Whether it is Nikki Haley or Tom Cotton running for president or Fox’s prime-time lineup bolstering Trump’s underlings, for as long as I have a public platform, I will contend that these are people who betrayed the principles of our system of government for their own gain and that my fellow citizens should refuse to give them votes or ratings. Stop Worrying About Free Beer and Doughnuts. But there is also a history that is undeniable: where I grew up in Massachusetts was built on mill work. But if you have no idea of history or science or technology beyond last week, this won't occur to you. I'll give you an example. Is the earth's warming a natural cycle? Join Facebook to connect with Tom Nichols Sr. and others you may know. “Well, because they’re trying to get you fired,” my friend said. We all paid for our dissent, in various ways. Donald Trump, remarkably, has managed to sell that same line, despite the fact that Trump is like almost no one else in America. If we’d been in it for our own enrichment, we’d have made the smart play and signed on with Trump, because that’s where the money was right from the start. In The Death of Expertise, I emphasize "Sturgeon's rule," the dictum by the late sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon that in any human endeavour about "ninety percent of everything is crap." But when a cable show puts on a climate scientist and a climate-science skeptic—I won't say "denier," because some of them are real skeptics—it looks to the viewer like it's a fifty-fifty split on the basic question. You risked looking like an idiot not only in front of an actual doctor but in front of one who was also your friend and a member of your community. This is all inane, but it's also supremely dangerous, because again, it makes the viewer feel like the sole arbiter of important questions that are not only over his head but also should be discussed with other citizens repeatedly and with goodwill, not via Facebook memes. Related Videos. I was not an anti-EU guy. An introduction to Public Theology for the Common Good. (For the record, I have received zero compensation for my association with the Lincoln Project, but I hope the owners of the organization get plenty rich. Please be patient while we complete the request. I believe that if all of us had caved, Trump would now be much closer to victory, not just at the polls, but over the Constitution itself. ... April 17, 1877, St. George's, Hanover Square and at the Greek Church, London Wall.. Notes for WILLIAM MCNEILL WHISTLER: William McNeill Whistler was born 22 July 1836 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Minotaur Maze refers to an illustration of the Greek myth Theseus and the minotaur drawn by Sir Edward Burne-Jones that was posted to Twitter in July of 2018 and parodied by users who thought the minotaur looked polite and perturbed by Theseus' presence. Dr. Nichols was previously the chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College. Pat Buchanan ran in part by talking about a culture war that was destroying lovely memories of his childhood in Washington, DC, in the 1940s and 1950s. His work deals with issues involving Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs. He is the new editor-in-chief of Image Journal. View the latest news and breaking news today for U.S., world, weather, entertainment, politics and health at CNN.com. Second, these four years have confirmed to us that Trump’s moral corruption of the Republican Party is total, from top to bottom. Something strange happens when the Internet becomes synonymous with your world. I am too scarred by the horrific outcome of the 2016 election to count any chickens, no matter how alive and clucking they might seem. But I don’t believe that those of us who opposed Trump will declare that bygones are bygones with conservatives who supported him and go back to partisanship as usual. The earth is getting warmer. A few needed law enforcement to step in because of threats to their lives and to their families. People worked hard, didn't live as long, and were less healthy. And anyone who is nostalgic for millwork is someone who's never seen a mill. Then, that summer, I wrote a piece on how I became a Never Trumper for The New York Times Magazine. Now I was accused of legal wrongdoing for expressing my political views as a private citizen. Tell the average American that the top executive at a major corporation makes tens of millions of dollars and they'll snarl with disgust at the greed of a man or woman who they think does nothing particularly useful or special. And why might a restored "elitism" actually be good for democracy? Tweet me now!") TOM NICHOLS: Well, as an American and a citizen of a democracy, I believe in our bedrock principle—one we've fought to bring to fruition through a revolution, a civil war, the enactment of universal suffrage, and the civil rights movement—of equality before the law. I wasn't very successful.) Available Online. And what costs are we willing to bear to mitigate it? What I do know is that, regardless of what any one of us does individually, two aspects of the Never Trump movement will outlast Trump. There are people in these US populist movements (some of whom now work for the president) who are trying to create a European-style nationalism in the United States, and that's very worrisome. Over time, my critics moved on to various other charges, including that I was personally unfit to associate with officers of the U.S. military, that I was an agent of the “deep state,” and even that I was a Russian asset and therefore a security risk. He was previously a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. There were plenty of professors, but not in my town.). In fact, they created a political order specifically designed to prevent that kind of populist egalitarianism. “When have I ever read Breitbart?” I responded. Advent Candles continued- love and Christ’s gifts. Seeded in those social circles were a small number of college graduates in the professions: doctors and lawyers. So I went on the offensive, writing and speaking out even more. Apr 19, 2020 - “Tomorrow, as I always do on New Year's, I'll be making my grandmother's Greek lamb recipe. Only when it comes to athletic achievement (and to some extent, in acting, perhaps), where prowess and failure are both obvious, do Americans think that a natural sorting of the top people from everyone else, the professionals from the amateurs, is acceptable. Author of Our Own Worst Enemy. The flood of information that confronts the average person is like the proliferation of restaurant chains and fast-food outlets. .He married. Americans hate this notion in every way, which as Tocqueville noted is rooted in our culture. Sarah Longwell: Why people who hate Trump stick with him. But win or lose, our goal will become something else. Many of us instead held firm and made the case for democracy and the rule of law from the right flank against our own tribe. When my friends—including the few I have left among the conservatives—ask what the Never Trumpers will do now, I say with all honesty that I am not sure. For example, I'm the grandson of Greek and Irish immigrants, and both sets of my ancestors were considered exactly the same kind of threat to the Anglo-Saxon American nation when they and others like them were disgorged en masse from boats in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Thomas M. Nichols is a Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Seeing someone such as Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska or the ever-troubled Senator Susan Collins of Maine rediscover their voices now that the die seems to be cast is not particularly inspiring. I teach and I write for a living. If that happens, America will become a different country, and we will all enter the first iteration of an American dictatorship. The people I care most about in the world all told me the same thing: Fight. They demanded my arrest. This is a terrible development in a nation where social trust is the only glue that allows us to vote and delegate power to each other without fear. (At 30 Rock in New York, at least it was Starbucks.) For most of us, media appearances came only with a ride to the studio and free coffee. I'd argue that in the recent era, the rejection of George H.W. While some lost money, all lost friends. If you only inhabit a digitized space of memes and rage, where partisan expression is the lingua franca of the realm and being on the "right side" is a badge of honour, then bothersome things like evidence, data, and knowledge are steamrolled by ideological fervour. But that is a world where expertise means nothing—where mastery and wisdom and knowledge are treated as irrelevant. Worse, it's no longer a friend who's being smarter than you, it's some stranger. And what if Trump wins? JS: How does this intersect with the kind of populism that has got us—and Europe?—to where we are today? JS: At Comment, we are spending the spring season thinking about the significance of trust and social architecture. We’re building the ship as we’re sailing it. Some had even signed letters during the election saying that they’d never work for Trump, but when he won, they groveled and asked for just one more glimpse of the throne. The fact that we didn’t run is more than a point of pride. I spent decades studying repressive regimes, but I always did so with the swagger of a man who holds an American passport. Smith was the editor-in-chief of Comment from 2013-2018, and teaches philosophy at Calvin College where he holds the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. At appleby manor church. See All Formats. You also didn't know a whole lot of doctors, either. What experts really disagree about, mostly, is what to do about problems. As a lifelong conservative choosing “Crooked Hillary” over the “Swamp Drainer,” I received a short burst of interest, especially from talk radio. We welcome any and all feedback — please contact managing editor Dan Postma at dpostma@cardus.ca. by Tom Nichols. "Do you think gravity is a law? The Trump faithful also accused us of trying to get rich on our Never Trump status. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and number one New York Times best-selling author offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics - and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation. We're all experts of expression. For my own part, I naively thought at the start of this madness that no one would much care what I said about Trump, at least any more than they did about my previous writing on politics. Besides, the fight among the conservatives was mostly brewing in Washington, D.C., and I was a middle-aged professor living on the quiet shores of Rhode Island. Now I don’t feel that one bit. Tom Nichols. (My church community had exactly one college professor in it, as I recall, in an area that boasted the University of Massachusetts, Smith, and, Amherst. Where we lived, people who'd finished high school and had some specialized training— cops, firemen, bookkeepers—were at the upper edge of a society of factory workers like my dad and light clerical staff like my mom. Journalists, meanwhile, have failed because they themselves often don't understand the issue, or because they adhere to some hokey notion of "balance" that requires constantly having panels of ten people discuss a major issue, with the idea that all of them are equally smart. Leave aside the campaign of 2016; you can find it earlier. Part of the reason so many Americans have become surly narcissists is that they spend way too much time alone. Lewis warned us all about this nearly seventy years ago when he wrote that in the Western democracies in general, people were taking the notion of political equality to mean a coarse and sullen insistence that "I'm as good as you" no matter how obviously false an assertion it is. This is disastrous for our system of government, because as I note in the book, Americans live in a republic, not a direct democracy. Join 7000+ readers who receive fresh, thought-provoking articles once a week right in their inbox. 26:58. Anyone with any European immigrant ancestry will figure this out in a matter of seconds. When we trust our feelings more than anything else, we stop trusting expert knowledge. If you smell something delicious wafting around the entire state of … What the experts disagree about is cause, degree, and mostly, solutions. James K.A. But that populist appeal, in which a crowd of angry people are assured that no one is any smarter, more virtuous, or more industrious than they are, is now the supreme expression of an anti-republican spirit that threatens the foundations of our democracy. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School, where he worked with the U.S. Air Force to create the program for the Certificate in Nuclear Deterrence Studies. What matters is that a long war is over. I had a lifetime contract with the Navy, but no contract is unbreakable. Comment Magazine is powered by Cardus | 185 Young Street, Hamilton, ON, L8N 1V9 | www.cardus.ca | 1-888-339-8866, You can unsubscribe at any time. I was wrong. TOM NICHOLS: You're talking to the wrong guy, because my whole argument against the European Union 30 years ago was Greece, that creating a European Union with a common currency and a common economics base—I said, "Germany and Greece in the same economic space, this isn't going to work." The experts have failed because they do not prize the notion of being accessible and understandable. DEVIN STEWART: So as long as you're self-aware enough to know that there is something lacking in your skill set or your knowledge base, that's the key. SERVICE TIMES SAINT SPYRIDON GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH www.stspyridonchurch.org Reverend Presbyter Anthony Evangelatos franthony@stspyridonchurch.org PAGE 2 THE SAINT SPYRIDON VOICE Parish Council President: Tom Nichols Chanters: George Spiratos Basile Panoutsopoulos My parents were intelligent but uneducated people, as were most of their social circle. Dr. Thomas M. Nichols is a Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Growing up … “There are some people,” Smiley said at a dinner among young recruits to the Secret Service, “who, when their past is threatened, get frightened of losing everything they thought they had, and perhaps everything they thought they were as well. This is civic poison, because it makes every person an advocate for their own lonely thoughts without any restraint of social or educational bonds. In Tom Nichols’ new book, The Death of Expertise, he explains how a misguided intellectual egalitarianism is harming our ability to assess the truth and solve problems, and discusses some of the responsible factors and possible long-term … But courage exercised only when the coast is clear is not courage; it is opportunism. Those are real debates. We were facing real risk, and I wanted to know their feelings. In reality, the opinions of experts don't diverge nearly as widely as people think they do. SMITH: In your book you call out a dangerous levelling effect in society that stems from an egalitarianism run amok—confusing a democratic politics (in which we all have equal rights) with a democratic epistemology (in which everyone's opinion is equal). This isn't just a gauzy childhood memory. Now they have decks in the back.) Nichols … Tom Nichols (the greek) Tom Nichols Friend. Some sent messages telling me that they looked forward to my official execution or other versions of my untimely death. Image: The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti by Ben Shahn (1967, mosaic), Syracuse University. As they did with all of us in the Never Trump camp, the president’s most fanatical supporters accused me of outright treason. But if you can access any number of crackpot ideas at the same time you're looking for expert views, it looks like a balanced fight among experts. Tom Nichols Sr. is on Facebook. I was at my church’s annual Greek festival, about to grab some souvlaki and baklava with my young daughter, when my phone rang. What’s happening? macleans.ca - There is a storm brewing in central Asia and the centre of the disturbance is Afghanistan. As it turned out, even before the Breitbart story dropped, my employer had already determined that I had not violated any laws or regulations. Self-professed super genius Tom Nichols is a fine example of the right-wing edgytarian that I described in this post. And why should some stranger be smarter than you? TOM NICHOLS: That's where this problem of narcissism comes in, because metacognition is also a very humbling thing. Social isolation is a quiet epidemic in affluent Western societies. JAMES K.A. (I had been asked some years earlier to be a contributor when the publication launched. (If you want a visible example, think of how houses used to have porches in the front. While the diplomats in the international community have … What's the likelihood of living together if we can't even trust our neighbours? How to Be a Leader brings these works to modern readers in an accessible way. Can the "death of expertise" be framed in terms of distrust? I think of this passage often, not only because I spent the first part of my career fighting (in my own small and mostly insignificant way) the Cold War, but also because I have spent the most recent part of my career fighting the possible rise of authoritarianism in my own country. Well, if you realize there's a billion websites in the world, that means that in any random search for information, you're up against 900 million bad sites as opposed to 100 million sensible ones. TN: I wrote a book a lot of years ago that tried to explore Robert Putnam's work on social capital. Can it be restored? I miss the New England of the 1960s in some ways; my hometown had a local barber, and a diner, and pieces of it looked like a Norman Rockwell painting. When the Left attacked Kavanaugh for defending himself, self-professed super genius Tom Nichols agreed with them. This request typically takes a few seconds. I hope you reminder me, Jen. I think this is a crucial concept and one we don't talk about nearly enough. It might look like Americans have more dining choices, when in fact they're eating themselves to death with a steady diet of cheap, easily available junk. This nationalist appeal, however, does rely on attacks on established knowledge in some important ways. He earned a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice. There are virtually no reputable medical professionals who share the anti-vaccine stance, and the range of expert opinion on this is about the width of a molecule. We’re in the Middle of a Pandemic. St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. But if you go to the Internet, or watch a lot of cable, you'd think that there's this battle raging between doctors about vaccines. Some turned out to be as racist and authoritarian as Trump himself, while others merely confirmed that they were little more than vacuous opportunists who were capable of betraying the Constitution at will. But I didn’t run the first time Trump was elected, and I won’t run if it happens again. Other conservatives who spoke privately and sometimes publicly of Trump with utter contempt in 2016 buckled that November. Our entire system is predicated on assuming that some people are better at some things than others, and that we delegate responsibilities and decisions. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the author John le Carré’s most famous creation, the fictional British spy George Smiley, reflected on a career spent fighting a now-vanquished enemy. That's mostly what people encounter now in the public sphere. Today, the narcissistic and faux-egalitarian American likely doesn't know her doctor personally, and has no fear of contradicting a medical professional by resorting to the Internet or to a Facebook page full of people just as untrained in medicine as everyone else. Our Founders built that into the system; they had no interest, really, in every single person getting an equal say on every issue. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School. And even those might not be written at a level comprehensible to the average reader. The American nationalist project is so self-evidently dumb that it falls apart on even a moment of reflection. —Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise "These writings of Plutarch are surprisingly relevant to political life in twenty-first-century democracies and deserve to be better known. I was a founding member of the band of Republican defectors known as the Never Trumpers, and one way or another, “the times I have lived in”—the movement to protect American democracy from Donald Trump and to stop his reelection—will come to an end in November. I am not confidently predicting victory. I became intimately familiar with the Hatch Act and its provisions—and I obeyed it far more scrupulously than anyone in the Trump White House—but that did not stop the regular waves of emails and phone calls over the next four years, usually spurred by some Trump-supporting website or talk-show host, demanding that I be fired. Pat Buchanan and Bill Clinton and Ross Perot all tapped into the "I'm just like you" sentiment, even though Buchanan was a life-long politico, Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, and Perot was a billionaire. I was at my church’s annual Greek festival, about to grab some souvlaki and baklava with my young daughter, when my phone rang. There is no danger of a rupture to a social relationship because there isn't a social relationship. Saint Nicholas of Myra (traditionally 15 March 270 – 6 December 343), also known as Nicholas of Bari, was an early Christian bishop of Greek descent from the maritime city of Myra in Asia Minor (Greek: Μύρα; modern-day Demre, Turkey) during the time of the Roman Empire. As we approach Election Day, my career and my constitutional rights remain intact. James Raymond Nichols, age 79, of Chicopee, passed away from natural causes on Sunday, April 5, 2020 at the Holyoke Soldier’s Home. If Trump’s minions were determined to curtail my constitutional rights, I was more determined to exercise them. That's light years away from the denatured notion of democracy that's taken hold in America today, in which people mistake political equality for actual, personal equality in every way. For example, there isn't really a huge debate about climate change among experts. They retreat into jargon and prefer to speak only with other brainy types who understand them. This, as I note in the book, is a failure both of experts and of journalists. Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: The revenge of the Never Trumpers. —The Editors. Lawrence W. Nichols, Toledo Museum of Art Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, March 13–May 12, 2017 Frans Hals—The Family Portraits Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols, The Walters Art Museum A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2010–2011 The Pompeian Revival Style in the United States. There isn't. The basis of Western thought and, indeed, our educational system can be attributed to the Greek philosophers: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. That summer, I sat down with my wife and members of my family. See our, Pluralism, Difference, and the Dynamics of Trust. 200 Great East Neck Road West Babylon, NY 11704 Phone: (631) 587-1150 | Email Us. According to Tom Nichols, he sought early on to identify himself less with the sensual naturalism of Titian than with the intellectual and sculptural values of central Italy. We stood and fought. Yes, the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project are now taking in lots of donations—but that was after burning personal and financial bridges to the Republican Party that sustained them and built their handsome homes over the years. The short pieces we all wrote—much like this one—generated a small fee that could pay for a nice dinner and maybe a bottle of wine. Likewise, any notion that anyone is better or smarter in some area is now "elitism," a word whose pejorative connotation has been reinforced by this resentful populism. Think about vaccines. For the first time in my life, I felt like a dissident. But it's also kind of silly, because of the basic nature of America as an immigrant society. How can they know whom to trust? And so to smother this realization before it brings people to their senses, populists and would-be nationalists inundate citizens with a lot of messaging about history and culture that is, basically, false, and built on idyllic notions of an America that never really existed. What matters is the hope.”, How to Actually Prosecute the Financial Crimes of the Very Rich. It would be easy to write this off to a culture of permissiveness, and there's some of that at work here, but C.S. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School, where he worked with the U.S. Air Force to create the program for the Certificate in Nuclear Deterrence Studies. What are the causes? He is a former Secretary of the Navy Fellow, and held the Naval War College's Forrest Sherman Chair of Public Diplomacy. And it could kill us. TOM NICHOLS: That's right. Our current alliances with our liberal friends may not be a permanent realignment. I had turned it down flat.). Tell them that football or baseball players get millions of dollars, and that they will have to pay a hefty price for a ticket to watch them, and they will gladly explain why some people who are great at things can command higher prices than those who stink. They’ve earned it.) Tom Nichols, University of Glasgow But we've taken it to idiotic extremes now—except, that is, in only one field: professional sports. Continuing to write about Trump could mean serious financial hardship. He was born in Holyoke, son of the late Nick and Helen (Dumkowski) Nichols, and lived most of his life in Chicopee. First, we will always be able to say that when Trump and his thugs took over the Republican Party and then the elected branches of the United States government, we did not cut and run. This is why, when Trump is gone (whether after this election or in 2024), I will continue to oppose everyone who had anything to do with inflicting this scar on American history, long after the members of the Trump family are finally bankrupt, in rehab, in jail, or living in seclusion in Manhattan among the neighbors who already despise them. TN: To the average citizen, it looks like there's a lot of expert disagreement only because everyone now has a megaphone no matter how uninformed they are. Tom Nichols 10/30/2020. I am a professor. It's also a world that gives cover to corrosive ignorance. Early in 2016, I said (in a conservative magazine, The Federalist, that has since fallen to the Trumpist fever) that I would take Hillary Clinton over Trump.