All posts tagged: political leaders

When experts fail – The Atlantic

When experts fail – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In 2017, my Daily colleague Tom Nichols wrote a book titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Three years later, America underwent a crisis that stress-tested citizens’ and political leaders’ faith in experts—with alarming results. The Atlantic published an excerpt today from the second edition of Tom’s book, which includes a new chapter evaluating the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the relationship between experts and the public. I chatted with Tom recently about American narcissism, the mistakes experts have made during the pandemic, and why listening to expert advice is a responsibility of citizens in a democracy. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Narcissism and Distrust Isabel Fattal: Why did you feel it was important after the COVID-19 crisis to rerelease this book? Tom Nichols: The book is …

When the Experts Failed During COVID-19

When the Experts Failed During COVID-19

Published by skeptic

Experts hate to be wrong. When I first started writing about the public’s hostility toward expertise and established knowledge more than a decade ago, I predicted that any number of crises—including a pandemic—might be the moment that snaps the public back to its senses. I was wrong. I didn’t foresee how some citizens and their leaders would respond to the cycle of advances and setbacks in the scientific process and to the inevitable limitations of human experts. The coronavirus pandemic, in particular, would prove the perfect crucible for accelerating the decline of faith in experts. Paranoia and appeals to ignorance have long been part of the American political environment, but they were especially destructive at a time when the U.S. was riven by partisan hostility. The pandemic struck at multiple political and cultural weaknesses within the edifice of American life: A mysterious disease—from China, no less, a nation that typically serves as a source of American anxiety—forced citizens to rely on the media, including outlets that many of them already distrusted, for scattered pieces of …

Erasing Jewish History Will Not Help Palestinians

Erasing Jewish History Will Not Help Palestinians

Published by skeptic

For Jews, the events of October 7—the worst massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—were horrifying and traumatizing. But what has happened in the three months since is also deeply unsettling, though in a different way. Much of the world, rather than offering empathy and compassion for Israel, has turned on it. Hamas’s malevolent actions helped produce a sharp rise in anti-Semitism and in anti-Israel rallies in cities across the world. Earlier this month, the International Court of Justice in The Hague began hearing South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in its war against Hamas, launched in reaction to the massacre. Israel was the victim of depraved attacks by an Iran-backed terror group determined to annihilate the world’s only Jewish-majority country—and yet it is Israel that is in the dock. We’ve seen this perverse phenomenon play out in other ways as well. During the Christmas holidays, Jesus was pulled into the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In an Instagram post, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew parallels between the persecutors of …

The Ugly, Inevitable Border Fight Between Texas and the Feds

The Ugly, Inevitable Border Fight Between Texas and the Feds

Published by Sam

The Texas National Guard has taken hostage a 2.5-mile stretch of the U.S. border with Mexico. According to a shocking Supreme Court filing by the Justice Department early this morning, armed soldiers and vehicles deployed by the state have repeatedly denied U.S. Border Patrol agents access to the Shelby Park area in Eagle Pass, Texas. The state did not immediately deny this; a spokesperson for Governor Greg Abbott said the state will keep “utilizing every tool and strategy to respond to President Biden’s ongoing border crisis.” It’s an ugly stunt, part of a long series of provocations by Abbott, who is clearly more interested in garnering headlines than in generating solutions to the chronic delays and underinvestment that plague the U.S. immigration system. But national leaders have also left a policy vacuum. In 2016, the courts that judge whether migrants qualify for asylum had a backlog of 163,451 cases; that total grew to 614,751 in 2020 and 1,009,625 last year. Asylum seekers wait about four years on average just to get their hearing. Federal officials …

When Leaders Fail – The Atlantic

When Leaders Fail – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

“That film,” my friend Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general, said to me, “should be shown to all senior national-security officials and military officers. It is the most profound demonstration of what happens in the wake of slovenly strategic thinking.” The occasion was a visit to Israel with a small group of military and national-security experts. The film was a 47-minute compilation of videos taken from dashcams, body cameras, and closed-circuit-television cameras. Some smartphone clips came from the perpetrators of the October 7 attacks in Israel, who delighted in the footage, and others from victims documenting their last moments. It is the most horrifying thing I have ever watched. It includes subtitles but no commentary on scenes of murder, mutilation, and bestial cruelty. It shows a beheading, performed before a cheering Gazan mob, and the despairing cries of sobbing, blinded, blood-smeared orphans. And it concludes with a chilling fact: This was only a tenth of the mayhem wrought on Israel that day. Over the course of a week, we toured the Gaza and Lebanon borders, …

Trump’s Plan to Police Gender

Trump’s Plan to Police Gender

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His campaign is promising a more repressive and dangerous America. Matt Huynh December 7, 2023, 6 AM ET Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024. After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out …

Is the Press Ready for a Second Trump Term?

Is the Press Ready for a Second Trump Term?

Published by skeptic

The relationship between Donald Trump and the news media has always been a little disingenuous, like a pair of fighters trading insults and throwing air punches at a weigh-in. The hostility is real, but the performance benefits both sides. Trump claims to despise the journalists who cover him, calling them “the enemy of the American people,” suing them, and threatening unspecified reprisals for their transgressions against him. But his narcissism craves their constant attention, and as president he gave reporters far more access than his successor has, taking their late-night phone calls, then framing their cover stories in gold. Media organizations, including this one, have warned for years that Trump is a danger to the democracy that makes journalism possible, and that a vigorous press is essential to a free society. At the same time, the media became dependent on his vile words and scandalous deeds for their financial health, squeezing droplets of news from his every tweet even if the public had nothing to learn. Leslie Moonves, the disgraced former TV-network chair, said of …

Quiet Competence Could Cost Joe Biden the Election

Quiet Competence Could Cost Joe Biden the Election

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Power of Magical Thinking I realize that to note that Joe Biden is boring is not exactly breaking news. Michael Schaffer of Politico wrote more than a year ago that Biden not only kept his promise to be unexciting but also “over-delivered.” My friend Molly Jong-Fast this fall noted for Vanity Fair that “[Team Biden’s] superpower, its ability to slide under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its Achilles heel, holding back the administration from getting the credit it deserves.” She places much of the blame on the media—a fair cop—but I think a lot else is going on that has less to do with Biden and more to do with the voters themselves. The deeper problem is that America years ago entered a “post-policy” era, in which the voters …

Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History

Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History

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If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip. What happened? One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was …