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I have a complicated reaction to this line of argument, I think.
The other day, when talking about the future of the Department of Education, I made a general comparison to how Latvians in what is now Latvia would or should have felt in 1984 if an ethnic Russian were defending the efficiency or professionalism of the central Soviet bureaucracy as it pertained to overseeing education throughout the Soviet Union. And my point then was that the fundamental split was who / whom, and no amount of arguing from the ethnic Russian would bridge that. But the devil is... the "What have the Romans ever done for us" bit in the Life of Brian has a lot of wisdom in it. That was the Soviet bureaucracy. And that is the Cathedral as well. And yet, also, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." And here we are.
To me, it seems like the fundamental problem is that American liberals want there to be "shared" central institutions and "shared" central media voices with "shared" trust and "shared" authority that are somehow perceived as "democratically legitimate", but they also think it's the most natural thing in the world for those "shared" institutions to have their particularist values and their particularist worldviews and be populated by their people and for them to do the gatekeeping. It's totally understandable that they should feel that way, given the actual reality of American since the New Deal, of course. And yet, any argument that's not grappling with that central tension here is, fundamentally, just trying to paper over the actual chasm. For all of these things, they're the Soviet party member in 1984 trying to insist that the ethnic Latvian is being misled by misinformation and propaganda from capitalist roaders by not accepting the authority and value of the central Soviet bureaucracy.
I can't remember if it was Moldbug where I first saw this observation, but I once came across the observation that almost every major power in the world covers, in their authoritative institutions, a lot of the same material in the hard sciences and engineering and basic medicine, and they get a lot of legitimacy by mastering and employing that materially-based knowledge and improving the lot of their citizens - and then they smuggle in a bunch of not-science in the same institutions but call it science to piggyback off that authority, and they spread the legitimating ideology of the hierarchy in this state or empire... anyway, once I saw that observation, I can't not see it everywhere. And that move seems fundamental to this specific discussion, especially given the role that trans (and LGBTQ2IA+ more broadly) has played in exactly this kind of context.
I remember The Alternative Hypothesis making the claim about states smuggling their ideology in with technological advancement on a cozy stream.
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I've heard more than one Russian nationalist complain that the Soviet Union was run by a cabal of Jews, Balts, and other minorities to the detriment of the Russian majority, but I digress. The implication of the science+smuggled ideology take is that whatever you try to replace the existing order with ought to have the same basic command of the hard sciences in order to be seen as legitimate, and the ongoing attempts to defund and intimidate universities and national laboratories into compliance with the new administration's agenda seem likely to damage that core competency, unless parallel private organizations (i.e. Bell Labs 2.0) are set up at lightning speed to take their place.
If the right were to admit that they simply don't have the "elite human capital," to use Richard Hanania's term, necessary to rebuild the institutions they are currently destroying, then that would make them nothing more than Vandals plundering Rome out of spite. Perhaps the Romans were immoral and degenerate and deserved to be conquered by the virtuous and strong Germanic tribes, but the latter couldn't build an aqueduct or a bridge worth a damn and their civilization was poorer for it.
Everybody in the former Soviet Union has some variant about ‘other ethnicity running for their own benefit at our expense’ and I suspect this is just a coping mechanism for the reality of shitty societies.
But regardless, every society believes not-science in elite institutions. Some of this not-science gets in the way of social functioning more than others, but there has never been a society running on science.
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