I can’t recall a political story that has humiliated more people posing as experts.  Let’s face it: political pundits with few exceptions proved that they know nothing of practical value when it comes to understanding the Republican presidential electorate.  Watch this 1-minute, 49-second compilation of “experts” outing themselves:

There is a general loss of faith in people who claim to be experts in many fields.  Technocracy, the faith that problems are solvable by dispassionate experts, probably hit its peak at the end of World War II, when victory was obtained through the work of scientists who developed weapons, including the A-bomb.  Its decline has been steady, fueled by embarrassing failures of expert predictions to work out.  Those modernist high-rise housing projects were touted by experts as just the thing to root out poverty.  The ever changing landscape of diet recommendations (eggs? good or bad? depends on when you ask the question) is another prominent example of the sort of thing that erodes faith in the power of experts.  And global warming, in which experts claim that a purported consensus among them suffices as proof of scientific truth, is sparking widespread loss of faith in the integrity of big science, where billions of dollars in grants are at stake and political interest groups are mobilized.

But politics ain’t science (and forget about all those “political science” departments – they are wannabes), so the loss of faith in experts has some special characteristics.  I think the root lies in the disconnect of the experts from their subject matter.  Most pundits live in the world of educated and affluent professionals, a class that has done well in the transition from an industrial economy to an information economy.  This class is pretty happy with the way the economic spoils are being divided.  The rest of the country is not.

Somehow, a guy who lives in a penthouse in Manhattan was in far better touch with the concerns of half or more of the country than the people paid to be political antennae.  They apparently drowned out those voices with the voices of fellow opinion-molders, in a groupthink orgy.  They care much more about what their peers think and say than they do about the concerns and opinions of their ostensible object of study, the American electorate.

I don't see signs of that changing any time soon.