How did we get to a place where there is extreme mistrust in the supposed elites?

It is no surprise that we are especially skeptical of elites these days. The Great Financial Crisis did not exactly go well, and the Covid pandemic was only slightly more than five years ago. Plenty of mistakes were made in both, even if parties do not always agree in which direction. Or consider the election of Donald Trump. If you like Trump, his rise is a sign of how far wrong things have gone. If you don’t like Trump, you still have to admit your elites let him win the presidency twice, surely a major failing.

As trust recedes in authorities, and also in legacy outlets, strange beliefs are proliferating, whether it is about life extension, global conspiracies, or even whether Hitler was the chief villain of World War II. If the elites tell us to reject such opinions, we might ignore them. President Trump often governs without caring what experts think, for instance when virtually all professional economists excoriate his recent tariff policy. His legal strategy is about overwhelming the system with cases and attempts, rather than maximum respect for the law as is commonly understood.

I am here to speak up for intellectual elitism, albeit with some important qualifications. I prefer elitism over the elites. That is to say, credentials themselves do not make for truth. Instead, usually the malady is that the elites do not take their own elitism seriously enough. A truly elite method is based in science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking behavior.