Smash the Professions

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Jun 4

In 1977, Ivan Illich, maverick priest and one-time darling of the old New Left (later canceled for his views on gender), co-wrote a book called Disabling Professions. He argued that the growing power of a “self-accrediting elite” was profoundly anti-democratic, “akin to the legal establishment of a state church.” For Illich, “[g]overnment by a congress that bases its decisions on expert opinions given by professionals might be government for, but never by the people.” But he was optimistic: “Professional cartels are now as brittle as the French clergy in the age of Voltaire . . . A post-professional ethos takes shape in the spirit of those who begin to see the emperor’s true physiognomy.”

Illich was always prescient; in this case he spoke too soon. Fifty years later, it may be that a “post-professional ethos” is taking real shape. As Musa Al-Gharbi and many others have shown, the Democratic party has spent the last several decades transforming itself into the party of the “self-accrediting elite,” the party of the professional-managerial class. They lost the last presidential election in part because of intense public antipathy for that class, whose “true physiognomy” was exposed with such brutal finality by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The populist revolt, both at home and abroad, gets relentlessly conflated with fascism, but it is better understood as a democratic rebellion against what Illich called “techno-fascism,” or rule by technocrats. Illich thought technofascism was inevitable “unless the major thrust of social criticism begins to change from support for . . . professionalism into the endorsement of a patronizing and sceptical attitude towards the experts.” For better or for worse, that skeptical attitude is now mainstream.

Not only liberals but conservatives are convinced that it’s for the worse. “Populism has always been an essential element of the coalition of the right, and it has a lot to offer in a time of elite failure and a collapse of trustworthiness,” writes Yuval Levin in The Dispatch. “But left to itself, it tends toward a corrosive alienation from American institutions, and toward the rejection of the boundaries of republican government. Populism must be balanced by conservatism, which pushes back on both fronts and which is also utterly essential at this moment.” This is a fair point, so long as the institutions of “republican government” are not conflated with the institutions from which populists are actually alienated.

Though they surely exist, I do not know any Trump voters who want to blow up the Constitution (Trump himself might be another story). They are more likely to overly revere it; indeed, the left has long criticized the right for “fetishizing” our founding documents, which many progressives have been keen to “update.” Even if Trump himself is as much of a threat to Constitutional order as liberals believe he is, his voters support him because they believe to the contrary that he can rein in the institutions that actually threaten a Constitution they venerate. Partisanship can undermine anybody’s principles, but Trump’s supporters by and large are not alienated not from the basic system of American government; they are alienated from the various tutelary institutions of the expert class, precisely because they believe these institutions have overstepped those “republican boundaries” that Levin invokes. If Trump really is an authoritarian and has won their support under false pretenses, he has done so by making the same rhetorical move that Trump’s critics so consistently make: opportunistically conflating the institutions of their own professional-managerial class with the institutions of democratic government itself, thus confusing technocracy with democracy.

At its best, the “post-professional ethos” that may now be emerging into the mainstream is a genuinely democratic refusal to accept this conflation, and those who embrace Illich’s “sceptical attitude towards experts” should start thinking about how to flesh it out in policy. A good place to start would be by targeting those professional “cartels,” which are some of the main ways that the expert class organizes itself and exercises power. In the court of public opinion these bodies are probably more brittle now than they were in Illich’s day, even though (or perhaps because) they are also more ubiquitous.

Consider that almost a quarter of the US workforce is now subject to licensing requirements; in 1950, it was five percent. As Aaron Edlin and Rebecca Haw have argued, state licensing boards are precisely what Illich said they were – “cartels by another name” – and it should be possible to sue them for violating antitrust legislation.

People are often quite open to this argument when the occupation in question is something like cosmetology, but they balk at the idea that professional associations should not be able to determine who is qualified to be a doctor. And those who do not balk are often hardcore libertarians who think the free market can be trusted to eliminate any charlatans who might set up shop under the new dispensation. But Illich’s argument was radical enough not only to include but to emphasize high-status professions like medicine, and his reasoning was not at all libertarian. Illich’s concern was not that consumers of services lacked options; it was that they increasingly had no choice but to consume the service, and more importantly, that they had no real freedom to decide for themselves whether the service was necessary. Professions like medicine were becoming what he called “radical monopolies,” organizations which “claim special, incommunicable authority to determine not just the way things are to be made, but also the reason why their services are mandatory.” For Illich, the real problem with the professions was that they disable us politically; they diminish our competence as citizens. That is a classic small-r republican concern, not a libertarian one. Experts may have special knowledge of how to deliver their own products and services, but it is for citizens to determine whether and to what extent those services are necessary in the first place. As for concerns about “qualifications,” the pandemic put them decisively to rest: even liberals in good standing now admit that the charlatans who did the most damage may well have been the licensed professionals themselves.

Opposition to commercial monopolies and openness to antitrust actions against them has become a key element of the new political center. Eleanor Fox has recently written about “the rise of the antitrust consensus against neoliberalism,” a position that unites “traditionalists, progressives, centrists, or even conservatives.” This new consensus unites ideological opposites like Matt Stoller and Oren Cass, who have been caught “upending Washington’s neoliberal consensus.” A trustbusting mood is upon us, and we can hope it’s here to stay. The concentration of corporate power is just too obvious, and too obviously detrimental, to permit an easy return to business as usual.

But any new political center would ideally encompass a more fundamental opposition to the “radical” monopolies that Illich had in mind. Critics like Edlin and Haw tend to emphasize the ways in which licensing requirements produce unnecessary inefficiencies in the delivery of services. But that frames the problem in economic terms that can sound almost politically neutral – a framing which ironically lends itself to the same paradigm of technocratic rule by “licensed professionals.” After all, if efficiency is the aim, we probably do not want a government by the people. But in a republic, efficiency is not the aim. The aim is self-rule. The problem with radical monopolies is not that they threaten competition, but that they threaten our capacity to govern ourselves.