Revenge of the Technocrats Could Be the End of Democracy

A Response to Ruy Teixeira

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

Democracy will die in 2029. Not through Trump’s crude authoritarianism but through its opposite: the return of competent technocrats promising to save us from chaos. They’ll campaign on evidence-based policy and economic recovery. The exhausted electorate will embrace them with relief. And democracy will die—not obviously, but permanently.

This is where

Ruy Teixeira

’s worldview leads.

Teixeira published “It’s Time for a New Left” earlier this week at Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion, and it deserves serious engagement. As a respected data analyst and political strategist who has spent years studying electoral patterns, Teixeira’s diagnosis of the left’s failures is empirically sound: the left failed to stop right populism, lost the working class, ignored economic growth, and prioritized climate and cultural issues over jobs and wages. His prescription sounds reasonable: prioritize growth, focus on working-class economics, stop the cultural radicalism, return to data-driven pragmatism.

But Teixeira isn’t proposing a shift in priorities within a democratic framework. He’s proposing better technocracy—smarter experts optimizing for different goals, better data determining what people should want, more sophisticated management of the public by credentialed elites.

To be clear: Teixeira doesn’t explicitly advocate for technocratic rule or AI-driven policy optimization. He’s making a political argument that the left prioritized the wrong things and voters rejected it. But his framework embodies technocracy nonetheless. By positioning himself as the data analyst who can determine what voters “really want” through electoral analysis and demographic modeling, he exemplifies the problem I’m diagnosing: treating “what do voters want?” as an empirical question with expert-determined answers rather than as ongoing democratic deliberation where values get constructed through participation.

This matters because Teixeira’s career has been about using data to tell Democrats how to win elections. His identity as electoral analyst shapes how he frames solutions—always as optimization problems (wrong variables, need better targeting) rather than as democratic participation problems (people feel unheard, need genuine agency). The framework is technocratic even when the specific proposals aren’t. And if technocrats return to power in 2029 having learned only to “message better about growth,” democracy dies through sophisticated replacement.

What Teixeira Actually Argues

To understand why his framework is dangerous, we need to see what he’s specifically claiming.

On mass immigration: Teixeira argues the left’s “de facto policy of mass immigration” treated it as “an unalloyed good contributing to a more diverse society,” making opposition tantamount to racism. He points to working-class areas across Europe and America shifting right, with immigration as the starring issue. The left, he says, refused to see rational reasons for opposing mass immigration beyond xenophobia.

On climate politics: He describes how climate change evolved from peripheral to “core part of the left’s 21st century project” despite “thunderous lack of interest from these countries’ working classes.” The left prioritized rapid clean energy transition and net-zero targets, claiming it would drive economic growth. Working-class voters, he notes, view climate as third-tier, prioritize energy cost and reliability over climate effects, and “just don’t believe” the green transition will deliver prosperity. And it hasn’t, he concludes.

On cultural radicalism: Teixeira says the left abandoned “the high ground of anti-discrimination, basic civil rights, and colorblind meritocracy” for “an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them.” He critiques equity over merit, arguing voters believe opportunities should be equal but outcomes will differ based on individual achievement. He’s particularly sharp on gender ideology, noting the left’s “uncritical embrace” of trans activism has become “a massive political liability.”

On growth: The left, he argues, “prizes goals like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for immigrants and identity groups above promoting growth.” This is “remarkably short-sighted” because “faster growth gives the left far more freedom to attain its goals.” The left became techno-pessimist, he says, leaving techno-optimism to Silicon Valley libertarians.

Each critique has merit. Mass immigration does strain institutions. Climate policy did ignore working-class concerns about costs. Cultural radicalism did alienate voters. Growth does matter for achieving progressive goals.

But notice what Teixeira is doing throughout: he’s treating these as optimization errors. The left chose the wrong objective function. Prioritized climate over growth, equity over merit, immigration over wages. The solution, in his framework, is retuning the variables—optimize for growth, prioritize working-class material interests, use data to determine what voters actually want.

This is where the technocratic framework reveals itself. Not in what he’s prioritizing, but in how he’s thinking about the problem: as an expert determining the correct priorities through data analysis rather than as a democratic participant arguing for one set of values over another.

The Real Source of Populism: Dispossession, Not Deprivation

Photo by Kasia on Unsplash

Teixeira thinks populism emerged because the left prioritized the wrong material arrangements. Fix the material conditions, he argues, and populism goes away.

But that’s not what’s actually happening.

The phenomenon driving populism isn’t material deprivation—it’s social dispossession. It’s a growing underclass locked out of the ability to climb the social ladder, excluded from the status games of both economic and intellectual elites, told they lack the credentials or sophistication to participate in decisions about their own lives.

This explains what seems like a paradox to data analysts like Teixeira: the Trump-Bernie voter. How could someone support both a democratic socialist and an authoritarian populist?

But they’re not opposite to someone experiencing dispossession. Both Trump and Bernie said the same thing, just in different registers: “The system is rigged against you. The elites are managing you for their benefit. You deserve agency over your own life.”

Bernie’s version: “Billionaires and corporations have captured democracy. We need to take it back through political revolution. You have power. Use it.”

Trump’s version: “The establishment looks down on you. They think you’re stupid. I’ll fight them for you. You matter.”

Both are responding to the same wound: systematic exclusion from meaningful participation in collective self-determination.

The technocratic left’s response to legitimate grievances was: “Actually, the data shows you’re doing fine. GDP is up. Unemployment is low. You just don’t understand the metrics.”

This validated the populist critique. When people say “the system doesn’t work for me” and experts respond “actually you’re wrong, look at these aggregate statistics”—you’re proving their point.

Why Technocrats Can’t See the Problem

Technocrats with STEM degrees, utilitarian orientations, and faith in data-driven policy structurally cannot understand what’s happening. Their methodology assumes the problem is whether policies are good or bad in some objective sense, measured by return on investment, optimized for maximum efficiency.

But that’s not what people are experiencing. The problem isn’t whether the policies are technically correct. The problem is that people don’t feel heard. Policies don’t seem responsive to what non-elites are saying.

When a factory closes and the worker says “my community is dying,” the technocrat reaches for skills retraining and labor mobility. These might be correct diagnoses of market failures. But the worker is also saying: “Mark Zuckerberg has too much control over my children’s lives.” They’re watching electricity bills climb as AI datacenters compete with consumers for electrons. Their kids are falling in love with what philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, shortly before his death last year, called “counterfeit people”—AI chatbots and social media personas more responsive than real relationships. They’re doing gig economy work where everything feels liminal and tenuous.

And when they express these concerns—about concentrated tech power, about AI reshaping consciousness, about precarity—the technocratic response is: “Trust the experts.”

Consider taxation. A strong majority of Americans think the rich should pay more. This is a democratic consensus based on straightforward reasoning: concentrated wealth threatens political equality, extreme inequality is incompatible with republican government.

Then people hear technocrats explain why we can’t do it. The economic downsides. The compliance costs. The complexity of cost basis accounting on unrealized gains. The risk of capital flight. The administrative burden. Each objection might be technically accurate. But the cumulative effect is: your democratic preference is overruled by technical complexity requiring expert management.

You could respond: “Yes, wealth taxation has challenges. Here are three approaches with different trade-offs. Let’s debate which we’ll accept.” That’s expertise informing democratic choice.

Instead: “Wealth taxation is complicated, so we’ll pursue more feasible alternatives.” That’s expertise replacing democratic choice.

The answer isn’t abandoning expertise. It’s putting it back in its proper place: subordinate to democratic judgment, not sovereign over it.

When experts say “the data shows the economy is strong,” they’re making a category error. The data shows aggregate economic activity. When people say “the economy is bad for me,” they’re making a normative claim about whether their lives have meaning and dignity.

This is the fact-value distinction. Facts are what is true about reality. Values are what matters in life. Data tells you which policies achieve which outcomes. It cannot tell you which outcomes are worth pursuing.

What Teixeira’s “New Left” Actually Means

Teixeira is proposing a reconstitution of technocratic liberalism. His argument is the cleanest contemporary representation of a worldview that is killing democracy while claiming to save it.

This technocratic framework is why we are here. It’s why people think liberalism has failed.

Every step of his analysis reinforces the framework that created the problem. It treats working-class voters as optimization inputs rather than agents. It assumes their revolt comes from incorrect policy optimization rather than dispossession.

What they actually want is to not be optimized. They want dignity that comes from self-governance, not from receiving benefits from sophisticated management.

Teixeira’s “new left” would say: we hear you, we’re optimizing for growth now. But you still don’t govern yourselves. We still determine what’s optimal.

Same relationship. Same authority. Same dispossession. Different parameters.

Cultural Excess as Symptom, Not Cause

Teixeira also accuses the left of being taken over by cultural excess—identity politics, equity over merit. This echoes Mounk’s The Identity Trap, and it’s notable Teixeira makes this argument as a guest at Mounk’s Persuasion.

Immigration opposition and cultural anxiety have their own dynamics. But the cultural excess was born out of the emptying of democratic content from governance.

When people lost meaningful economic agency—when communities were hollowed out, when jobs disappeared, when they were told these were inevitable forces requiring expert management—they sought meaning elsewhere.

Cultural politics filled the vacuum. The professional class turned it into moral crusade because that’s where they could exercise agency. The working class experienced it as one more way the elite was telling them what to value.

Teixeira’s solution—stop the cultural radicalism, focus on growth—doesn’t address the root cause. It shifts which values experts optimize for. And that framework is what creates the conditions for authoritarianism.

How Technocracy Creates the Conditions for MAGA

Techno-authoritarianism isn’t worse than MAGA—it’s not better, it’s upstream. It’s the kind of elitism that drives people into movements like MAGA.

Both technocracy and populism represent anti-pluralist disfigurements of democracy. Technocracy creates the conditions that make populism seem reasonable by systematically excluding citizens from meaningful agency.

When people experience dispossession, they rebel. And the alternative isn’t democratic self-governance—both parties offer expert management. The alternative is Trump. Someone who at least acknowledges they exist as more than optimization problems.

The technocrats create the conditions. MAGA fills the vacuum.

This is the cycle: Technocracy produces dispossession. Dispossession produces populism. Populist incompetence produces calls for expert management. Expert management produces deeper dispossession. Until the only alternatives are techno-authoritarianism or crude authoritarianism.

When Competent Authoritarianism Returns in 2029

Imagine Trump and MAGA fail spectacularly—economic crisis, incompetent overreach, institutional damage. Technocrats return to power in 2029 campaigning on competence: “Adults back in charge. Evidence-based policy. Economic recovery.”

The exhausted electorate embraces them with relief.

What will they implement? Having absorbed Silicon Valley’s effective accelerationism and Teixeira’s materialist framework, they return with AI-driven policy optimization, market-determined technology, expert panels replacing democratic choice.

Picture this: It’s 2030. Congress debates healthcare reform. But the real decision happens in an AI optimization system trained on “growth and equity metrics.” It analyzes millions of variables—demographics, productivity impacts, cost curves—and outputs “optimal policy configurations.” A panel of health economists explains why Alternative C is technically superior. Congressional debate becomes performance—nobody can challenge the model’s assumptions without seeming anti-science. The vote ratifies what the algorithm already decided.

This isn’t science fiction. Technocracy always evolves toward automation. Once you accept that public judgment should yield to expert optimization, it becomes almost inevitable that experts themselves yield to algorithmic optimization. What begins as “evidence-based policy” becomes “model-driven policy,” and what begins as reliance on expertise becomes reliance on machine learning systems that outperform experts on predictive metrics. This is not conspiracy—it’s the internal logic of technocratic governance. If human judgment is a source of noise, the next step is removing human judgment. If optimization is the goal, algorithms inevitably become the optimizer. That’s how technocracy becomes AI technocracy, long before anyone votes on it.

They’ll tell you: “We listened. We changed the model’s parameters. It optimizes for growth and equity now. You don’t need to march—the system is aligned to your values.”

They’ll frame this as “saving democracy.”

What they’ll actually do is evacuate democratic content while maintaining democratic forms. Elections continue. Congress meets. Courts function. But citizens govern nothing.

Democratic forms persist. Democratic substance dies.

Because it will be competent, because GDP will grow, because it won’t be crude authoritarianism—resistance will seem irrational.

As I discussed with

Steve Schmidt

: “We removed the democratic content from democracy and started electing managers rather than politicians who had worldviews... The center has lost its legitimacy.”

Neo-Feudalism, E/Acc, and Technocracy: Three Paths to the Same Destination

Three apparently distinct frameworks are actually complementary aspects of the same authoritarian project.

Neo-feudalism—Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance—explicitly rejects democracy: “Most people can’t govern themselves. We need hierarchy.”

Effective accelerationism—Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley—treats technology as inevitable: “Accelerate or die. Democratic oversight is an obstacle.” This movement explicitly rejects democratic regulation.

Technocracy—Teixeira’s “new left”—replaces citizen choice with expert optimization: “Trust the data. Let experts determine optimal arrangements.”

They’re stages of the same transformation. Technocracy establishes that experts should determine values. E/acc provides justification that acceleration is inevitable. Neo-feudalism draws the conclusion: hierarchy is necessary.

Each framework provides intellectual cover for the next.

Citizens or Subjects

The question isn’t: “Should technocrats or MAGA govern?”

The question is: “Should people govern themselves, or should experts manage them?”

People want to feel like citizens. They don’t want to be managed. The American experiment is an experiment in self-government. Technocracy says, “vote for the best philosopher kings.”

The alternative to technocracy is not ignorance. It’s a different hierarchy of authority: citizens deciding what kind of society they want, and experts helping them get there.

This doesn’t mean democratic majorities have unlimited power—constitutional constraints exist, separation of powers matters, individual rights are protected. But the framework question—do citizens govern?—and the content question—what should policy be?—must remain separate.

Technocracy doesn’t fail when it makes bad decisions—it fails when it makes decisions at all.

We need to recover what classical liberalism actually means: human dignity first, economics second. Citizens choosing, experts informing. Values through deliberation, not optimization.

What does resistance look like? Every time an expert says “the data determines this,” ask: “What values did you assume?” Every time someone proposes “evidence-based policy,” ask: “Who decided which evidence matters?” Every time technocrats promise optimization, demand: “Show us the trade-offs and let us choose.”

Because if technocrats return in 2029 with AI and effective accelerationist ideology fused into technological authoritarianism, our children will live in a world where algorithms determine policy, markets determine technology, experts determine values, and citizens determine nothing.

The American experiment was never about finding the smartest managers. It was about proving that ordinary people can govern themselves.

Our children will ask: When did democracy die? We’ll have to answer: When we let the experts save us from ourselves.

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For deeper philosophical grounding, see “The Two Materialisms: Why I’m a Liberal,” “The Coming Clash of Civilizations,” and “Effective Accelerationism Is Just Technological Authoritarianism With a Smile.”

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