Being on the receiving end of a deal with the most powerful person in the world must be quite disarming. Trump was already the ultimate deal-maker. Now as the leader of the free world, his power to make deals is unsurpassed in history. When Trump offers a deal, he starts with an extreme position that drives the experts mad. This is not crazy; it is the art of the deal.

While many twist and turn in response to Trump’s negotiations, what we are witnessing is the undoing of ‘the science’, what has effectively become ‘policy-based evidence’.

Policy-based evidence is a play on the term ‘evidence-based policy’. It’s where policymakers pretend that government policy exists in an ideological void and where different interests accept rational plans for the betterment of society.

If evidence-based policy ever existed, it might be run by the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius epitomised Plato’s philosopher king. However, he was known as the last good emperor for good reason. After Aurelius, Rome’s decline was terminal.

The reality is that evidence-based policy is an attempt to create a ‘scientific consensus’ that is used to shut up the ordinary people. A few years ago, American political philosopher Jason Brennan suggested that epistocracy (effectively rule by experts or ‘the knowers’ rather than rule by the people) was superior to democracy.

Brennan’s work entitled Against Democracy was an important philosophical thought experiment, but it was hardly a manual for replacing democracy. What I find most interesting is that he argued against deliberative democracy, or enhanced citizen participation through citizen juries and citizen-initiated referenda.

Our esteemed Professor David Flint suggested recently that a Swiss form of deliberative democracy might help to overcome Australia’s inability to change the Constitution through referenda triggered by citizens. But Australia’s ‘Washminster’ (Washington+Westminster) system tends to fall somewhere between Brennan’s epistocracy and the Northern European deliberative democracy.

There are problems with each approach. Epistocracy is basically a form of elitism, where the non-ruling elite (the owners of the means of production) control the ruling elite (the government). This is the arrangement that Karl Marx railed against in his major works.

Deliberative democracy, on the other hand, is the other end of communism. A bunch of people, usually those who have too much time on their hands, get to influence elected politicians. If religion was the opiate of the masses that supported capitalism, deliberative democracy is the fentanyl that supports communism. Neither is good for individuals trying to carve a sense of liberty out of an otherwise over-regulated world.

It is interesting that Brennan’s Against Democracy emerged during President Trump’s 2016 campaign. It was almost designed to say that voters were idiots, and Trump could only win an election because the voters were so stupid. The post-Covid era has proven the opposite – the experts haven’t got a clue, and their so-called ‘scientific consensus’ is based on a sense of elitism that is not healthy for our individual liberties.

John Stuart Mill wanted women to have the vote, but he also worried that if everyone had the vote, the stupid people without property or qualifications might mess it up for everybody else. Given that Mill’s On Liberty or The Subjection of Women were both considered radical in his day, his foresight means that the modern reader might be forgiven for thinking there was nothing original in Mill’s work, so pervasive have his ideas become.

However, the idea of ‘scientific consensus’ is something which Mill may never have agreed with. In his A System of Logic, Mill outlined what might be called the process of inductive reasoning. In the social sciences, inductive reasoning is a way of understanding the world through observation. We observe phenomena and then draw conclusions from reality.

In the study of politics, for example, there are competing theories that in the natural sciences would make no sense. For example, if you are on Earth and you drop an object that is heavier than air, it will fall to the ground. You don’t need to do this experiment because the theory of gravity has not yet been proven wrong.

The natural sciences tend to use deductive reasoning, where, through observation or thought experiments, the researcher formulates a hypothesis and then tests that hypothesis by conducting an experiment. Karl Popper noted that hypotheses need to be falsifiable, that is, able to be proved incorrect through experiment. The results of an experiment also need to be replicable, that is, if somebody else conducts the experiment, they ought to get similar results otherwise the hypothesis is disproved.

As an example, if you dropped a heavier than air object on Earth and it didn’t fall to the ground, and someone else did the same experiment and achieved the same results, then the theory of gravity is declared false, and we start all over again. This is effectively what is known as the scientific method and it is the hallmark of the Enlightenment, which led to ideas about meritocracy and liberal democracy that we enjoyed until the Wokerati arrived.

In the social sciences, however, the subject of research is inevitably individual humans who, according to the tenets of liberal democracy, are rational beings who are capable of making decisions to look after their own welfare. This means that if they catch a whiff that you are researching them, they will do anything to distort your research.

Unlike the natural sciences, individual free will means that falsifiable hypotheses and replicable research results are nigh impossible to achieve. Inductive reasoning is appropriate because we can observe what has happened and then develop general principles from our observations.

When one observes Trump, one is not observing science, but art. No expert can tell you what Trump is doing, nor predict the outcome. Trump himself might struggle to tell you how he came to know what he is doing. Practiced knowledge is the result of recognising patterns over time. It is not readily tested by experts.

Trump’s art of the deal is the most democratic thing we have seen since ‘the experts’ told us to trust ‘the science’. Einstein reportedly said that one fact rather than 100 experts could prove him wrong. Trump has done in less than two months what thousands of experts have failed to do in years. And that’s a fact.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is a political scientist and political commentator. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILTA), and a Member of the Royal Society of NSW. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, Chairman of the ACT and Southern NSW Chapter of CILTA, and a member of the Australian Nuclear Association. Michael is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon and was appointed to the College of Experts at the Australian Research Council in 2022. All opinions in this article are the author’s own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other person or organisation.