What Passes for Insight

One of the main tenets of progressive thought is that the government should rely on "experts" to help direct the regulatory state rather than allowing the will of the people to prevail. At the heart of progressive ideology lies the belief that the people are either too uneducated, too uninformed, too emotional or just too stupid to make the proper decisions for society. This belief is one of the main reasons for the debate between progressives and conservatives over the importance of individual liberty. On a few issues (like abortion) progressives have adopted the language of individual rights, but the basic view remains that the government, informed by the views of experts, is the best entity to decide the course of society.

There are many reasons why conservatives disagree with this essential progressive view. One of the main reasons is that so-called experts are often wrong, and if society relies only on these experts then common sense and reality are sometimes left out of the equation. I saw a good example of an expert who had no idea what he was talking about in an article this morning. William Galston of the Brookings Institution's Governance Studies department wrote an analysis of the 2012 election in five states for the New Republic. So you have the favorite repository of experts for progressives writing a piece for one of the favorite journals of progressive thought. But here's the rub: according to Galston, the reason why president Obama polls better in Ohio than he does in Pennsylvania despite the fact that in the past Democrats ran a bit better in Pennsylvania than Ohio, is that Ohio voters are not as happy with their Republican governor as Pennsylvania voters are with theirs. After putting forth this analysis, Galston spins a conclusion as to what this means for the upcoming presidential campaign.

What better proof could one have of the fallibility of experts than Galston's nonsense? First, the polling differences between Pennsylvania and Ohio were well withing the margin of error in the polls. In other words, for the information cited by Galston, one cannot tell in which state Obama is actually doing better. Second, there is no reason to believe that voters think about their views of their governors in deciding on whom to vote for in a presidential election. Why would they? Think to yourself: would you select a president based upon whether or not you like the governor of your state?

Obviously, Galston's expostion is not one to change how society functions, but rather is just a manifestation of the propensity of experts to provide opinions that are about as accurate as fortunes received in cookies in Chinese restaurants.