Expertise and expertism in politics and the CHP's army of advisers

Had it not been announced days, even weeks in advance, and had society not been led to such great expectations, perhaps the damage would not have been so great. But the leader of the political party that has "always lost" in democratic life raised people's expectations so high, days beforehand, that it became inevitable that it would be almost impossible to present a vision large enough to meet them. Moreover, this preparation claimed to challenge, and to be an alternative to, the vision presented at the meeting that the ruling party called the Century of Türkiye, a meeting carried out with a performance that, from any angle, one would not expect from a party twenty years in power.

At the end of the day, at the vision meeting of a People's Party that aspires to power, that has the accumulated wind of opposition at its back against all the disadvantages of a government that has ruled alone for twenty years, and that represents the entire shared mind of the Table of Six, the first thing you should see is the people. Look for the people, if you can find them.

A meeting without the people is naturally a meeting without excitement. Was such a choice made for the format of the meeting? Instead of the people as the owner and actor of politics, were elite experts and know-it-all advisers, of the import-substitution kind, who would apply social engineering to this people, in spite of the people, preferred?

After this performance, which came at the end of such a long preparation, an assessment of damage or revenue was quickly made. If the CHP did not make it itself, the people or society made it on its behalf. For days we have been reading and watching these damage-and-revenue assessments.

Some describe this as a departure from the CHP's line, but evidently these assessments, playing to the CHP's base, are reading a different CHP identity or history. Those who know the history of the CHP see that it never had a different character from the start. What we are talking about is not only that they have hired an import-substitution adviser. In this respect too, it must be recalled that from its founding the CHP has never put forward a vision relying with confidence on the people and values of this country. When the CHP pointed Türkiye to the goal of "contemporary civilization" in its earliest days, it never cared how far this goal could suit Türkiye's sociology, values and historical development. The social change projects applied to Türkiye were import-substitution projects from the very beginning: the Criminal Law, the Civil Law, projects of civilization, culture and way of life, and so on. Moreover, anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with history knows that what was meant by contemporary civilization in those early days was not the United States or Britain of today or of that day, but the fascist Germany and Italy of that time. Indeed, there was no politics in those countries; politics was the monopoly of "enlightened despots," who applied very bitter prescriptions to the people, in spite of the people.

The world saw, through a very bitter experience, where the model of government without politics carried things in Germany and Italy. The CHP, for its part, has never been able to free itself from the arrogant outlook of experts, know-it-alls, and those who consider themselves superior to the people. That is why it never had a chance on the democratic ground where politics is more valid. So to look for help today to an American expert, someone who has written many books and knows a great deal, is not, as is supposed, a departure from the CHP's traditional line, but a continuation of that line. Moreover, a continuation for which not even any need for updating has been felt.

Kılıçdaroğlu's pointing out that all 70 people he presents as a "champions league" are experts with no particular political qualities, and his taking pride in this, shows how flawed his understanding of politics is. A politics hostile to politics. Politics is conceived as a technical job in which experts take charge and everything is rendered beyond dispute on a scientific basis.

For heaven's sake, what business do those who harbor such a desire about politics have in politics? Doing politics in order to abolish politics with all its means and methods... What else does that mean but purging the state of the people? Who will run a state administration purged of politics, and in the name of which indisputable scientific truths?

The problem is deeper than supposed. The issue is not merely one of importing a political commissar from the United States. That dimension exists, but the failure to see it shows that the CHP's self-reflexivity and its empathy toward the people have not advanced a barleycorn's length in the intervening 99 years.

Politics is too serious a matter to be left to experts. In fact, the whole history of thought and politics must have learned the most meaningful lesson on this from Plato in the history of philosophy. Plato, who said that the state should be ruled by philosophers, when he tried to use the first opportunity to govern that came his way by applying the philosophical-scientific methods he knew, ended in a fiasco for himself. His famous return from Syracuse, in great disappointment and fiasco, left humanity an unparalleled lesson, in showing that political science and politics itself are different things.

These words are of course not about the CHP's experts or the quality of their expertise. Those experts, those university professors, may truly be very good in their own fields, but their being good political scientists or scholars does not mean they can be good politicians. It does not even mean they can be good advisers. And they should not suppose that the lofty ideas they put forward in advising can be immediately converted into politics.

In fact, in the relationship between the expert and expert-centered (expertist) politics, what finally settles the matter is the word of the politician, a word that requires no expertise at all and that zeroes out the value of expertise. That is, in expertist politics, just as in the CHP's one-party rule, the science and expertise apparently resorted to had no value whatsoever, and even to the experts it was despotism that had the final say.