawed. Lysenko’s methods caused widespread famine, yet Stalin continued to promote him. The Soviets lost an unknown number of lives due to food shortages exacerbated by this rejection of scientific expertise.
In short, Stalin’s war against expertise cost the Soviet Union hundreds of thousands of experts imprisoned or executed and decades of scientific and military progress. The purges left Soviet agriculture and medicine in shambles, contributing to famines and poor public health.
More? Mao Zedong invited intellectuals to critique the Communist Party in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, then turned against them, sending many to labor camps. During the Cultural Revolution, iIntellectuals, teachers and professionals were targeted as bourgeois enemies of the revolution, leading to public humiliations, imprisonments and killings. This was repeated in Cambodia a decade later by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge where even people with eye-glasses were targeted!
And now we have Trump, Musk and Vance in our own newly anti-intellectual country, where Trumpism goes hand in hand with attacks on scientists, from dismissing climate science, undermining COVID-19 expertise, undermining election officials and promoting conspiracy theories over factual expertise.
So, why? The obvious answer is that scientific and academic rigor threatens propaganda and ideological control. A ruler/cult leader who claims omnipotence cannot tolerate independent expertise. Authoritarians demand loyalty over competence. And, remember, it could be intellectuals and professionals who organize against tyranny.
Let’s agree that authoritarians who attack expertise exhibit a combination of narcissism, paranoia and ideological rigidity, leading them to believe they can outthink specialists despite lacking relevant knowledge. You see that in Trump on a daily basic. The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how ignorant and incompetent people fail to recognize their own ignorance and incompetence and assume they are more capable than experts. The dictionary definition should have a picture of Musk, who— despite no formal expertise— thinks he can dictate AI safety, neuroscience and space policy. Obviously, this effect is particularly dangerous in authoritarian settings, where no one dares to challenge the leader’s delusions.
And that brings us to our old friend malignant narcissism— Trump’s need to always be the smartest person in the room, a toxic mix of grandiosity, paranoia, aggression and total lack of empathy. These people see experts as threats because expertise implies independent thought and competence, which undermines their self-image as all-knowing rulers. Musk, for example, belittles regulators and scientists who question his reckless engineering shortcuts at Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company and Neuralink, resulting in exploding rockets, the most accident-prone and least well-designed car on the market and a spectacularly failed company that accomplishes absolutely nothing.
It’s also worth mentioning that many authoritarians believe experts are conspiring against them because they project their own deceitful nature onto others, a paranoia that leads them to purge the very people who could save them from disaster.
Whether it’s Hitler, Stalin, Trump or Musk, authoritarians prioritize loyalty over expertise because independent experts might question their decisions. They staff governments and corporations with incompetent sycophants, ensuring disastrous results. Think of Jared Kushner’s incredible portfolio of jobs in the first Trump regime— from pandemic response to Middle East peace.
Some authoritarian leaders— Trump included— derive pleasure from degrading and humiliating intelligent people, reinforcing their dominance, forcing experts to submit. The irony is that authoritarians eventually destroy themselves by attacking expertise. Trump’s mishandling of COVID probably cost him reelection and… well firing the nuclear safety experts could well wind up in all Trump’s and Musk’s obituaries. Let me go out on a limb and assert that the concerted efforts by Trump and Musk to undermine expertise represent a dangerous trajectory toward authoritarian governance and by attacking the very foundations of informed decision-making, they jeopardize public health, national security and the democratic principles on which a country neither gives a shit about was built.
Back with Tom Nichols’ warning that DOGE really is nothing more than “an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise… It’s one thing to be angry about having to wear a mask at Costco; it’s another to engage in the apparent indiscriminate firing of more than 300 people who keep watch over nuclear materials… Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut, a willful indifference that gives away the game. Musk’s assault on expertise is coming from the same wellspring that has been driving much of the public’s irrational hostility toward experts for years. I have been studying “the death of expertise” for more than a decade, and I have written extensively about the phenomenon in which uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts. The death of expertise is really about the rise of two social ills: narcissism and resentment.”
Self-absorption is common these days, but Musk embodies a particular brand of narcissism found among certain kinds of techno-plutocrats who assume that their wealth is evidence of competence in almost any field. After all, if you’ve made a zillion dollars inventing an app, how hard can anything else be? And although it is a truism at this point to observe that Trump is narcissistic, one thing that binds Trump and Musk and many others is their sense that their talent and inherent greatness have been dismissed by experts. Much like ordinary citizens who have “done their own research” and yet are furious that doctors won’t listen to them, Trump and Musk seem constantly angry that their wealth and power can gain them anything except respect.
You can see this resentment almost every time President Trump (and Co-President Musk) speak. No one is allowed to know more about anything than Trump. When pressed, Trump will defensively say things such as “I’ve read a lot on it,” an implausible claim from a man who is famously reluctant to read. Musk, for his part, commands a personal fortune so large that it dwarfs the GDP of many small countries, and he brags about having a top U.S. security clearance— but he bristles at any doubts about whether he is, in fact, the most accomplished player of the video game Diablo IV.
For Trump and his allies, this kind of resentment is tightly threaded into practical and self-interested concerns: Apolitical experts in a democracy are a strong line of defense against politically motivated chicanery. Meanwhile, Musk and others believe that money should translate directly into power, and that their wealth should confer intellectual legitimacy. Such people chafe at the reality that getting their way still sometimes requires arguing with experts, and that opposing those experts requires knowledge. Their solution is not to listen or learn but to try to replace those troublesome pencil necks with pliable servants.
… Another dynamic at play is that Trump, Musk, and many others treat “experts” and “elites” as functionally indistinguishable. This is a dishonest claim, but it is useful in mobilizing public sentiment against experts in the name of a mindless egalitarianism. It is also part of the overall ruse: The DOGE assault has nothing to do with merit or equality. Indeed, Musk’s attack on federal agencies, with one group of privileged and educated people trying to displace another, is the most intra-elite squabble Washington has seen in years.
A similar resentment may also drive the young volunteers who are waving Musk’s name in front of career government servants. Washington has always been full of disappointed strivers who feel they’ve been kept out of the game by snotty social and intellectual gatekeepers—and, as a former young striver in the capital, I can affirm that there’s some truth in that. Now they’re in charge and more than ready to become obnoxious new elitists themselves. (“Do I need to call Elon?” one young DOGE-nik reportedly snapped when a federal official had the temerity to deny him access to sensitive information.)
In the early 20th century, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset warned that such resentment would eventually become the enemy of talent and ability. “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different,” he wrote in 1930, “everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Trump and Musk not only feel this same impulse; they have harnessed it for their personal use.
… Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.
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