美国专家、学者、顾问惨败。
2021-01-24 13:19阅读：11,433
今天的华尔街日报长文：过去五年这些专家只骂特朗普是法西斯，是流氓。特朗普的人品当然是有问题的。但是这些专家不理解人民为什么选特朗普。他们也完全不明白特朗普的支持率为什么一直这么高？他们看不到奥巴马执政的八年所执行的很多政策完全忽略了中西部工人阶级的愤怒和处境。而且希拉里做总统候选人实在是太糟糕了。
这些专家一直认为，如果美國承认耶路撒冷为以色列的首都会导致灾难；还说中东各国与以色列恢复外交的前提是承认巴勒斯坦国。所有这些都被特朗普否定了。结果非常好。这些专家全是错的。即使在新冠肺炎的控制方面，这些专家也比特朗普好不了多少。他们明知道美国人不好管，崇尚自由，为什么一定要封城呢？封城只是导致了经济的崩溃、政府债务的高涨。很多州一直没有封城，结果处理得也很好，疫情并不见得更恶劣。
从口罩、封城、隔离、追踪，这些专家从来不承认自己做的错误。这是全世界所有专家政客的共同毛病。华尔街日报结尾归纳得非常好。这些专家在最重要的时刻显示出他们都是一帮蠢蛋！They
were, “at crucial moments, idiots”.
全文如下。想学英语的朋友们，千万认真读一读。
Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class.
They were right about his character, but his defects were obvious
to almost everyone. They were wrong about virtually all else.
By Barton Swaim
Jan. 22, 2021 1:45 pm ET.
The Trump years had something for almost everyone. Progressives had
the satisfaction of righteousness and a justification for daily
outrage. What they didn’t have were policy victories, although they
might have had a few if they could have refrained, even for a fe
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w days, from treating the president as illegitimate. For
conservatives, the case was exactly reversed: They had some major
policy wins, but at the cost of frequent embarrassment and dismay
at the president’s offensive behavior and self-defeating
logorrhea.
The worst of his conduct took place after the 2020 election and
seemed to fulfill progressive commentators’ allegation that Donald
Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Mr. Trump’s
refusal to accept defeat, culminating in demands that Vice
President Mike Pence overturn a lawful election on no legal
authority, occasioned a debacle that may haunt the Republican
Party, and the country, for years. Even so, the most salient theme
of the past five years was not any challenge to democracy. The
great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a
century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The
people who were supposed to know what they were talking about,
didn’t.
The failure began with the country’s top consultants and pollsters.
Candidate Trump did almost everything lavishly paid political
consultants would have told him, and did tell him, not to do—and he
won. The most respected pollsters, meanwhile, predicted a landslide
for Hillary Clinton. America’s best and brightest political adepts
turned out to know very little about the elections they claim to
understand.
Also during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics,
intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy
signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism
at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm
when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly
after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that
all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in
order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many
experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and
throughout his presidency. That these cultured authorities couldn’t
tell the difference between a populist protest against elite
contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues will go down
as one of the great fiascoes of American intellectual
history.
The fascism charge was only the most acute form of the claim that
Mr. Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Some semantic
clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists
of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not
referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected
officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for
progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special
political rights and welfare-state provisions to new
constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is
carrying out an “assault on democracy.”
Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word,
but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was
discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and
ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class
critics had foreseen.
Perhaps those critics failed to understand Mr. Trump’s assault on
democracy because they had carried out a similar sort of assault in
2016-18, with the support of the federal bureaucracy and the
nation’s political and cultural elite. I’m referring to the Russia
scare: the belief that Mr. Trump won only because his campaign
“colluded” with agents of Moscow, and that his election in 2016 was
therefore illegitimate. The theory made sense only if you couldn’t
grasp the obvious reasons for Mr. Trump’s victory, namely that
Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate and that Obama-era
progressivism had become sufficiently unpopular in the Midwest to
throw the election to the nationalist candidate. Somehow it was
easier for smart and accomplished people to believe that a TV
celebrity and political neophyte with attention-deficit issues had
entered into a diabolically ingenious pact with a foreign dictator
in which the dictator helped him pick up just enough votes in the
states he needed to win.
It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish
an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with
the Russians. America’s best minds and most influential leaders had
spent more than two years obsessing over an idiotic conspiracy
theory. This spectacular failure of the expert class would have
been impossible without the willing support of a credulous news
media. That Mr. Trump won the presidency largely by denouncing the
media should have suggested to leading journalists and media
executives that something in their industry had gone badly wrong.
Instead most of them took his rise as license to indulge their
worst instincts.
Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s
unique evil. They regarded every preposterous accusation put
forward by his political foes as reasonable and likely true. The
repeal of “net neutrality,” an Obama-era regulation on internet
service providers, heralded the end of the open internet (it
didn’t). The administration built “cages” in which to cram children
of illegal border crossers (it didn’t). The president praised
neo-Nazis as “very fine people” (he didn’t). His postmaster general
was removing mailboxes to steal the election (an obvious lie). In
retrospect, it was hardly surprising that so many Americans
believed Mr. Trump’s fictitious claims about the election. Reports
of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from
news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so
little about factual truth.
America’s foreign-policy elite didn’t perform appreciably better.
For decades, they had insisted that peace between Israel and the
Arab world was impossible without a long-term solution to the
Israel-Palestinian problem. It was an axiom, no longer up for
debate. Mr. Trump followed through on a promise long made but not
kept by the U.S. government to recognize Jerusalem as the capital
of Israel. Foreign-policy experts the world over predicted hellish
payback from the Arab world, but the recognition went forward, the
U.S. Embassy moved, and the payback consisted of a day’s worth of
inconsequential protests.
Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push
to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab
states. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco
announced they would establish formal relations with Israel, and
Saudi Arabia may do the same. The foreign-policy clerisy, having
been wrong about the central question of global diplomacy for the
past four decades, predictably ignored these achievements.
Then there are the public-health experts. We are still in the
middle of the coronavirus pandemic, so it is difficult to write
about it with the perspective it demands. Yet political talking
points aside, this much is apparent: No nation—or anyhow no nation
that values individual liberty and isn’t an island—has managed even
to slow the spread of Covid-19 without causing economic ruin and
attendant disorder.
The Trump administration made its share of mistakes during the
early stages of the pandemic, although its chief failing was the
president’s lack of rhetorical clarity. But the outstanding failure
of the 2020 pandemic was the experts’ belief that the only sensible
response involved sustained closures of businesses and schools. By
any set of criteria outside the self-contained system of
public-health best practices, the lockdowns failed. They purchased
minor slowdowns in the spread of the virus at the cost of punishing
economic destruction, untold social dysfunction, and mind-blowing
public debt.
You get the sense that even proponents of the lockdown orthodoxy
secretly recognize their folly when they advance the post facto
argument that many more people would have died and the hospital
system would have collapsed if we hadn’t shut down the economy.
Upending this conveniently self-exculpatory claim is the fact that
many parts of the country didn’t lock down, or did so only loosely
and briefly, and managed to keep their hospitals running just
fine.
Controlling the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S. was always going to
be a messy business: Many infected people don’t get sick and have
no compelling reason to burrow in their homes, and America is an
unruly nation with a long tradition of nonconformity. The experts
might have accounted for these realities. They might have realized
that the measures prescribed by their textbooks—contact tracing,
forced quarantines, shelter-in-place orders—were mostly unworkable
in America. They didn’t. Large parts of the country shut down on
their advice, and the economy went into a needless recession.
Once again, the people paid to know what they were talking about,
didn’t. Mr. Trump’s aggressive gaucheries made the experts feel
they couldn’t be wrong so long as they were against him. A policy
maven or an academic historian or an experienced political
consultant couldn’t help judging himself favorably against a Queens
real-estate mogul who spoke in five-word sentences. And yet very
often the mogul was right and the experts were wrong.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 siege at the Capitol, members of the
expert class are busy congratulating themselves for being right
about Mr. Trump all along. He really was the would-be autocrat they
always said he was! But the important question was not Mr. Trump’s
true nature or innermost designs but whether America’s democratic
institutions, especially the courts and Congress, were prepared, if
required, to rebuff his designs. Of course they were. If this was
an attempted coup, it was a comically inept one. Hardly anyone in
Mr. Trump’s own administration, including the vice president,
wanted anything to do with it.
Mr. Trump’s character deficiencies were always obvious, even to
many of his supporters. Other questions required judiciousness to
answer, and about them the expert class had almost nothing useful
to say, so fixated were they on the president’s unworthiness.
The most regrettable part of this class failure is that, with rare
exceptions, the experts themselves acknowledge no error. Nothing
about the Trump years has occasioned soul-searching or
self-criticism on their part. But today’s experts will eventually
retire and pass from the scene. A newer, fresher generation of
pollsters, academics, think-tank scholars and journalists will care
more about the truth than they do about aligning with today’s
consensus. They will feel no need to disguise their ignorance by
signaling hatred of Donald Trump. And they will not fail to note
that their most accomplished and revered forerunners were, at
crucial moments, idiots.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer at the Journal.
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