Over the past several years, long-standing frustration with an increasingly radical progressive intelligentsia has reached a political boiling point. This is evident in GOP policymakers’ novel willingness to intervene in the operations of higher education to address perceived ideological capture. Some of these measures are constructive. For instance, my own institutional home of the Salmon P. Chase Center at Ohio State is one of several centers established to expand intellectual inquiry and impart foundational knowledge of the American civic tradition.
Other measures reflect darker impulses. Sweeping, ad hoc restrictions on scientific funding have disrupted fruitful research agendas, and the executive branch’s targeting of specific institutions appears capricious and vindictive. For good or ill, this likely represents a permanent break from a status quo in which credentialed experts possessed taken-for-granted institutional autonomy and intellectual authority.
These political developments have been accompanied by a broader reevaluation in how we think about the relationship between democracy and epistemic expertise. Initially, following 2016’s one-two punch of Trump and Brexit, a narrative emerged among America’s elites that we were now living in a society characterized by “post-truth”—a term that featured as Oxford’s Word of the Year. Too many, it was claimed, had stopped valuing accurate information or trusting expertise. Demagoguery, misinformation, and partisan news were allegedly leading people to adopt whatever beliefs validated their emotions and confirmed narratives of their group’s superiority, without regard for evidence or logic. Right-wing political tribalism and motivated reasoning had won the day.
At the height of the “post-truth” narrative, journalist Jonathan Rauch offered his own analysis of our state of epistemic fracture with 2021’s The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (CoK). No mere lamentation or screed, CoK undertakes the more ambitious work of articulating and defending the foundations of knowledge that allowed Western societies to function and flourish. Rauch’s tale is one of Enlightenment triumphalism. From Hobbesian epistemic chaos and ruinous creed wars, he argues, Western societies gradually developed scientific and liberal principles that allow for the peaceful, rigorous, and collaborative pursuit of truth. These principles have brought us rapid and staggering progress—of technology, prosperity, and stability.
But abstract principles alone cannot yield such achievements. They must be enacted. To this effect, Rauch points to four major epistemic institutions—science, journalism, government bureaucracy, and the legal system—that make up the titular “Constitution of Knowledge”. According to Rauch, it is through—and, crucially, only through—this matrix of institutions that we can arrive at any legitimate understanding of reality. Thus Rauch offers a vigorous defense of that Constitution against both the right-wing hordes that would burn it down and the left-wing microdespots who would subvert it to social justice ends.
Rauch’s contribution earned effusive praise from across the (center of the) political spectrum. Jonathan Haidt declared it one of the most important books of the decade. Jon Meacham intoned, “If […] the truth shall set us free, then count Rauch among the liberators.” George Will hailed him as a “James Madison for this era.” Such accolades were not wholly without warrant. Rauch’s account is thorough, elegant, and compelling. In a moment worn down by partisan vitriol, his celebration of American-style liberalism lifted spirits. His willingness to punch either left or right gained him bipartisan respect. CoK seemingly brought a measure of clarity and nobility to a public discourse severely lacking on both counts.
The reader may sense a “but” coming. For the sheer elegance of Rauch’s telling masks some major shortcomings.
First, despite its subtitle, CoK is not best categorized as a defense of truth as the term is typically understood. Most people recognize truth or reality as something “out there” that exists independently of our perceptions of it. But to the minimal extent that Rauch addresses the meaning of truth, he relies on a pragmatist conception that collapses the distinction between what is actually true and what we have collectively decided is true. He asserts, “The totality of [validated] propositions is as close as we come to objective truth,” making it clear that propositions can only be validated by recognized experts within epistemic institutions.
In this sense, Rauch’s isn’t so much advocating for truth per se than for an elitist and technocratic epistemic regime. In Rauch’s system, lay individuals and non-expert communities, hobbled as they are by misperception and bias, cannot be trusted to produce valid truth claims. To be publicly accepted, claims must emerge from established social practices, such as the peer review process in science or fact-checking in journalism, carried out within communities of credentialed professionals. A true claim is one that an expert can persuade other experts to accept. Reality, by definition, is whatever organized groups of degree-holders or high-status professionals say it is.
There are good epistemic and practical reasons to privilege expert gatekeeping for the adjudication of many truth claims. But Rauch’s system goes further by denying non-experts any epistemic standing whatsoever. In his scheme, laypeople get no say in what counts as truth or reality, even on matters in which they have some knowledge and stake. His system forecloses the possibility that laypeople could arrive at objective truths that experts have either missed or erroneously rejected.
It is trivially easy to identify situations in which this leads to troubling results. If a community of all-white scientists reaches consensus on the biological superiority of the white race, for instance, the system in CoK would seem to doom nonwhites to accept this unpalatable expert conclusion, or at least recognize that their objections should receive no public hearing. Although it may seem far-fetched, there’s nothing hypothetical about this scenario. It describes the state of play in many academic disciplines in the first few decades of the 20th century.
It may be countered that CoK addresses this objection by stipulating that a proper system of science is open to anyone, regardless of background. Nonwhite citizens objecting to the scientific consensus of white supremacy could thus act on this conviction by enrolling in graduate school, joining the community of experts, and applying validated practices to challenge the dominant view. If the challenge has merit, the fallacious claim will eventually be replaced. Liberal science does not always get things right at first, but it does at last. And so-called race science did eventually fall out of favor.
Supposing this conclusion is sound, however, it still raises questions as to how long it might take to correct fallacious views, what concrete harms flow from those views while they reign, and what recourse is available to the victims of those harms. Again, these concerns are not so very hypothetical. But Rauch’s argument in CoK does not provide a means to adequately address them.
Of course, the all-white community of scientists could also institute discriminatory policies to remain all-white, preventing challenges to their white supremacist claims. In this case, Rauch would presumably argue they are not practicing the sort of liberal science he is advocating. But this response serves to highlight a second shortcoming of CoK: Though Rauch powerfully articulates a compelling set of epistemic ideals, he has little to say about what to do when the reigning crop of experts incorrigibly departs from those ideals.
It’s not that Rauch thinks the present cohort of academics or other gatekeepers are perfect. He recognizes that our epistemic elites have fallen short in various ways. He devotes a chapter to cancel culture, groupthink, and other forms of coercive conformity within the epistemic institutions that undermine their functioning. Yet even after documenting such failings, he still defends the status quo.
In the final chapter, Rauch writes that “[i]nstitutions define and instill integrity. They defend us, which is why it is so important that we defend them.” Being founded on sound and noble principles, it seems that epistemic institutions cannot do any real harm, but only fail to do the good of which they are capable. There is no grievance against them that could justify external intervention, for there is nobody qualified to intervene.
For misbehaving epistemic elites, then, Rauch offers little more than an altar call. In contrast, discontented populists are reproached for their irrationality, gullibility, tribalism, and ingratitude. Though with greater constructiveness and nuance than other sources, CoK nonetheless affirms a “post-truth” narrative in which elites are complex, flawed heroes while populists play the role of two-dimensional villains. This not only falls short as a diagnosis, but represents precisely the sort of attitude that lends resonance to populist sentiment in the first place. A few short years later, the inadequacies of this stance of elite apologetics have become difficult to ignore.
As a corrective, we may turn to Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson’s 2025 The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism. Here, Russell and Patterson stand the “post-truth” narrative on its head. They share Rauch’s recognition of the ways elites have fallen short of their ideals. But where Rauch dodges the implications of this critique, Russell and Hale make them the center of their story, using COVID-19 as a case study.
Russell and Patterson share Rauch’s premise that epistemic elites gain their legitimacy from the ideals of liberal science, such as commitment to objectivity, openness, willingness to self-correct, and recognition of their limits. The problem is that in recent years, elites have not only fallen short of these ideals, but exhibited precisely the opposite characteristics: partisanship, dogmatism, intolerance of dissent, and epistemic overreach. Populist discontent is a wholly rational response to such misbehavior.
The authors charge epistemic elites with two broad crimes. The first relates to their attitude toward dissenting views, whether from laypeople or minority groups of experts. Rather than engaging with competing perspectives, elites respond to dissent with dismissal, mockery, and sometimes concerted campaigns of vilification. For instance, calls to “follow the science” invoke an unquestionable authority at odds with scientific principles. Early purveyors of the lab leak theory of COVID, now recognized as its most likely origin, were cast as dangerous conspiracy theorists. Such condescension and intellectual tyranny (Russell and Patterson’s terms) serve not only to undermine trust in elites but provoke active hostility.
Secondly, elites have come to believe their facility with facts grants them authority in matters of value. Their ability to analyze data, create predictive models, or parse legal arguments should, it is thought, secure them deference in matters of policy judgment. But this is a category error. As noted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, facts, theories, or models can only help us predict the consequences of what we might do, not tell us what we should do. Consider policies regarding COVID-related closures of businesses or houses of worship. Technical expertise can only inform our sense of how such policies might affect the spread of COVID. Yet elites claimed authority to pronounce on how we should weigh the goods of virus containment against those of commerce and worship. By conflating fact- and value-based judgments, elites treat deviation from their preferred policies not as legitimate political disagreements, but as rejections of truth itself. Unsurprisingly, this has not endeared them or their institutions to the larger public.
Russell and Patterson further highlight the shortcomings of typical “post-truth” diagnoses. For instance, many argue that populists have fallen victim to “misinformation.” Not only is this proposition lacking in empirical support, but it relies on a naïve and philosophically untenable view that classifying “misinformation” is a straightforward process. In fact, claims of “misinformation” and efforts at “fact-checking” frequently serve more to reinforce biases of existing elites than to distinguish truth from falsehood. Charges of racism, conspiracism, or anti-intellectualism underlying populist discontent similarly reduce to either raw assertions of authority or shallow engagements with genuinely complex substantive disagreements.
The Weaponization of Expertise does not possess (or attempt) the grandeur of The Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch sets out to draft a constitution, whereas Russell and Patterson are merely prosecuting a case. But as a diagnosis of our political predicament, the latter work offers the stronger account. CoK is too dismissive of populist discontent to help us make sense of it, and its noble abstractions float too far above the rough-and-tumble of our actual cultural conflicts. Russell and Hale’s seemingly simple story (in brief: elites overreach, populists call them out, elites double down) ultimately described these conflicts in a more realistic and grounded manner.
Though the two works provide opposite diagnoses of populist discontent, they basically point to the same prescription: elites need to recommit themselves to the ideals of liberal epistemology. Honesty, openness, objectivity, humility, and institutional renewal are all in order. Yet the prescription comes in very different hues. In Rauch’s telling, elites need to responsibly reassert the meritocratic superiority that is rightfully theirs. In Russell and Patterson’s, they should instead relinquish claims to superiority except within the narrow domains of their expertise. The former attitude has its place, but the latter is more fitting for an elite that must be chastened before it can be reinvigorated.
The “post-truth” narrative has receded from its early 2020s prominence, perhaps due to growing awareness of its philosophical and empirical fragility, the disillusioning experience of COVID-19, or its political ineffectiveness as evidenced by the 2024 election. Whatever the cause, the contrast between 2021’s The Constitution of Knowledge and 2025’s The Weaponization of Expertise reflects an epistemological dimension of the broader “vibe shift” of the past year.
In this uncertain landscape, elite institutions seeking a sure footing would do well to prioritize trust-building over truth-policing. This entails cultivating norms that temper partisan and moralistic excess, acknowledging how ideological bias has compromised truth-seeking, and engaging with people and perspectives that are prominent in American society but unrepresented in elite circles. Without such norms, there is a need for a corrective missing from Rauch’s “constitution”, but present in the American Constitution to which it is analogized—namely, a system of democratic checks and balances.
Truth itself cannot be left up to a vote. But the public needs some means of intervening when it perceives society’s professional truth-seekers to have gone astray, whether this involves boycotting publications, cutting or redirecting public research funding, or voting on amendments to the legal system. We should not assume a public that enacts such interventions has rejected truth. They may be understood instead as seeking to enforce a social contract in which society’s epistemic elites have failed to hold up their end.
About The Author
