Experts Gone Wild
By Mike Scanlon
September 16, 2024
An ability to win hearts and minds has long been seen by America’s leadership as essential to domestic and international politics and security. For much of the Pax Americana, our government and intelligentsia have poured time, effort, and money into studying how to persuade everyone from allies to enemies and, conversely, how to counter an opponent’s influence campaigns.
But something essential has changed since the rise of President Donald Trump as a political force.
During the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke up against censorship and for lay readers in the wake of an attempt by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchmen to eradicate communist books from libraries:
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book . . . .
How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? . . .
And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.
These days, America’s most educated have grown distrustful of non-experts and their ability to process dangerous ideas.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/09/16/experts_gone_wild_1058413.html?utm_source=dlvr.it
