Weaponization of Expertise

Some Thoughts on Elites, Populism, and The Mess We Are All In

Consider a common narrative about the main problem with public discourse: the problem is that many people are too sceptical, too distrustful of “experts” (academics, politicians, bankers, journalists). They are too sceptical and distrustful because they are constantly bombarded with misinformation. Misinformation spreads online via “echo chambers”, where false information goes “viral”. Social media algorithms aide this because they reward emotional and divisive content over nuance. The traditional gatekeepers—journalists, academics, scientific institutions—have been undermined by these technological and social changes. As a result, people are vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors, who spread falsehoods for political or financial gain.

This narrative involves several inter-related assumptions. First, if people would just recognise genuine expertise, public discourse would improve and societal consensus on important issues would follow. Second, the traditional gatekeepers do (or at least used to do) a good job of figuring things out—finding solutions to complex social problems—and communicating those solutions to the public. Third, one reason why people are unable to recognise genuine expertise is lack of education or faulty critical thinking—people are simply unable to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources. Finally, experts serve as objective arbiters—they stand above petty partisan political disagreement.

The narrative also lends itself naturally to a proposed solution: we need to increase trust in legitimate experts via better education, improved media literacy, and aggressive content moderation to limit the spread of misinformation. Different proponents of this solution will weigh these components differently: you might prefer to focus on education rather than content moderation, in the hope that better educated subjects won’t be so easily fooled. But all proponents of this solution agree we need to restore deference to credentialed experts and established institutions. They are our primary knowledge authorities, so we need to put our trust in them

That was a bit of a caricature. Anyone—or at least anyone worth engaging with—who seriously defends the common narrative will add a good deal of nuance. Experts and expert institutions aren’t perfect; what, though, is the alternative? But it is a caricature that picks out a recognisable position. We can call it the “technocratic mindset”: experts have the skills and knowledge required to solve complex social problems, so we should give them the job of solving them for us. Our job—unless you happen to be a member of this expert class—is to let them get on with solving them. The problem is that, right now, we—at least, in certain countries—are not letting the experts get on with it. This needs to be remedied, by some combination of education, media literacy, and content moderation.

A recent book, Jacob Russell and Dennis Patterson’s The Weaponization of Expertise, sets out to explain and critique the technocratic mindset and the common narrative about the problem with public discourse that goes with it. For Russell and Patterson, the technocratic mindset is an expression of hubris (experts have the skills and knowledge required to solve all our problems) and the common narrative is completely wrong. It is wrong because it misunderstands both the nature of expertise and the reasons for widespread rejection of it. The solutions put forward by proponents of the common narrative won’t work because they misunderstand the reasons why many people don’t listen to the experts. They mischaracterise rejection of the expert consensus as a simple refusal to listen to what the experts have to say. People know what the experts are saying. They just don’t believe them.

I can’t say that I agree with everything in Russell and Patterson’s book. But those failings are the flip side of the things it does well. They quite rightly skewer assorted members of the expert class for two related failings: they over-estimate their own skills and abilities, and they under-estimate the skills and abilities of ordinary people. As a result, they misunderstand the source of public skepticism about the expert class. But, where Russell and Patterson have a nuanced and sympathetic understanding of these ordinary people, they fail to extend that nuance or sympathy to the experts or the institutions they inhabit. The result sometimes come close to the inverse of the common narrative: the problem isn’t ordinary people but the experts. As a corrective to the pathologies of elite discourse, this is welcome. As a serious attempt to understand our current political moment, it is potentially dangerous in the way that all simplifications are potentially dangerous.

But what, exactly, is their corrective? And why—despite my agreement with many of their central claims—am I not fully on board with it? Let me start with a summary of some of Russell and Paterson's main arguments.

The Technocratic Mindset

In the first part of the book Russell and Patterson take a closer look at elites. Their core thesis is that elites use claims of expertise to shut down democratic debate on policy questions that involve value judgments. For Russell and Patterson, elites are primarily defined by their educational credentials. These credentials create what they call a "diploma divide" in political and cultural attitudes that drives populism.

This elite class is characterised by what Russell and Patterson call the "technocratic mindset". This mindset "reduces complex social and political questions to technical problems, removing the role of values and public judgment". As they put it:

Public-policy questions are, to them [that is: elite technocrats], ultimately technical puzzles to be solved by experts. This epistemic stance is what interests us about the elite because we think it is this attitude—more than any particular political vision—that ignites the ire of populists.

The COVID-19 pandemic serves as their central case study of expert overreach. During the pandemic, they argue, scientific authority was extended beyond technical matters into domains requiring value judgments. This, they think, was a mistake:

Most troublingly, the idea that we had to defer to science extended even to claims that could not be adjudicated by science alone. Pandemic policies presented trade-offs that could not possibly be resolved without considering domains far beyond fields such as immunology.

Russell and Patterson provide numerous examples of this overreach, but they focus on two pandemic-related policies in particular: school closures and mask mandates. In the case of school closures, they argue that experts advocated for extended closures despite early evidence against their necessity, leading to significant educational harms. Similarly, they argue that mask policies are a case in point of the misuse of expertise during the pandemic: exaggerated claims of efficacy, attempts to stifle debate, and to dismiss any and all contradicting research.

Importantly, Russell and Patterson argue that the problems with expertise are structural and not confined to the pandemic. They cite John Ioannidis's influential paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" to support their claim that methodological limitations, publication bias, and the like, distort scientific research. More generally, they argue that the replication crisis is in large part the result of an academic system that rewards “novel, surprising findings” instead of “careful, nuanced work”. They also argue that researchers deserve some of the blame for the many forms of exaggeration that occur in press releases and media stories about published research.

Populism as Rational Response to Elite Overreach

Russell and Paterson frame populism as a rational response to elite overreach, rather than simple ignorance or resentment. They define populism as:

A reaction to elites running along cultural, economic, and political dimensions and caused by the absence of opportunities for exit and voice.

Their two paradigm examples of populism are the rise of Donald Trump in the US (the book was written before the 2024 election, but their analysis would nicely explain the result) and the 2016 Brexit referendum. But they also understand “science scepticism”, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a manifestation of the same underlying populist rejection of elite overreach.

For Russell and Paterson, the problem with a lot of discussions of populism is that they are oversimplified. They are oversimplified in a few different ways. One is that they tend to focus on populist politicians and their rhetoric (case in point: Donald Trump), rather than populist voters and their motiviations. Another is that populust voters are typically treated as monolithic movements, when in reality they are diverse coalitions. (Here it is perhaps important to distinguish between the most vocal supporters of a politician and the coalition that votes for them, which in any large electorate is always going to be relatively diverse).

Perhaps the easiest way to see why Russell and Paterson view populist voters as a diverse coalition is by focusing on what they see as the economic dimension of populism. The economic factors that drive populism include: stagnant middle-class wages, rising costs of housing and other essentials, globalisation effects, and technological changes that threatening traditional jobs. Because of this focus, Russell and Paterson view someone like Bernie Sanders and his enduring popularity as an indication of how widespread populist sentiment is. As they repeatedly tell us, populism is not a “right wing” phenomenon, even though some of its most visible manifestations can be found on the political right. [At this point, it would really have helped their case if they had shifted their attention from the US to Latin America. More on this below!].

Beyond taking a closer look at the motivations of populist voters, Russell and Paterson sketch the contours of what they call “populist epistemology”. Populist epistemology combines two components. The first is scepticism about elite knowledge and elite claims to knowledge. This component has a lot in common with the critique of technocracy and technocratic knowledge in Jeffrey Friedman’s excellent book Power without Knowledge, which I have previously written about.

The second component is a defence of common sense and commonsensical knowledge. It is a bit unclear what this component really amounts to. But I think it resolves into one (or both) of two things. The first is a defence of the value of commonsensical scepticism, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Russell and Patterson discuss various instances where a more common sense approach might have revealed the problems with mask mandates which said you had to wear a mask in a restaurant, but could take it off to eat, or school closures that extended far beyond the point when it was clear that children were at no particular risk. The second is a defence of “local knowledge” and the validity of “lay expertise”. I’ll say more about this in a minute, but the basic idea is that local knowledge is sometimes essential to solving problems. They provide examples where expert predictions failed but lay insights proved correct, such as the case of sheep farmers who correctly predicted long-term contamination after the Chernobyl incide

Elite Reactions and Intellectual Tyranny

The final part of the book examines how elites have reacted to populist challenges. In Russell and Paterson’s view, they have reacted badly. They have doubled down on the behaviours that are responsible for the rise of populism, like elite overreach. They have also manufactured a crisis—the “post-truth” crisis—with its attendant worries about fake news and misinformation, in the attempt to explain what has gone wrong without acknowledging their part in the problem.

Against this, Russell and Paterson argue that the so-called post-truth crisis is overstated. They say that:

All the best social science research converges on the same finding: there is no evidence that we live in an age uniquely defined by misinformation or conspiratorial belief.

This is, of course, not to say that misinformation does not exist. Indeed, misinformation exists and has always existed. Their point is that it is not responsible for any of our current problems. If anything, it is the other way round: populism creates a kind of “market” for misinformation, because people who come to distrust elites go looking for “alternative experts” and alternative sources of information.

Russell and Patterson are particularly critical of what they call the "intellectual tyranny" adopted by elites, who dismiss dissent as "misinformation" rather than engaging with substantive critiques. They tell us:

The darkest side of the elite mindset is perhaps its descent into intellectual tyranny. Skepticism is mislabeled denialism; dissent is censored as misinformation or derided as conspiracy thinking; open discussion is marked off-bounds as bothsidesism.

The elite reaction to their authority being challenged has been to circle the wagons, to portray dissent as beyond the pail.

As elsewhere in the book, the COVID-19 pandemic serves as Russell and Patterson’s main example. They sketch what is more or less the standard view in the philosophy and sociology of expertise about the basis of scientific authority: scientific consensus differs from “groupthink” because it is reached via a process of contestation and debate. It is the social structures of science that confer authority on the results of the scientific process, not the brilliance and intelligence of individual scientists. But, as Russell and Patterson point out, this entails that the way in which science and the scientific consensus was portrayed during the pandemic is deeply confused. During the pandemic, there was no settled scientific consensus around masking, lockdowns, or most other public health measures that were debated. The consensus was in the process of being arrived at. You can’t treat the tentative ideas and hypotheses arrived at during the emergence of a consensus in the same way you treat a settled consensus. But this is exactly what happened throughout the pandemic.

One of the most interesting aspects of this part of the book is Russell and Patterson’s defence of “lay expertise”. These lay experts:

Often employ sophisticated data analysis and scientific methods, challenging the idea that only credentialed experts can evaluate evidence.

Russell and Patterson cite several examples of lay expertise. These include examples that many sociologists and philosophers often discuss and I have discussed in a previous piece: patient activists, Cumbrian sheep farmers, and various applications of “local knowledge”. Where Russell and Patterson differ from the existing literature is in arguing that we should view some communities of “science sceptics” in a similar way, with a particular focus on some anti-masking groups on social media. Their point here, I take it, is that, if we’re going to defend the existence of lay expertise, we can’t simply pick and choose the communities of “lay experts” who don’t challenge our pre-existing scientific and political commitments.

It must be emphasised that Russell and Patterson do not reject expertise. Rather, they advocate for epistemic humility—acknowledging uncertainty, valuing debate, and recognising that policy issues involve both facts and values. In their view, the lesson to take from the various public health missteps during the COVID-19 pandemic is not that scientists are idiots because they made so many mistakes. The lesson is rather that the fact they made some mistakes shows that some scientists were often lacking in this epistemic humility, and that it was wrong to restrict debate on things like school closures, lockdowns and masks:

Hindsight is not the correct judge of a decision, which may have rested on stable grounds when first made, but reversals made in hindsight shed an uncomfortable spotlight on why silencing dissent is so problematic.

What Russell and Paterson conclude from all this is that democracy fundamentally requires trusting citizens' capacity for political judgment rather than deferring solely to expert opinion. As they put it at the end of their book, their main aim was "to reassert a basic, moral claim about democracy: political judgment belongs to all of us". The book as a whole should be read as a broadside against the idea that we should simply defer to the elites because the elites know best.

Populism Outside the US

At this point I cannot resist a snide aside. (If you want to hear my real criticisms, skip to the next section!).

There is an extremely odd point in Russell and Patterson’s discussion of populism. At one point they say, almost in passing, that “populism across history and across the globe is a single phenomenon”. Even if this is true, they provide absolutely no reason for thinking it is true. They pay absolutely no attention to manifestations of populism across history.

Moreover, they only pay attention to manifestations of populism outside the US when they can be understood as similar to populism in the US, in the 21st century, post 2016. There is barely any discussion of populism in Latin America or Asia. There is a bit of discussion of populism in Europe, but no discussion of populism in Eastern Europe. This is quite confusing: their basic analysis of populism is that it is a reaction to globalism and neoliberalism. This is a promising basis for understanding populism across the globe (though perhaps not history). But they don't even begin to pursue it.

Instead, their story shares a common problem with the simplistic narratives around populism and misinformation that they want to criticise. It is a story that seems almost entirely based on two events in 2016 and their aftermath: the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum. This is, to say the least, an impoverished basis for understanding populism—especially if you profess to think that populism “across history and across the globe” is a single phenomenon.

[A second snide aside: In their discussion of Brexit they struggle to keep the distinctions between England, (Great) Britain and the United Kingdom straight. As a professional Scottish person, few things are more guaranteed to annoy me than using “England” interchangeably with “Britain” or “the UK”].

The Problem of Terminological Slippage

Ok now for the more important problems. One of the most confusing aspects of Russell and Patterson's analysis is the terminological slippage in their use of the words "elite" and "expert." They define elites broadly, noting that:

The moniker elites, roughly speaking, refers to university-credentialed experts in high-paying, usually urban-centric jobs, alongside the politicians and members of the media who enable them.

But at various points they use the words “elite” and “expert” to refer to people who occupy a wide range of roles and positions: academics, journalists, politicians, business figures, military personnel, and simply "the rich”. It is a little difficult to see what ties all these groups together. There is no obvious connection between being a member of this broadly defined elite and being an expert in any particular domain—you don't need a university qualification to be in the military or have significant wealth.

This terminological imprecision matters because it muddies their central argument. There is a broad story they might be telling, in which populism is a backlash against the excessive power wielded by elites in general, and a narrower story, in which populism is a backlash against the excessive power wielded by an expert class within the broader class of elites. Both stories might be plausible, but they are not the same story.

The distinction becomes important when Russell and Patterson attempt to demonstrate the power of elites. They argue that:

It is implausible to hold that elites lack power because economic elites and elite groups that represent big business have enormous power to shape government policy.

This may be true, but it relies on the broader definition of "elite." What about their central target—academic elites? Do they have the same kind of power as economic elites? Some of them might because they are members of the economic elite. (I am told that professors at fancy US universities are quite highly paid). But many of them aren’t.

This conceptual looseness leads to another problem. When Russell and Patterson attribute failures during the pandemic to "elites," it is not always clear who the failure is being attributed to. For example, in their discussions of school closures and mask mandates they document numerous public policy missteps, bad political decisions, and nakedly partisan behaviours. But it is not always clear why this represents a failure with the expert class, rather than a failure with the political class, or with teaching unions, or some other group that is part of the "elite” in the broad sense but not the narrower sense.

At times it seems like Russell and Patterson’s point is not so much about the failures of the expert class as about the failure of our politicians and political systems to make proper use of the knowledge produced by the expert class. At one point they say that a core problem is that people "pick and choose the experts that tell them what they want to hear". This may well be true, but if it is true it isn’t obviously a failing on the part of the experts themselves. It’s a broader problem with our political culture.

If, as Russell and Paterson argue, expertise is weaponised, we need to ask why anyone listens to the experts—why does weaponisation work? The answer likely involves a political culture that values the veneer of expertise more than expertise itself, because it provides justification for preexisting political positions, or because it is a convenient way for a politician to avoid responsibility for their own decisions. For someone faced with the decision whether to order a nationwide lockdown, it is convenient to be able to outsource the decision to a scientist who has a model on which only a lockdown will avoid millions of deaths, rather than to take responsibility for making your own decision. If they are right, you have made the right decision; if they are wrong, you can say you were simply “following the science”.

The Neglect of Populist Politicians and Ideological Entrepeneurs

Russell and Patterson deliberately focus on populist voters rather than looking at populist politicians and the intellectuals who provide them with legitimacy. This is perfectly sensible. They are entirely right in challenging claims about populism and populist voters that are insulting and demonstrably false.

But there is an issue here.Russell and Patterson’s book spends a lot of time documenting the problems with elites and elite discourse and no time at all talking about the problems with populist politicians and the ideological entrepreneurs who court populist voters. Not only does this miss an important part of the story, it means there is a bit of a gap in their discussion of elites and the pathologies within elite discourse. It is hardly a stretch to say that populist politicians and intellectuals increasingly function like a new elite, and it is important to ask whether that new elite is any better than the old one.

Russell and Patterson spend a lot of time excoriating Tom Nichols, an American academic and writer, who has written a book called The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. I haven’t read Nichols’ book, but if Russell and Patterson’s discussion of what Nichols has to say about expertise is half-accurate, I don’t particularly want to; it doesn’t sound very insightful. But they quote Nichols as saying that populism harbours an “unfocused rage at the culture, at the elites” which produces opportunities for “savvy operators” to “exploit”.

This sounds to me like a perfect description of someone like Jordan Peterson, who is by any measure a member of the elite, and has made a lucrative career out of attacking the elite. Peterson illustrates a more general phenomenon. While Russell and Paterson may well be correct that elites weaponise expertise for political gain, they don’t discuss how other elites do the same thing in reverse. These “counter-elites” leverage anti-elite sentiment not to empower ordinary citizens, but to build their own power bases and advance their own agendas.

The lesson to take from this is that, if you want to analyse elite discourse as a form of status competition, where elites use their credentials to achieve power and status, and to advocate for their political goals, no matter how idiosyncratic or unpopular, then you need to be more even-handed than Russell and Patterson.

The Limits of Populist Epistemology

I have a few concerns with what Russell and Patterson say about populist epistemology. The concern is not that there is nothing to the idea of “lay expertise” or that they are wrong to highlight the values of “local knowledge”. The concern is more that I’m not really sure what their populist epistemology amounts to.

Jeffrey Friedman’s book, Power without Knowledge, which I mentioned earlier, serves as a useful comparison here. Like Russell and Patterson, Friedman is concerned to highlight the basic problems with technocracy. For Friedman, technocracy requires a kind of knowledge (knowledge of social problems, their causes, and how to solve them via public policy) that is incredibly hard to obtain. It is hard to obtain not because technocrats (policy makers, social scientists) are corrupt, lazy, or subject to various perverse incentives, but because social problems are complex, and evaluating their solutions is very difficult.

Friedman concludes that technocracy is doomed to fail, but he also concludes that a populist alternative is doomed to fail too. If social problems are as complex as Friedman thinks they are, common sense and commonsensical knowledge is not going to suffice to understand or solve them. Populist epistemology is no better off than technocracy. Friedman’s conclusion seems to be that we need to abandon the idea that we can leverage knowledge—whether produced by technocrats or “the people”—to solve complex social problems. [This is rather a strong conclusion and it is unclear whether he himself really endorses it. But that’s not our concern here, and in any case you don’t need to go as far as Friedman seems to in order to highlight the challenges facing technocracy].

I’m not sure whether Russell and Patterson agree with Friedman about the scale of the problem facing technocracy. In some places they seem to suggest that a populist alternative to technocracy would be preferrable. In other places they walk this back a bit. At one point they say that:

Populist epistemology—at least in its less extreme forms—is quite defensible. Very few public-policy questions rest solely on expertise: many implicate questions of values, morality, and trade-offs between different domains. The sphere where expertise can supply absolute 'answers' is really quite narrow. Most purported uses of expertise are, in fact, a bluff, where experts are trotted out to shore up the political priors of elites.

This passage encapsulates the problem. On the one hand, parts of it sound concessive: they seem to be saying that what we need is a more democratic way of doing public policy. This aligns with the mainstream view in philosophy of science, which is more concerned with the precise ways in which we need to democratise knowledge production and policy making than with arguing for the need to democratise policy making in the first place.

On the other hand, what do they mean when they say that “most purported uses of expertise are, in fact, a bluff”? Do they mean to say that there is an alternative to all this, where we get in the people who really can leverage their expertise to solve problems? If so, who are these people? Are they reformed elites, or ordinary people? How are we going to find them? Russell and Patterson simply don’t tell us.

Am I (an Elite) Just Triggered by This?

I struggled to write a conclusion to this piece. While the criticisms I have discussed may give a different impression, in fact I agree with the vast majority of Russell and Paterson's central claims. I am as sceptical of the technocratic mindset as they are (maybe more so), I am well aware of the inherent limitations of expertise, and, while some of their discussion is a little lacking in philosophical nuance and sophistication, this is more than compensated by political nuance. So why, as I read this book, did I find myself constantly wanting to disagree with them?

Maybe the reason is simply that I am one of the people they are criticising. I work at a university, I have political views, and no doubt those views have sometimes seeped into my work. I have, you might say, a vested interest in defending elites and elite institutions: my livelihood and social status, such as it is, depends on it.

Even if that's part of the reason, it isn't the whole story. To my mind, far from being too cynical about elites and the incentives that produce elite status competition, Russell and Paterson are—at least in places—not cynical enough. As I have argued, while they are happy to criticise academic experts for weaponising their expertise in the service of defending lockdowns, mask mandates, and "following the science," they don't give sufficient weight to the fact that outspoken critics of these policies were in essence doing the same thing: leveraging their expert status—or in some cases their status as outsiders, heterodox thinkers shunned by the mainstream—to agitate for their preferred approach. If we are going to view elite discourse as an elevated form of status competition, we need to be even-handed: the elites who decry the elites are as much engaged in status competition as the elites they decry.

But it goes deeper. I think the basic reason for my discontent is this. Russell and Paterson combine their negative, some might say cynical, take on the failings of elites, academic experts, and research institutions with a call for the return to older, more traditional scholarly (and journalistic) norms and ideals. We need to return, they suggest, to the old ideal of academic inquiry as open-minded and critical. Researchers should be truth-seekers and journalists should seek to report the truth. To be sure: Russell and Paterson aren't naïve. They don't claim these ideals were ever fully realised, and they don't think that researchers and academic institutions can stand "outside" of politics (as they constantly remind us, facts do not speak for themselves—they must be interpreted, and different people will interpret them differently). But they do claim that we have stopped trying to realise these lofty ideals.

What is missing from Russell and Paterson's book is a serious attempt to grapple with why we have stopped trying to realise these lofty ideals. (And why we perhaps never really tried in the first place). Why have journalists become partisan mudslingers? Why have legacy media institutions increasingly become mouthpieces for political parties and stopped even pretending to present a balance of different opinions? Why have academic researchers increasingly entered the political arena? Why do scholars favour eye-catching findings over careful, serious work? In the case of the media, I think the answer is fairly obvious: the industry is collapsing, and this is a desperate attempt, both on the part of institutions and individual journalists, to survive in a world where there is simply not enough money for the sort of careful, serious journalism that Russell and Paterson quite rightly yearn for.

In the case of universities, the answer is more complicated. It partly parallels the answer in the case of journalism: academics, particularly academics who don't study or work at universities like Harvard or Oxford, are faced with the challenge of securing, and then holding on to, a paying job, and this requires doing the things that everyone else is doing: publish (a lot), apply for funding (lots), grow your public profile (hence why I’m here). This inevitably distorts both your research priorities and the results of that research. There are of course academics who build a career by refusing to conform. But they must, of necessity, be a minority.

This can't be the full story, however, because academics who work at places like Harvard and Oxford do these things too. Indeed, they often work at Harvard or Oxford because they do these things better than everyone else. If anyone has the freedom to refuse to go along with all these perverse incentives, it is the tenured Harvard Professor.

I think the full story has something to do with the dynamics of politicisation. And here I find myself agreeing with Russell and Patterson on a crucial point: academia, scientific research, and knowledge institutions have indeed become increasingly politicised in recent decades. What was once at least nominally a pursuit of knowledge governed by scholarly norms has increasingly become a site for political battles. University departments, academic journals, and research agendas now often explicitly align with particular political positions. The scholar who claims to simply be pursuing truth is viewed with suspicion from all sides.

Given this reality, it is worth considering whether politicisation itself is the problem. It is a commonplace that politicisation is a bad thing. The commonplace is sensible enough, once we add a few caveats. Some things just are political and should remain that way. Perhaps there are some things which we don't currently view as political that really should be viewed as such. But by "politicisation" people typically mean something like "making something political that was not and should not be political." (There is a subtler variant, where something that was always in some vague sense political acquires a stronger political resonance. But we’ll ignore subtleties right now).

I don't know if politicisation is always a bad thing. If nothing else, people can disagree over what things are not and should not be political. But I do think that politicisation is sometimes a bad thing. To my mind, an under-appreciated reason why politicisation can be a bad thing is that it produces a particularly destructive dynamic. Once something (like a University or a scientific issue) becomes politicised, someone who is unhappy, or even just uneasy, about this is in a very difficult position. If they do nothing—abandon the issue or institution, or ignore its politicisation and continue as before—then, not only does it remain politicised, it retains its new political valence. Those who politicised it "win". If they try to do something about it, they cannot avoid engaging in politics, with the result that the thing in question becomes more politicised. While things can become depoliticised, this isn't that common, and it typically takes a long time. The result is that, once something becomes politicised, it tends not only to stay that way, but become more politicised over time.

We can apply this to politicised academic research. Scholarship, universities, and knowledge-producing institutions have become sites of political battles and, once that happens, it is very hard to back down. Backing down basically means letting the "other side" (or one of the many sides) win. There are of course those who want to take a more high-minded approach, equivalent to nuclear disarmament. But we know how the campaign for nuclear disarmament is doing. Those calling for disarmament in the absence of broader agreement are often seen as naïve idealists at best, or as actively undermining their own side at worst. The unilateral disarmer leaves themselves vulnerable to those who have not disarmed, just as the researcher or institution that refuses to engage in political battles may find themselves sidelined or irrelevant in increasingly partisan debates.

This dynamic helps explain why even those who recognise the problems with politicisation—like the tenured Harvard professors who could theoretically resist these trends—often don't. The costs of unilateral resistance are too high in a system where everyone else has embraced the new rules. A senior researcher who refuses to engage in the political dimensions of their field risks being dismissed as irrelevant or naïve, while watching colleagues who embrace politicisation gain influence, funding, and attention.

Russell and Paterson are right to yearn for ideals in academic research and journalism. But what they don't adequately explain is how we might come any closer to realising those ideals in a world that, for better or worse (I would certainly say worse), is heavily politicised. It's not enough to simply call for better norms when the incentives driving the current behaviour remain firmly in place. The political and economic forces that have created our current predicament—from the collapse of traditional media business models to the increasing precarity of academic employment to the growing polarisation of society as a whole—won't disappear through appeals to better behaviour alone. I must admit that, if pressed, I don’t think they will disappear—indeed, I think they will grow. I am, as a result, a good deal more pessimistic than Russell and Patterson sometimes seem to be about the future. So perhaps my fundamental issue with their book is that, far from being too pessimistic, it is not pessimistic enough. But then I would think that. After all, I am a born pessimist.