Incompetent Leaders Exposed

Putting people in public office is not like casting a movie or even a television advertisement. In fictional worlds you need but look the part. Even if you don’t look the part, you will be shown to be playing the part with aplomb. You need to perform the gestures that most people imagine, fit the role. In short, you need to be an especially good liar. 

Of course, in a fiction, the outcome is predetermined. There is no reality test in fiction. You do not have to answer to any constituency. You need but look the part.

Politics is a different game. While you can certainly advance in politics by seducing the public, by tricking them into believing that you are capable of doing the job, at some point, the rubber hits the road and you have to answer to your constituents. At some point your failings and flailings will cost you the respect of the general public, and you are, as they say, toast.

The Biden-Harris administration seems to embody this perfectly. However much people imagined that Joe Biden was a competent, seasoned professional politician, few people noticed that he was suffering from senile dementia, and that he could not even maintain the fiction of being in charge or of knowing what he is doing. Similarly, for the singularly inept Kamala Harris, a living argument against diversity, equity and inclusion. Everyone had imagined that she was supremely qualified-- she was a United States senator-- but then she started to speak and we discovered that she had no idea what she was talking about.

And then there are our government bureaucrats. The ones who are directing the Covid-response effort have asserted their authority, but in a curious way. Theirs is more about totalitarian control over minds than about providing consequential leadership.

A serious leader listens to is staff. He interacts with his staff. He exchanges ideas and data. And he formulates a plan that contains pieces of the advice he has received from below.

Such is not the case with our current batch of bureaucrats. They have decided that they are not really political leaders, but are philosopher kings. This means, they need not listen to you or me. They need not exchange ideas with the hoi polloi. They see things so much more clearly and want to impose their views on the populace, like it or not. 

We have often noted in these pages that the hallmark of scientific study is skepticism. When you are promoting your ideas as absolutely certain, as beyond doubt, as completely settled, you are not doing science. You are trafficking in dogma.

This applies to the hapless Anthony Fauci who has insisted on having total control of the nation’s Covid response, and who therefore, as Sen. Rand Paul said the other say, must bear some considerable responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths.

The fiction of settled science comes to us from the crowd that has been pushing the notion of a climate apocalypse. These mighty prophets have insisted that their computer generated models can foretell the future and that we must act now, to dismantle the Industrial Revolution. 

As it happens, and has been noted many times in these pages, there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow. It is a hypotheses that awaits tomorrow to be proved or disproved.

The climate change hysterics are insisting that they are philosopher kings, that they possess the incontrovertible truth and that you must obey. It has not crossed their minds that they might be wrong, so they insist that they are totally right. 

And yet, as behavioral economists have discovered, once you try to force people to do something, they naturally push back. They do so even if you are promoting something that will benefit them. When you threaten someone’s face, he will first defend his face, in this case, his free will, before he will accede to your despotic impositions.

Anyway, Daniel Henninger argued in his Wall Street Journal column yesterday that our inept bureaucrats and our incompetent politicians have undermined their claims at authority. I would mention that this is not necessarily an unalloyed good, but such is the case. Their hysterics have so often been discredited, or shown to be fantasy, that no one believes in them any more.

The other day esteemed columnist Bari Weiss wrote on her Substack that she was fed up with the hysterics about Covid, and that she was going back to living her life. 

Henninger addresses himself to Joe Biden, and compliments Biden on having cured the American people of their trust in politicians.

What you’ve done has long been thought even more impossible than finding a cure for Covid. You’ve immunized the American people against politics. Give this man the Nobel Peace Prize.

Apparently, the people who told us that they were going to get the virus under control have been exposed as liars and frauds. They are like the Wizard of Oz, exposed as a strange old man flipping switches and pulling levers. They are not competent professionals. Many have been granted their positions in order to fulfil diversity quotas. They do not command respect or inspire confidence. 

The results of their policies are arrayed all around us:

Omicron infections are arriving at hundreds of thousands a day. Sagas abound of burned-out hospital workers and depleted workforces. Holiday air travel was a historic nightmare. The promised supply of rapid antigen tests is today’s equivalent of the bridge to nowhere. Cloth masks worked, until they didn’t. School’s out—forever.

It was remarkable how often one saw people interviewed while standing in lines to be tested say: “I don’t understand how this can be happening after two years.” People are flying the pandemic white flag: They’ve stopped caring what the government, the politicians or “science” is telling them about Covid.

The Covid pandemic is altering many multiples of behavioral patterns, and one of the biggest, for which we should thank the virus, is the death of certitude.

I would not have chosen the word certitude, but I would say that America’s confidence in its experts and its political class has been damaged, perhaps irrevocably. The general feeling is that the ship of state is both rudderless and captainless:

From Covid’s start in 2020, public and scientific authorities across the world said: “Trust us. We know what we are doing.” We now see that this unshakable, public-facing certitude was false.

Today, it’s fair to say that no one but the hopelessly credulous believe much of anything Mr. Biden, Jen Psaki, Anthony Fauci or Rochelle Walensky says about Covid and Omicron. The list of doubted authorities worldwide could extend to the horizon.

In effect, there is nothing wrong with respecting authority. The problem here is not authority but the aspiration to be philosopher kings who traffic in dogma and who want to impose themselves on the masses, the better to cover up their own incompetence and their own suspicion that they are in way over their heads.

My purpose is not to discredit public authority or science. We need both. Public authorities in 2020 cleared the regulatory path for Operation Warp Speed, which let private-sector scientists develop protective vaccines. My intention is to re-establish a necessary virtue that looks altogether lost to public life and its scientific representatives: intellectual modesty.

It would be good to have more intellectual humility. A dialogue between leaders and followers would help restore confidence. And yet, since Dr. Fauci is an aspiring dictator, such a dialogue seems nearly impossible.

Our leaders, Henninger continues, seem compelled to look as though they are in control. They play the part, more or less well, until reality starts crashing around them:

Political leaders try to convey the impression of control over events, insofar as most are always on thin ice with the public. With the pandemic, the most visible faces of U.S. authority across two years—Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, Joe Biden—became caricatures of the in-control public figure. In their world, we were always winning.

Our inept leaders have tried to shore up their own positions by saying that the science is absolute and that they alone know it. We have seen that Dr. Fauci and Co. did everything in their power to discredit the scientists who signed the Great Barrington declaration. The truth is, different scientists had different proposals. To think that science is one thing and that it can be known to an absolute certainty is a sign of hubris, the kind that doomed tragic heroes to destruction.

Science as a political weapon originated with the battle over climate policy.

Disputes among scientists can get famously intense, but at some point in the past decade, the impatient proponents of climate-change policy enlisted the media to suppress dissent. Social-media companies, whose employees surely self-regard as rigorous STEM graduates, enabled the intellectual silencing. Dissent, which is perhaps the most honorable political tradition in free systems, was demoted into oblivion as “misinformation”—again with mass-media support.

Recently, we discovered the new word, disinformation or misinformation, and we now believe that when people make the decisions we do not want them to make, they simply do not have the right facts. In truth, it means that they do not respect the authority of our philosopher kings:

How can we be winning if a significant portion of the U.S. population has come to believe that the representations of science about climate and Covid are mostly, to pick a word, disinformation?

What does real science look like?

Every week, the New England Journal of Medicine publishes the results of clinical studies involving myriad medical problems, including Covid-19. The NEJM exists because few of the diseases explored in its pages are ever “solved.” The nuances of medical treatment, which is to say science, get debated in subsequent articles and letters.

Of its nature, public health is authoritarian, ordering the masses into compliance for some larger social good, such as food-handling hygiene. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, now fitfully run by the White House-compliant Dr. Walensky, occupies a gray realm between issuing directives and serving as a scientific clearinghouse. During the pandemic, serious scientists—in and out of public life—have let their status as discoverers of important but ever-contingent knowledge be hijacked by the authoritarians of certitude. Omicron has ended their reign.

Consider it a silver lining in a cloud of troubles.