ABSTRACT
Margaret Thatcher memorably held that academics didn’t really do any work; Michael Gove, while campaigning for Brexit in 2016, declared that “people in [the UK] have had enough of experts”; Trump has appointed people who despise the very agencies they are meant to serve, such as Rick Perry; Bolsonaro has dismissed COVID-19 as “a little flu” and has flouted all social distancing rules; Trump has recommended ingesting lethal substances to cure the disease (and people have died); some voters endorse and celebrate ignorance as a rejection of untrustworthy elites; business leaders are praised as more capable decision-makers, when it comes to the length of a lockdown, than epidemiologists. The list goes on. Can democracy exist if knowledge, expertise, and competence are shunned and rejected? Can we expect to live in thriving societies without these? Kenneth Baynes will help us navigate Habermasian pathways to answer these questions.
