STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Vice President Harris' campaign speech in Washington this week included a line we will now analyze.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I pledge to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make and to people who disagree with me.
INSKEEP: There's a lot in that line, but let's focus on the start. A pledge to listen to experts sounds like an effort to contrast with former President Trump, who famously offered his own theories about science and medicine during the pandemic in 2020.
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DONALD TRUMP: I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, how do you know so much about this? Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.
INSKEEP: Harris' remark also touched on a broader American divide between people who listen to experts, as she said, and people who have their doubts. So we've called in Tom Nichols, who's an expert on this. He's the author of a book called "The Death Of Expertise." Welcome back to the program, sir.
TOM NICHOLS: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: And I guess we should say you are also an expert in national security. But what did you think when the vice president declared herself to be on the side of the experts?
NICHOLS: I thought what a strange impasse we've come to in modern American life, that you need to say that, that, you know, you would have to affirm something that for 50 years, most Americans would just assume. But it's something, you know, that's now actually a political position rather than simply an affirmation of common sense.
INSKEEP: Yeah, it seems to me there are a lot of divides that are touched on here having to do with education, having to do with who's an elite. You can see this as framing the elites against everybody else, which is why some people would say, I don't want to listen to the experts.
NICHOLS: Right. And the - you know, the Trump movement is very much a kind of populist, as you say, anti-elite movement. And experts get immediately tagged with that because expertise, by its nature, is exclusionary. If you call in an expert, it's because you need a particular kind of talent or knowledge, and that means it's not you. And Trump makes a lot of hay by saying that, hey, anybody can do anything. You know, how hard is it to be president? How hard is it to know about medicine? Or, you know, I know more than the generals. And that's very empowering for people because when he says that, he's saying, and you can do that, too.
INSKEEP: Now, when we say anti-elite, I guess we'll pause to note that Trump is a very rich man. The world's richest man is among his supporters. Kennedy is among his supporters. But setting that aside, that's the frame here. And I'd just like to ask, I mean, I think I can understand why people would doubt the experts who would seem to have let us down from time to time. In the pandemic, just to give one example, they repeatedly changed their stories about masks and closing schools and a lot of other things.
NICHOLS: Well, experts are always going to make mistakes. I mean, they're not - I always tell people, look, they're going to occasionally be wrong. They're just less likely to be wrong than you are on a given subject. And, you know, during the pandemic, when things were changing and the scientists were changing their views, that's called science. People, I think, expect these very definite yes or no answers because they live in a world where science has given them very definite and straightforward answers in a world full of things that mostly work. And I think a lot of people were off balance by the fact that the scientists were saying, hey, this is a new problem. We're in the middle of a crisis, and we're working to figure it out. You know, give us a little slack here.
INSKEEP: OK. So I know you're not an expert in politics, but we're not going to let that stop us. Do you feel - is it your instinct that it's a political winner for Harris to say to her supporters, listen, I'm actually going to listen to people who know things? I'm also going to listen to stakeholders and other people, she says, and to people who disagree with me, but I'm going to listen to experts, too.
NICHOLS: I think it's a reassurance to people that are already in her coalition to say, you know, that this is how she'll differ from Donald Trump. So I don't know - I think it's certainly not a winner in terms of trying to convince anybody who was already leaning toward Trump, but I think it's a good kind of, you know, reaffirmation. It's kind of like reaffirming other obvious things, like we're going to stay in NATO.
INSKEEP: OK.
NICHOLS: You know, and things like that.
INSKEEP: Tom Nichols of The Atlantic, thanks so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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