They cannot quite believe it. In a world that values brains, credentials, nuance, and finesse they just watched Trump get elected. What the heck???
My time here attending lectures at Harvard has put me in rooms where the majority of people have a great deal of education. The people sitting around me are post-doctoral fellows, mid-career diplomats and officers in the military getting a second advanced degree, visiting professors from other universities, and people whose previous job had been to be giving advice to the most senior people in government. Plus, mixed in, there are a few undergraduates sitting in.
Harvard is in a liberal bubble, but not because it is wholly Democratic. A great many of the people here have worked for Republican officeholders, primarily the George W. Bush administration or as key staff for Congressional committees led by Republicans. There is also an active revolving door between the military and Harvard.But it is Democratic in the sense that this place is establishment, and the Democratic party was aligned in the 2016 election with the existing political system and the status quo, with experts as opposed to populist gut and emotion. Harvard nurtures expertise and nuance. The intellectual environment gives great respect to education and experience, which then uses those tools to operate carefully and with nuance. In the news is the comment by a Trump advisor in the aftermath of the Trump phone call from Taiwan: "if China doesn't like it, screw 'em."
It is now a world of the Tea Party, populism, and Trump.
I attended a two hour seminar led by senior professors and State Department advisor on Asia policy and how the election of Trump may effect American policy. Later I attended a conference on the effect of the Trump election on the Middle East which included a former defense minister of Israel and Israel's head of security--top targets for terror or assassination. The room was swept by bomb sniffing dogs and there were security people from Harvard, from Israel, and from the US State department. It was either the safest place in America or the most dangerous.
These world class experts seemed dumfounded that Trump won. When their discussion of things brought them to a sentence where they said "President elect Trump" or "the Trump administration" they paused and quirked their faces as if to say "I cannot believe I am saying 'Trump presidency'." Their task was to describe how the current web of policies would be recalibrated under a Trump presidency. They were flummoxed. Re-callibrations assume policies are calibrated in the first place.
They would observe that Trump's policy statements were vague, contradictory, unformed, and apparently completely unstudied. Senior leaders of extraordinary accomplishment and expertise, with lifetimes of experience studying complex systems were confronting the reality that the new prime mover in America foreign policy operates out of gut instincts--which were enormously successful politically--but who knows essentially nothing about the complexity of foreign policy.
They would observe that Trump's policy statements were vague, contradictory, unformed, and apparently completely unstudied. Senior leaders of extraordinary accomplishment and expertise, with lifetimes of experience studying complex systems were confronting the reality that the new prime mover in America foreign policy operates out of gut instincts--which were enormously successful politically--but who knows essentially nothing about the complexity of foreign policy.
Some readers will conclude that they are exercising elitist snobbery when they rolled their eyes at the new era of Trump. But the primary emotion was not disdain. It was confusion and amazement. They were not looking down at ignorance and "flyover country." They were people who were essentially dismissed by the voters. They are on the outside.
Imagine an all star team of cardiologists at the Cleveland Clinic, physicians and surgeons with decades of experience doing complex surgeries transplanting hearts. Their work involved constant evaluation of how best to refine the procedure. They just learned that the Clinic Board of Directors, after a long discussion, voted that henceforth their expertise was not needed. The Clinic decided to let a charismatic businessman write the protocols, beginning January 20.
Voters intentionally rejected expertise in favor of gut and guesswork. Voters had looked at the work of experts for a generation and decided they did not want experts running things. They were rejected, not for a known alternative but for an unknown directed by a person with strong instincts, not knowledge.
A recurring theme was the hope that Trump would bring in people with some experience. Trump will seek advice, won't he? The phone call from Taiwan's elected president was either ignorance or craft. Or maybe just recklessness. Here is an example of the kind of thinking done by policy experts who are consumed by nuance: Click Here for an analysis of the Taiwan phone call
Another theme was the hope that Trump, who hungrily seeks public approval indeed has an underlying policy compass: policies that would gain vigorous public support. This could be a useful constraint because sound policies that have good results would be popular. He won't be crazy. He will be popular. We could do worse.
Had the election been between Hillary Clinton and any Republican candidate other than Trump the discussions would have been about policy direction. But in the case of the election of Trump the message was that America had thrown away the maps and and the rules and the wisdom of experience and and decided to march off on its own, feeling its way as it goes.
It was a choice of policy versus gut, and the public trusted Trump's gut.
Imagine an all star team of cardiologists at the Cleveland Clinic, physicians and surgeons with decades of experience doing complex surgeries transplanting hearts. Their work involved constant evaluation of how best to refine the procedure. They just learned that the Clinic Board of Directors, after a long discussion, voted that henceforth their expertise was not needed. The Clinic decided to let a charismatic businessman write the protocols, beginning January 20.
Voters intentionally rejected expertise in favor of gut and guesswork. Voters had looked at the work of experts for a generation and decided they did not want experts running things. They were rejected, not for a known alternative but for an unknown directed by a person with strong instincts, not knowledge.
A recurring theme was the hope that Trump would bring in people with some experience. Trump will seek advice, won't he? The phone call from Taiwan's elected president was either ignorance or craft. Or maybe just recklessness. Here is an example of the kind of thinking done by policy experts who are consumed by nuance: Click Here for an analysis of the Taiwan phone call
Another theme was the hope that Trump, who hungrily seeks public approval indeed has an underlying policy compass: policies that would gain vigorous public support. This could be a useful constraint because sound policies that have good results would be popular. He won't be crazy. He will be popular. We could do worse.
Had the election been between Hillary Clinton and any Republican candidate other than Trump the discussions would have been about policy direction. But in the case of the election of Trump the message was that America had thrown away the maps and and the rules and the wisdom of experience and and decided to march off on its own, feeling its way as it goes.
It was a choice of policy versus gut, and the public trusted Trump's gut.
1 comment:
Do you actually think Washington DC politics and governance can be compared to Cleveland Clinic cardiology? At any rate, via the electoral college, voters said "pull the plug." I wouldn't rate Washington any higher than a Russian hospital, if that.
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