Populist Expertise: New Forms of Knowledge Production in Anti-Intellectualism Regimes

• In Event: Theorizing the Populist Moment

Abstract

This paper argues that twenty-first-century populism has developed three distinctive strategies to establish a new type of expertise (which is called here “populist expertise”), distinct from previous technocratic-neoliberal models: vernacular expertise, military expertise, and popular expertise. 1) Vernacular expertise: a form of specialist knowledge that sidesteps trained experts and relies on “common sense” and the “wisdom of common people.” 2) Military expertise: using the army to undertake large-scale engineering and logistic projects. It is another way in which the government has replaced civil contractors and outside experts. Military expertise provides a heteronomous expertise, a large group of experts that do not demand “professional autonomy” and are more easily immersed in an engulfing notion of politics. 3) Popular expertise. For “regulatory science”—the sub-disciplines and techniques that need to arrive at a policy recommendation (Eyal 2019)—related to highly specialized problems, governments kept using experts from previous administrations, but it has rebranded their work, giving it an aura of patriotic and popular endeavor. The work of the old “technocrats” is now framed and communicated as part of an effort to create a “popular science” that is useful for “the people.” Populist regimes in the Americas are transforming the logic, content, and operation of how experts participate in the government. They introduced new ways to deploy, justify, communicate, and fund the activities of experts. At a conceptual level, the paper aims to outline a different form of relationship between expertise and populism that departs from 1) definitions that see technocracy and populism as antithetical; 2) the “managerial populism” model (which has been mainly used to analyze European cases, like Sarkozy’s France and Berlusconi’s Italy); 3) the theory of “technopopulism;” 4) Brubaker’s idea of “Euro-Atlantic populist conjuncture.”

Author

• Hector Vera, UNAM