Trump Must Put the Experts in Their Place

The ongoing revolt against expert authority signifies the recovery of a classical understanding that politics is, and ought to be, architectonic. 

This term comes from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Politics — the business of the polis, the “city” or authoritative political community — aims at the most comprehensive goal: securing what our Declaration of Independence calls the “Safety and Happiness” of its citizens. Other, more specialized pursuits (various areas of “expertise”) involve lower and narrower goals. 

Thus, the true art of politics must exercise “architectonic” authority over them:

[The political art] ordains what sciences there must be in cities and what kinds each person in turn must learn and up to what point. We also see that even the most honored capacities — for example, generalship, household management, rhetoric — fall under the political art. Because it makes use of the remaining sciences and, further, because it legislates what one ought to do and what to abstain from, its end would encompass those of the others, with the result that this would be the human good. For even if this is the same thing for an individual and a city, to secure and preserve the good of the city appears to be something greater and more complete: the good of the individual by himself is certainly desirable enough, but that of a nation and of cities is nobler and more divine. 

An architect respects the special competencies of the workers (masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and so on) involved in the construction of a house and is able to direct their special and partial efforts to the overarching goal of a well-ordered structure fit for its proper purpose. A house designed by a bricklayer who mistook his specialty for that of the architect would be a lousy house: all bricks, everywhere and for everything, regardless of basic principles of form and function. This error is so obvious it’s hard to imagine any actual bricklayer making it; yet our ideologically addled elites have made an analogous error in politics for decades. 

The true statesman respects the special competencies of the general (the expert at securing victory in battle), the businessman (the expert at generating and managing wealth), and so on, rather than arrogating to himself minute control over every troop movement or financial exchange. But he realizes that the purpose of war is peace, and so the military art, which, left to itself, might pursue endless occasions to fight and win victories, must be subordinated to politics, which understands war as an occasionally necessary means to secure the nation’s common good. Similarly, the true statesman realizes that a nation is a nation, not an economic zone (as Aristotle also recognized). What shall it profit a nation to increase its GDP, but lose its own soul?

This principle might be misunderstood as an attempt to illegitimately “politicize” science, and economics, and everything else in life — as if the only alternatives were radically laissez-faire liberalism or full-blown Lysenkoism. 

The reader might suspect that the idea of politics as “architectonic” is a relic of classical philosophy, which, after all, was concerned with the ancient polis, a closed and total community ignorant of modern principles of liberty, civil society, and the individual; that its invocation here must signify allegiance to some baroque new school of political thought. On the contrary, this principle is hardly the preserve of the ancients. It is the consensus of the great philosophic traditions of the West (ancient, medieval, and modern) and represents the intuition of the ordinary citizen, that the best criterion for judging our political authorities is not by reference to abstract principles of legitimacy or some preferred ideology, but whether they actually secure the common good.

To pick a single, but instructive, example, consider Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address. Having described how the “military-industrial complex” might come to endanger “our liberties or democratic processes,” Eisenhower traces this threat to the American regime to “the technological revolution during recent decades.” He laments the corrupting effects of massive government contracts on scientific research — and at this point, the reader might suspect Eisenhower to indict something akin to Aristotle’s “architectonic” concept of politics as the culprit. Instead, he provides his own very Aristotelian articulation of the nature of politics:

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

In the decades since Eisenhower’s warning, the military-industrial complex and our “scientific-technological elite” no longer merely threaten but have come to dominate the country. The task of statesmanship today is far greater than it was two generations ago.

Many in Trump’s coalition have found their way to him because they have seen his willingness to step back from the necessarily partial perspectives of the experts and to ask whether their efforts actually serve the cause of American greatness. Trump’s greatest challenges in his second term will stem from the resistance that our discredited but entrenched experts offer to his attempts — entirely within the mainstream of the American and Western political traditions — to exercise architectonic control over them and to channel them toward “the supreme goals of our free society.”