A popular New Yorker cartoon published around the time of the first Trump election features an angry-looking man on a plane saying, “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” Drawing the obvious analogy between the plane and the country, the cartoon is in fact […]
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A popular New Yorker cartoon published around the time of the first Trump election features an angry-looking man on a plane saying, “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” Drawing the obvious analogy between the plane and the country, the cartoon is in fact straightforwardly anti-democratic: Voters should, on the view of the cartoon, not be able to elect who they want over the experts who know what they’re doing. This perspective, framed as opposition to a “populism” that itself is just democracy by another name, runs through center-left dogma about academia, media, the courts, the experts, through skepticism of free speech to credentialism about virtually everything.
