WHEN A CARTOON TOUCHES A NERVE
‘The New Yorker’ mocks Trump voters and triggers a debate on (smug) experts
Jill: When I saw this New Yorker classic, I instantly posted it on Facebook and typed: “2016 and the next four years in a single cartoon.” To me it captured our whole predicament, from Brexit to Donald Trump to whatever comes next in the change-or-bust brushfire sweeping the globe.
The caption refers to the airplane pilots as “smug” and out of touch. It leaves out “smoldering resentment,” but that might as well have been there too, along with the omnipresent 2016 subtext of “Who needs experts? They’ve only screwed things up.”
The president-elect is not in the cartoon, but it is all about him. He is the leading igniter of anger and division, the leading insulter of credentials and experience. For months, years, he’s been calling our leaders stupid and crooked. Lately his scorn has landed on the intelligence community that he’ll need to keep the country safe.
But these days, God help us, that’s a feature — not a bug. Hands went up all over America when he shouted, “Who thinks I should fly the plane?”
David:
Well thank goodness professional politicians remain in control of Congress. Otherwise they wouldn’t have stopped Trump from trying to handcuff the Office of Congressional Ethics on his first day in office. Oh, wait, that WAS the professional politicians, not Trump.
That New Yorker cartoon made me want to chew glass the second I saw it. Before the election, the last communiqué Manhattan’s liberal bubble sent argued that expanding the electorate with convicted felons would be a grand idea. Now they’ve changed their minds: The great unwashed should just shut up. I love the tortured relationship some people have with democracy.
American government is far more complex than flying a passenger jet, but the experts have shown again and again that they are not up to the job. Who was in charge at the Department of Veterans Affairs when its scandalous treatment of veterans blew up? Experts. When retired four-star general Colin Powell mistakenly made the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, was there any more expert consumer of intelligence on the planet? No. How many experts were on hand for the birth of Obamacare, and how many highly trained minds worked on the disastrous launch of Obamacare’s online portals? The American people have ruled: a few too many.
Jill:
Let’s get real. Who are you going to trust? Trump, who says he knows “things that other people don’t know” about Russia but won’t tell us what, or 17 intelligence agencies that concluded Russia hacked our election?
The degree to which Trump and many of his personnel choices lack experience is unprecedented. A neurosurgeon as housing chief. A corporate CEO as secretary of State. A governor as United Nations ambassador. The co-founder of a worldwide wrestling empire to head the Small Business Administration. And of course, straight from reality TV and the glam world of real estate development, the billionaire president-elect.
Obviously, experts sometimes make mistakes. It’s inevitable in a world of increasingly complex and interconnected problems. But that doesn’t mean novices are going to do better. In fact they are likely to do worse. That is terrifying given the stakes, from war and peace to the survival of the health insurance market and coverage for 20 million people.
The trend this cartoon reflects is profoundly troubling. It is a perfect distillation of disrespect for knowledge, experience, credentials and facts — for the science behind climate change and evolution, for instance, or the evidence that huge tax cuts for the rich don’t create jobs. We should not be surprised that political obstinacy, opportunism and ignorance have now given us fake news and Trump’s one-man assault on truth.
The experts might not always be right. They might sometimes be smug. They might even be out of touch. But we need them.
David:
I’d be happier in a world where we could trust experts. Set it and forget it, I say. But we can’t, and Trump’s pick of the completely unqualified Ben Carson to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development couldn’t better exemplify the problem. President Reagan’s HUD was a corrupt mess. President Clinton’s HUD was responsible for some of the economically illiterate policies that caused the 2009 financial meltdown. President George W. Bush’s HUD went straight back to full-blown Reagan-era sleaze. President Obama’s second HUD secretary was accused of misusing HUD funds before he even set foot in office. Maybe it is time for a different choice to lead the housing agency.
And on Friday, intelligence expert and CIA Director John Brennan will brief Trump and hopefully dispel some of the smoke the president-elect has been blowing about the Russians’ hack of top Democrats’ emails. Perhaps Brennan would be a smidge more credible if he hadn’t previously lied to the Senate about the CIA’s hack of Senate computers. I simply can’t imagine where people get their cynicism about our intelligence experts.
The fact is that “the experts” too often have a parochial view that looks at policy through a narrow lens, most often leaving out the way high-minded theory can become brutal reality. That’s how crime got out of control in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s how taxes became something regular people can’t understand and the Internal Revenue Service can’t explain.
And I am glad that you brought up evolution. Everybody forgets that at the time of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, the Trumpian booboisie believed in creationism while experts and science textbooks taught that the “civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” were the most evolved “highest” race of men. The "Ethiopian,” “Indian,” “Malay” and “Mongolian” races, not so much.
Whose view looks better now?
David Mastio, a libertarian conservative, is the deputy editor of the Editorial Page. Jill Lawrence, a center-left liberal, is the commentary editor.