The leader of the Maldives, an Indian Ocean island nation whose very existence is threatened by global warming, was emphatic. "In all political agreements, you have to be prepared to negotiate," he said in Copenhagen this week. "But physics isn't politics."

Passionate, emotional and desperate, President Mohammed Nashid was also wrong. These days, everything is politics. Everyone who's talking insists at high volume that they're right. And now, amplified by the Internet, anyone, knowledgeable or oblivious, can talk to the entire world.

Once, not so long ago, the planet's prevailing voices were those of the experts _ the people who, right or wrong, had years of training to back up what they said. Then came the Internet, and everything changed.

Consider the global warming debate: The skeptics shout. The skeptics' opponents shout back. The scientists insist they have research in their corner. And public debate shifts from the provable and the empirical toward the spectacle of argument.

Democracy in action? That's one way of seeing it. But is something deeper afoot? As the amplification of human opinion becomes more democratic, is the suspicion of the expert and the intellectual _ a long-held trope in American society _ going globally viral?

Because whatever side you're on, to sample the worldwide conversation in the age of the broadband connection and the constant, instantaneous comment is to be confronted with one recurring thread: Knowing what you're talking about ain't what it used to be.

"What you have is the (presumption) of expertise by ordinary people who feel their opinions are as valuable as anybody else's. And at the same time, you have experts behaving like gods beyond what they know," says Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent and author of "Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?"

"Society," he says, "has authorized everybody's opinions."

As an ideal, direct democracy has great appeal. Everyone has their say, and truth and justice prevail. It doesn't work quite that way in the real world. That's why most operating democracies are representative democracies, where the people choose the men and women who will speak and act on their behalf.

Nevertheless, the notion that the everyman's wisdom can trump formal training is a powerful one. In the United States, it is more than two centuries old _ gestated during the Revolution and institutionalized by the populist maneuverings of Andrew Jackson.

It lives on in modern political discourse. Exhibit A: Sarah Palin. Running for vice president in 2008, she made a habit of targeting "so-called experts" who, she said, were out of touch with the needs of "the real America."