The expert class is failing, and so is Biden’s presidency

Hunter Biden's pardon is another log on the fire.

As Sean Trende pointed out on X, it hasn’t exactly been the best century for the expert class. Begin with the response to September 11 — the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, which were supported by bipartisan majorities. Then the financial crisis and the bank bailouts. Then Brexit and the election of Trump. Then the pandemic: what was supposed to be a triumph of management for a technocratic elite instead wound up as a worst-of-all-worlds scenario with prolonged restrictions and school closures and 7 million dead — from a virus possibly caused by sloppy scientific research practices. Then massive inflation, which was supposed to be a thing of the past. Throw in here, if you like, “wokeness” and how it’s eroded trust in higher education and triggered a cultural backlash.

Of course, the experts have gotten their comeuppance. Because it was better predicted by polls and because he had already been president, Donald Trump’s win last month was treated more with resigned shrugs than with expressions of shock, even among the liberals I know.

But if you zoom out the lens, 2024 was in some ways more shocking than 2016 — and much more of a middle finger to the expert class. In 2016, progressive institutionalist types could at least console themselves by saying the public didn’t know what it would be getting with Trump, and might have had some natural desire to experiment when the alternative was Hilary Clinton, the unpopular avatar of the technocratic status quo. Well, this time around, the public saw what it got with Trump — including the pandemic, January 6, and all those crimes and misdemeanors — and decided it liked it better than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In the national exit poll, 52 percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance from his first term in office, compared to 42 percent for Biden.

That Trump’s victory was secured with massive shifts among precisely those groups that Democrats once thought of as their base — the working class, young voters, racial and ethnic minorities, and voters in the nation’s bluest cities — make the just deserts all the more rich. Some writers on the left have approached this with detached irony, and it would actually be kind of funny if elections weren’t so consequential.

As compared to those other things I mentioned, President Biden’s blanket 11-year pardon of his son Hunter Biden, announced on a holiday weekend, is just a small log on the fire — a piece of kindling. Biden and the White House, of course, repeatedly lied about Biden’s intentions even after the election was over. It will surely enable Trump to feel like he can pardon the January 6 rioters without a political cost, as well as the various and sundry criminals in his orbit, though Trump would likely have had no problem doing that anyway. It will further reduce Biden’s ranking in the history books and contribute to the perception that he was a failed president, provided that historians aren’t blinded by their partisanship.

But it isn’t even the worst Biden-related failure in this category. The institutionalists who insisted that everything was fine right up until the very moment that Biden turned in such a manifestly unfit debate performance that even MSNBC panelists had to concede what a shambles it had been — that was a much bigger scandal. And I use the term scandal deliberately. The lack of disclosure surrounding the cognitive fitness of the leader of the free world ought to be investigated. The media should be embarrassed that it lost interest in the story the moment that Biden finally gave up the nomination. It is not even clear that Biden should be president today — give the loyal Harris her reward and make her 47th President because if Vladimir Putin calls on the red phone at some point in the next 49 days, I don’t want Biden on the other side of the line if it’s outside the 6-hour window when he’s “reliably engaged.”

The Village needs unsparing critics

People sometimes ask me why I’m often harsher on the left than the right, despite agreeing with the expert class on more things than not. (I’d note here that I’m using the term “left” loosely: it’s not the traditional labor/Bernie Sanders left that I usually feud with, but rather two other groups: Democratic partisans and illiberal academic types.) One reason is just because of my adjacency to it: I live in New York and work in the media; most of my friends are Democrats; I come from an academic family; and most of the readers of this newsletter are left-leaning.¹ So I have more influence in these circles — and because I speak the vocabulary, I know how to call out its bullshit.

I would say, though, that I also don’t see myself in quite the same role as Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein. I have admiration for Matt and Ezra, but they’re more comfortable in self-identifying as members of that establishment class. As I discuss in my book, I instead see myself as straddling two communities: the expert class of academics, journalists and like-minded types that I call “the Village”, and the calculated risk-taking class — tech and finance types, poker players and crypto geeks — that I call “the River.”

The book is critical of the River in many respects, including its increasing partisanship and appetite for political power. I should probably make a note to replicate more of those criticisms in this newsletter. The delirious and unconditional embrace of Trump among the MAGA faction of the River², as opposed to a more conditional alliance that tries to steer him toward competent, pro-growth governance, has been disappointing. (But not surprising: new converts are often the most fervent.) It may be up to the dissident center to keep its distance from the River as it seeks to rein in MAGA at the same time it continues to poke at the failures of the Village.

Still, mostly I write about the Village because that’s where the action is since Trump’s initial election in 2016. MAGA is too far gone, and the nearly complete capitulation of Republicans toward Trump has been the most predictable development in American politics. The Village has more capacity for self-correction, by contrast. There’s been a pullback from peak wokeness, certainly, and even institutions of higher learning are finally getting the message by doing things like restoring standardized testing requirements. The Democratic Party did eventually get rid of Biden to at least give itself a shot.

However, there has been an arc toward institutional decline. The failures of Biden’s presidency were not due to bad luck or “misinformation” among the broader electorate but rather were failures of its own making: overstimulating the economy, relaxing border controls amid a massive public backlash to immigration, and then trying to run Biden again. Plus, inefficient and sometimes corrupt governance in blue cities and states, which have steadily become less livable.³

Village types thought they could pull a “gotcha” during the campaign by pointing out that, well actually, if you asked voters to consider whether they were better off four years ago — during that dreadful year of 2020 — they weren’t, because 2020 happened under Trump’s watch. But a lot of what people found objectionable about 2020 were the policies of the left, which had plenty of political and cultural influence: school closures advocated for by teachers’ unions, calls to “defund the police” amidst a crime wave, and a racial “reckoning” amid a pandemic that few people outside the Village wanted.

I have a thesis about why these institutions have been performing more and more poorly. For roughly the past 20 years, Democrats have become increasingly the party of the educated — and as you can see in the above data, Trump’s election in 2016 really locked in the trend. The result is what I call the Indigo Blob: the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia, and public health on the one hand — institutions that draw almost exclusively from the ranks of college graduates — and expressly partisan and political instruments of the Democratic Party and progressive advocacy groups on the other hand.

The Indigo Blob has control of the “means of moral production”: it writes the story, at least as supposedly respectable people are expected to read it. It runs the newspapers and writes the Hollywood scripts. It awards the BAs, MDs and PhDs. And it seeks to shut out and shut up dissenters — it can be absolutely vicious toward people like me and Yglesias. In this later capacity, it is increasingly failing: people like Matt and me have found a huge audience through Substack without compromising our values or getting too “red-pilled” (or at least I’d like to think). Still, the Indigo Blob is eagerly flocking away from Twitter toward Bluesky, where it hopes to build a new echo chamber.

The Indigo Blob can weave superficially compelling narratives, often involving a lot of whataboutism. Biden pardoned Hunter? Well, what about Trump pardoning Paul Manafort? Those school closures were bad? Well, what about anti-vaxxers? Not on board with full-blown wokeness? Well, then you’re in league with the fascists. But these stories have become increasingly desperate and implausible. The Indigo Blob suggested that it was “ageist” to be concerned about Biden wanting to be president until he was 86. It said that educated white men brought about Trump’s victory, even though college-educated whites were actually the only group of men who didn’t swing heavily MAGA.

And so these narratives have become unconvincing other than to a narrow group of Village midwits. Both the multiethnic working class and an increasing number of highly successful people like those in the River are seeing through the bullshit.

So now the Village has a double failure. Its institutions serve the public increasingly poorly — but it’s also increasingly losing politically. If Trump’s victory against a Harris campaign that literally ran out of ideas wasn’t proof enough of that — I’ll have a long critique of the Harris campaign beginning later this week — people are also voting with their feet, fleeing blue states and cities. Corporations that embraced wokeness have now done a 180-degree turn in the other direction. Saturday Night Live is back to making fun of Democrats.

If the Village wants to continue down this path, it can go right ahead. Don’t point out Biden’s obvious hypocrisy or cognitive decline. Don’t investigate school closures or COVID origins. Continue using “misinformation” as an excuse to shut down speech. Have a great time at Bluesky. But the Village just lost an election to Donald Trump. And it’s losing the battle of ideas, the one thing that it’s supposed to win.

1. Although, I suspect we outperform on bipartisanship relative to the vast majority of newsletters.

2. On the whole — if you took a census — the River is probably still majority progressive and Democratic, but there’s no doubt the MAGA faction has been rising.

3. Though I think this latter criticism is sometimes overdone: New York has relatively low crime and a lot of nice new infrastructure.