Thank you for putting into words what many of us have been suspicious and uneasy about. I never cease to marvel at your ability to grasp the subtle texture of reality and explain it clearly.
All the seemingly objective “technocratic” analysis of human behavior within our supposedly democratic institutions and bureaucracies is rendered meaningless in the face of the present corruption (blackmail? corporate ownership of our legislators, judiciary and administrative overlords). Our “democracy” vanished when money (citizens united) became speech. Israel, Russia, Oligarchs, and crypto currencies have effectively rendered all notions of democratic governance moot.
What could be a better example of the failure of technocratic liberalism but school reform? For several decades we were told over and over again that policies preferred by the ed reform crowd simply would, had to, must cause major learning gains, and it was only the corruption and obstinacy of the teachers unions that was holding back that process. Now even the most idealistic ed reformers tends to have a rather sheepish attitude towards it all, after their preferences failed again and again and again. And now instead of the relentless claim that replacing public schools with private or quasi private alternatives would inevitably result in large and durable learning gains, they now tends to say that choice is good in and of itself, quietly avoiding mention of the very rationale that once underlined their entire approach.
Great article. You lay out beautifully the failure mode of what Inglehart of the World Values Survey called the Materialist worldview (or Hines's Modern worldview, or Spiral Dynamics Orange Strive-Drive vMeme, etc.). The "Analytical Frame" is a brilliant term for this mode of thinking. It indeed treats problems as Complicated systems that can be solved using Complicated (if/then/else) process thinking. It simply cannot handle governance of Complex systems, much less Complex Adaptive ones. In a sense "governance" as a term should be depricated like Frankly the whole piece is brilliant and easily explains ideas I've been wrestling with for years.
The part I think you did not highlight is that when process-based technocratic governance fails it leaves open the possibility to collapse back to earlier, simpler forms like simple rules-based hierarchies and top down authoritarianism. It does so to quell the perceived chaos and force top-down order. Since the U.S. Constitution established a hierarchical system enforced by rules (laws) based on traditional elite governance with a representative twist, it tends to be subject to "falling back" to pure authoritarianism when it is under stress (WWII, 9/11, Pandemic, etc.). I can understand why you didn't touch on this since it was already taking on a big idea and this dynamic deserves its own article(s).
It’s a well-crafted argument, so full marks for that. But it’s purely conceptual, based in part on questionable assertions, and with nary a connection to day-to-day reality, and so not very useful. “The technocratic liberal establishment promised that rational analysis could perfect democratic governance.” - ??? When, by whom, and if so, how exactly, with specific examples, was that promise implemented to the detriment of democratic governance?
The major error is the failure to connect the argument with any of the myriad specific events and trends of Western history in the last about 50 years that have so influenced individual voters as to lead to Trump 2.0 - Vietnam, Watergate, globalization, laws and policies favouring capital over labour, the 24-hour news cycle, 9/11 and the War on Terror, right-wing and social media degrading public discourse from thoughts to feels, the save-the-banks-not-the-people response to the Great Recession, COVID, the unregulated and pervasive power and influence of big tech, etc. My view is that human history proceeds along a path of events and their consequences rather than in response to analytical frameworks.
I mean, every time we talk about anything in society, we are using conceptual frameworks. The question is not whether what I said is conceptual, but whether or not it is coherent and has explanatory power. And I don't think any of your appeals to historical contingencies does any violence on my arguments against liberal technocracy. My arguments against liberal technocracy are not even completely novel. Other political philosophers (like my friend Vlad Vexler) are making similar interventions.
Many thanks for your further response. I haven’t spent a lot of time considering the present moment from the perspective of political philosophy, but, respectfully, it seems to me that asserting the primacy of destructive “liberal technocracy” (which I don’t really understand; is there an illiberal technocracy operating somewhere?) ignores for no good or helpful reason the root causes - the numerous distinct, tangible forces that directly influenced voters to bring us Trump 2.0. Frankly, experts aren’t even a force, they are just a delivery system.
On a different issue, although you don’t provide a ‘way forward’ from the problem, the implication seems to be that governance by non-expert is preferable. If so, does it please you to see that Trump 2.0 is running that experiment?
I am not saying technocratic thinking is the primary problem. Nor am I making a comprehensive statement about what we ought to do. I am critiquing a way of thinking that is predominant in elite liberal discourse. A lot of people are suggesting I'm saying it's the root cause of all of our ills, which is in fact, not a claim I'm making. In fact, if you take my argument fully on board here, I would suggest that it would be hypocritical for me to make such a claim. I certainly think there are many factors—and I write about them all the time.
Your observations about right-wing and reactionary propaganda are not wrong. I make these same observations in my writings on the regular. But I might observe that they are exploiting vulnerabilities of democratic dissatisfaction that elite technocracy has played into. Opaque bureaucracies and a sense that policymaking should be left to qualified experts, is fertile ground for populists to demagogue against.
This comment resonates with me. It’s a beautiful written article that amounted to saying very little. The premise is so broad, the framework is so vague, it’s functionally useless. Ironically, it ends up doing the very thing it rails against: tying up the complexities of life into a very neat bow
I'm an expert on certain things... and have been an expert on other things in the past. But every time I started a rotation, whomever the counterpart I was evaluating/coaching was, the first thing I would say is "I teach common sense, and whether what you did was the right thing is driven by results."
The problem with the expert class these days is a tendency to say "well, actually...", and then something that runs counter to common-sense. We as Americans worship on the alter of expertise, but outside of a few narrowly technical fields (I want the helicopter I'm flying in designed by an expert, never mind that common sense says it should fall out of the sky), "expertise" is frequently just another word for "credential" in our society. And the credentialed class is increasingly out of their depth.
You've identified exactly the distinction I'm trying to make. Your approach—"I teach common sense, results drive whether you did the right thing"—embodies the epistemic humility I'm advocating for. You're an expert who understands the boundaries of expertise.
I absolutely trust virologists on virology, engineers on helicopter design, and experts within their technical domains. The problem isn't expertise itself—it's when "expertise" becomes credentialism, when technical knowledge gets extended beyond its domain, and when expert recommendations become substitutes for democratic deliberation rather than inputs into it.
Your point about results-driven validation is crucial. In genuinely technical fields, expertise can be tested against reality. But in many domains where credentialed experts claim authority, there's no clear feedback mechanism. Political scientists who couldn't predict Trump, economists who missed 2008, public health experts whose confident COVID predictions proved wrong—their credentials granted them authority that exceeded their demonstrated knowledge. That said, I still trusted them a lot more than the people telling me to take ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. I did get vaccinated, and I do not regret it to be clear. My point here is, quite nuanced.
The analytical frame I'm critiquing treats political and moral questions as if they were technical problems with objectively correct solutions. But as Hume understood, you can't derive "ought" from "is." A virologist can tell us how viruses spread, but they can't tell us what level of risk we should accept or how to balance competing values. Those are questions for democratic deliberation informed by—not replaced by—technical expertise.
When expert recommendations consistently violate common sense intuitions, that should prompt questions about whether expertise is being applied appropriately, not automatic deference to credentials.
The goal is expertise that serves democratic reasoning, not expertise that replaces it.
Expertise and credentials have been frequently used to shut down debate, which is why they have become so discredited. Politicians (and public health experts) saying "trust the science" to not just justify shutdowns, but persecute those who disagree that shutdowns were an appropriate response to the threat posed by covid. Climate change advocates (and scientists) saying to "trust the science" when advocating the destruction of our economy to halt climate change. These "experts" are pushing their own politics in advocating solutions and then act shocked when people treat them like political actors.
The flip side of this is that politicians get an out, by claiming to not be fully responsible for the consequences of their actions. And they also get an appeal to authority, which over the short-term was useful to them.
The cost of all of this is of course our institutions. Founded on at least the perception of being impartial, most of them have, due to their own actions, lost that, and as a result are now being targeted. Based off your writing, I think you and I probably differ as to whether we believe most of our institutions are salvageable in their current form, but I think we largely agree as to where their root problems lie.
I certainly do not think these post-truth populists burning the institutions down is going to make things better, no. I think they might get us all killed and drive us to civil war or worse.
I know, I read your work. I just don't view them as worse than the post-truth leftists who've marched through our institutions and have been imposing their views on the rest of us for the last decade. Honestly, I see an authoritarian right rising against a soft-totalitarian left, and that left has been the driving force behind the changes that have been shattering our societies norms and destroying the neutrality of our institutions.
And since I don't see a side that is standing up for the "reasonable people who just want good government that adheres to America's founding principles and could have a conversation with an average person from the 1990's without that person thinking that they were a lunatic," I think we're all in the position where we have to choose what we view as the least bad option.
I must confess I think anyone who thinks Trump is "less bad" that Harris would have been, is sorely mistaken. Even taking on board on the faults of the technocratic center.
That's the thing. I don't view the "technocratic center" as being anywhere near the center anymore. They used to be, but that view is about 20 years out of date. The official institutional perspective of all of these "technocratic" organizations was wholly captured by the left. How many mandatory left coded trainings have people who work for institutions had to sit through regarding all sorts of issues? I've had more than my fair share, and my institution is probably the least captured. The right didn't fight back because it outwardly professed to believe in the neutrality of those institutions... which handicapped them while those institutions were being captured.
Trump first did this with the legacy media... he stopped deferring to them, recognizing that they had long since ceased being worthy of being deferred to as anything other than a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party establishment. This term he has been going after everyone else. The right is (finally) fighting back instead of just acquiescing. My issue with this? He isn't actually fixing problems... but then, Democrats refused to acknowledge that problems even exist. So I'm left with... least bad options.
From my perspective on a national level? The side that acknowledges that problems exist, doesn't talk down to me or scorn me for being a white male, won't discriminate against my children for being half-white and half-asian when it comes to college admissions, job applications etc, and won't form a mob to come after me online and try and get me fired in real life for expressing opinions that 15 years ago were completely uncontroversial is the "least bad" option. As far as international relations go (something I'm very much involved in, and have been for quite some time)? I think the US had a choice between managed decline or something radically different, and we are now doing radically different. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but my view is a lot more nuanced than the people saying, "but our allies!?"
Since I'm retiring from my first career soon and am looking across the country (and around the world) for places to live, at the local level? The party that I can be confident over the next 20 years will continue to enforce laws, support economic growth, allow development to keep housing available and cost of living low, prioritize parents in public schools and try and keep taxes as low as possible is where I'm looking at as far as states to live in. There are a number of red, and some purple, states that meet that criteria. There are no blue states that do.
The Democratic party has huge problems when it comes to governance. My view of national politics has been shaped by a lot of things outside of the country that I've seen. One of the most important was how it was easier to understand what the rules of conduct were living in an authoritarian country in 2020 than it was in America. But where to live is local. It amounts to trust in a party to govern... and a lot of Americans are voting with their feet right now, and so am I.
Roe vs Wade - I think it can be summed as technocratic change; i don't think the nation was taken on a journey by politicians (would / will it fail, yes many times!); instead it was punted by them to SC. Same with gay marriage. they should have been constitutionally or by legislature legalised; or live with a detente of varying state policy.
I've seen it happen in other countries (India); politicians punt difficult social questions to Courts or other institutions ill equipped to deal with the complex fabric of society.
Matthew, I think you see yourself as pragmatic, but in truth you are guilty of naivety. We 'white males' have had the upper hand for a while now, but we are the minority in a world interconnected in ways unimaginable only a few years ago.
What you see as some uniform 'left/woke' agenda is the process by which some adaptation to this reality is being attempted. Your hope to resist this adaptation is ultimately doomed. Republicans/Conservatives and their unsteerable Trump/Farage bulldozers think to keep reality at bay, but the cost is too high. The rest of humanity, the climate and biology in the form of say, viruses, will not be pacified by Executive Orders and Supreme Court logic twisting.
It appears you were happy to experience authoritarianism, and are welcoming its arrival in America. No doubt the authoritarian you experienced was male, wealthy and presenting as heterosexual, like yourself. No doubt then likely to have congenial views to the likes of us. But consider what it might be like to be less naturally aligned with the regime, or to become so? History has a lot to tell us here.
To avoid negative-sum conflict and destruction we have to seek a negotiated (democratic) future within our states and the world, as Mike argues. It is naive to think fighting for 'Business As Usual' in social and economic terms has any long-term chance of success.
You are making a lot of false assumptions in this statement that I find incredibly naive, as well as inaccurate.
This belief that the left-woke agenda is somehow the vanguard of history and inevitable is the biggest one. Very typical of American liberals, but incredibly blinkered. I've spent most of my adult life living and working in other countries (mostly developing) with foriegners. The progressive left is more disconnected with people, all people, today than it has ever been, and believing that it is somehow unstoppable is both the height of arrogance and ignorance. You're talking about an agenda that has lost at the ballot box twice, in the US, to Trump. One that has caused their own "Trump" to be elected in Italy, may well lose France in the next presidential elections, has made Germany and Britain essentially ungovernable, and doesn't hold sway anyplace else of consequence. You need a lot more than arrogance to convince me, or anyone who isn't already a true believer like you, that somehow the ideology you support is destined to succeed.
Welcoming authoritarianism in America? Why can't people on the internet ever address arguments that I make instead of making up an argument in their own head and then addressing that while pretending it is mine? I guess because they prefer to argue with caricatures instead of other people.
You read what you want to read, I think. I speak not of what should happen as an 'ideology', but what is happening as a reality. The mass of non- white, western, male, straight, wealthy humanity is demanding its share of resources; the atmosphere is protesting against our indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels; our disruption of the natural world is releasing disease we need public scientific intervention to survive.
I don't propose any 'ideology' to tackle these challenges other than genuine liberal democracy as described by Mike. What policies might emerge, I can guess at and hope, but not predict.
As for your preference for authoritarianism - you speak apparently approvingly of more easily understanding the rules of conduct under such a regime. If I misinterpreted this remark, perhaps you would like to explain what you meant?
Soooo, you aren't really addressing any of the points that were made above, and just want to argue that the white race is on the way out? Since I didn't make a statement on that one way or another (my kids are only half-white, and that is far from uncommon in today's America), methinks you are creating a bit of a straw man to argue against. DEI/Affirmative Action, soft on crime policies, internet mobs and institutions that are anything but non-partisan and growing discredited because of it are what I was talking about, and are hardly inevitable. If that isn't what you were talking about, then I don't know why you were replying to me.
As for authoritarianism vs liberal democracy, I was making the point that liberal democracy is not what the progressive left wants or has been pushing for. The ever changing standards of conduct that existed in 2019-2020 America as far as free speech were much more constraining and difficult to follow than those of an authoritarian nation, where at least the restrictions on free speech were clearly articulated, universally understood, and didn't change.
Now I was very clear, I would love to have a liberal Democracy. If there were a political party or dominant political force in America that stood for that, I'd support them. But that isn't where we are. If the center-left manages to reclaim the Democratic party from the progressives that control it lock, stock and barrel right now, then we may have that again. If traditional Republicans reclaim the Republic Party from MAGA, same thing. But neither of those things is looking likely right now,, and all we've got a choice between two bad options. I will pick the option I view as least bad, and so will most voting Americans.
You are saying in many words what I was thinking as I read the article: "the main problem was the enormous amount of bullshitting from the alleged expert class."
I fear that if there is a way back from this cliff, the answer the liberal technocrats will take away from it is not that more democratic participation was necessary in crafting policy solutions in order to ensure people felt their voices were heard in the creation of the laws by which they must live, but rather that the people have proved they are too stupid to be trusted with their own governance and an enlightened aristocracy of philosopher-kings that is beyond democratic accountability (since democracy brought us figures like Donald Trump) is necessary to ensure that society runs optimally.
I shall respond to the feeling of despair here with a passage from one my mythopoetic pieces to capture how I think about how to orient myself against these despairing feelings:
"You've been in the ring long enough to know how this works. The clamor, the spectacle, the high-wire act of meaning-making in a world that wants to pull everything apart. You know the flood is always rising, that the center is always under siege, that entropy never sleeps. But here, in this fleeting moment of stillness—between the trapeze swings, beneath the roar of the crowd—this, my Note from the Circus.
Because love, too, is a balancing act. A dance with gravity, a defiance of the fall. It is the wire beneath your feet, the tension that holds, the invisible force that makes coherence possible in a world that should, by all accounts, collapse into noise.
And if there is a message scrawled on this note, a whisper passed between acts, it is this:
Hold the center. Push back the flood. Keep walking the wire.
This is the Grand Praxis. This is the work of being human. This is the path that was established at the beginning of all things and remains open to us now, in this moment, as we face the challenges of our time not with despair or denial but with the courage to create.
Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. And in the constructing, we participate in the rhythm established by the first movement—the only movement—that makes all existence possible.
The most gut-rumbling danger of the intellectual arrogance you describe involves nuclear weapons, deterrence theory and their command and control systems. Technical expertise is an absolute necessity for obvious reasons, but then we immediately veer off into trying to prevent nuclear war by counting on fallible human beings operating in countries with wildly divergent political systems, histories and cultures to manage those differences indefinitely without someone, somewhere making one final miscalculation that extinguishes the human race within hours. You place a lot of faith in a spirit of cooperative adaptation in responding to unexpected events and new information but what should we do when confronting unforgiving complexity that allows for no second chances?
If we confront an unforgiving complexity that allows for no second chances, then there will be no second chances, I suppose. If this game of civilization we are playing ends, it ends. But I intend to keep playing, and I know my orientation in the game.
Beautiful you have nailed the tail on the donkey, by distinguishing complicated from complex systems, as if more data centers will save of from the messy business of participatory democracy, and the hard work building our ear muscles to be able to listen to and get to know our neighbors regarding the issues that confront us all, especially where we live and breath in the watersheds and habitats of our local and regional lives!
The unspoken thing that you’re missing in this article about technocratic elite is that they don’t like voters very much. They are overwhelmingly democrats and progressives, overwhelmingly, college, educated, increasingly cloistered, in a few key regions, and are increasingly distant from what the average American thinks or believes.
What about everyone that supports what he's doing? We shouldn't tolerate rampant crime and homelessness in cities, or the subversion of our needed immigration system. Hiding behind progressive interpretations of constitutional rights to preserve the decay of civilization isn't something normal Americans will support. They want secure borders and safe neighborhoods.
Now you know full well he isn’t suggesting that. I do find it funny you wrote the entire article about democratic participation and yet you struggle to fathom that voters can and do want things different from you
> " For decades, the technocratic liberal establishment promised that complex social problems could be solved through sophisticated analysis, expert knowledge, and evidence-based policy. Democracy would be perfected through better data, institutions would be strengthened through careful design, and progress would emerge from the systematic application of human intelligence to human problems.
Instead, we got Donald Trump."
Nice story bro. But you might give some thought to the argument that "you" "got Donald Trump" because much of your vaunted "liberal establishment" has been rotted out by postmodernist claptrap. Apropos of which, you might also consider this comment from Terry Glavin, a Canadian journalist of some repute:
TG: "Much of this newsletter’s content has been about the erosion of the disciplines necessary to establish broad consensus about how to go about determining what constitutes the truth. It’s about the crisis of epistemology that has given us Left-wing postmodernism, post-truth Trumpism and a fatal incoherence in the mass media generally."
QUOTE: Amen to that. A couple of precursors on that theme, the first from US psychologist "Scott Alexander" currently writing in the Substack Astral Codex Ten (not as wooish as it sounds though he has his biases and blind-spots), and previously at Slate Star Codex:
SA: "Topics here tend to center vaguely around this meta-philosophical idea of how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs, and especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all." [Doomed!, I say doomed! 😉🙂]
And something from a US/UK lawyer and professor of philosophy, Elizabeth Finne, in her Quillette article on "The Tyranny of the Subjective":
EF: "The primacy of subjectivity is by no means limited to politics. It now permeates the framework through which we have traditionally mediated our competing narratives. Journalism, academia, science, and law are all affected. In short, any institution that exists to accommodate competing perspectives is being undermined by a new paradigm that privileges the subjective ‘lived experience.’ And, in the process, the meta-values which have traditionally enabled us to transcend our differing subjective experiences suffer. Foundational principles such as audi alteram partem (listen to the other side), the presumption of innocence, proportionality, empiricism, and even the rule of law now must bow before the sovereignty of the subjective."
And that "primacy of subjectivity" and "privileges the subjective 'lived experience' " doesn't get much starker (raving mad), and more in-your-face, than Kamala Harris gushing about transwoman -- AKA, male transvestite -- Dylan Mulvaney "living authentically as a woman":
Mulvaney is most certainly NOT a woman -- just a male if he still has his nuts attached, and a sexless eunuch if he doesn't. Saying he is "living authentically as a woman" doesn't make him one, doesn't make him an "adult human female"; it only proves that he, and all his fellow travelers and enablers, is madder than a hatter.
Which is rather like Robert Westman, the Minnesota shooter responsible for the deaths of two children, and like the NYTimes which insisted on referring to HIM as "Ms.", "she", and "her":
NYTimes: "The document noted that Ms. Westman 'identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification.'
In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, the assailant fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices ..."
NO ONE gets to "identify" as a female if they're male, or as a male if they're a female -- as ACLU "lawyer" in the Skrmetti case and transman Chase Strangio does. You might just as well say that someone who's 47 years old can "identify as a teenager" and play in juvenile sports leagues.
There's your smoking gun for why your "liberal establishment" is something of a joke. Being charitable.
In many ways the technocrats were just doing what we asked of them. Americans didn’t want to squabble over details, they wanted to live their lives and not worry about things. I agree the old systems are not meeting the moment but I’m wondering how you are accounting for the fire hose of slop convincing the population the experts are out to get them.
Both things are a problem. I write about the firehose of slop (flooding the zone with shit) all the time. But I think what I'm talking about is why democratic culture has become increasingly vulnerable to it.
They definitely got caught in the trap of thinking good governance would be enough. Besides running again the last admin’s inability to message their works was an enormous failure. It would be such a same to lose all of the knowledge of the technocrats so my hope is that we can find a way for political leadership to be more agile while keeping the knowledge and expertise of the people staffing the government.
Thank you, interesting read. How can your complex problems be solved by two-party Democracy where all is a simple Black or White. Let's have the chaos of multiparty politics to better navigate our chaotic world. Or is that too simplistic a solution? Even in politics something can be greater than the sum of its parts, your 2+2 can equal 5.
Put another way, I'm getting from this that the analytical frame is self-absorbed in good faith, while remaining either willfully or stupidly ignorant of the history of bad faith. If things are going your way -- and "money doesn't talk, it swears" (Bob Dylan) -- you could be insulated from the bad faith that regular people have to deal with and which has been growing in complexity under profiteering algorithms of self-referential narcissists (see Bandy X. Lee). Those of us with plenty of serious business keeping food on the table and paying bills, rely on good faith and play along as the wealthy capitulate to extortion and other corruptions. Our need for community requires us to pool our time and experience, to share insights (thank you, Mike!), and to formulate ways out of this gas-bag of pseudo-democracy. We're still here, still humping, and still welcoming equal opportunity in the eyes of god and in the eyes of the law.
Fascinating reflection, even if the vessel required to navigate collectively through increasing complexity feels pretty broken about now, and taking on a lot of water.
Thank you for putting into words what many of us have been suspicious and uneasy about. I never cease to marvel at your ability to grasp the subtle texture of reality and explain it clearly.
All the seemingly objective “technocratic” analysis of human behavior within our supposedly democratic institutions and bureaucracies is rendered meaningless in the face of the present corruption (blackmail? corporate ownership of our legislators, judiciary and administrative overlords). Our “democracy” vanished when money (citizens united) became speech. Israel, Russia, Oligarchs, and crypto currencies have effectively rendered all notions of democratic governance moot.
What could be a better example of the failure of technocratic liberalism but school reform? For several decades we were told over and over again that policies preferred by the ed reform crowd simply would, had to, must cause major learning gains, and it was only the corruption and obstinacy of the teachers unions that was holding back that process. Now even the most idealistic ed reformers tends to have a rather sheepish attitude towards it all, after their preferences failed again and again and again. And now instead of the relentless claim that replacing public schools with private or quasi private alternatives would inevitably result in large and durable learning gains, they now tends to say that choice is good in and of itself, quietly avoiding mention of the very rationale that once underlined their entire approach.
Great article. You lay out beautifully the failure mode of what Inglehart of the World Values Survey called the Materialist worldview (or Hines's Modern worldview, or Spiral Dynamics Orange Strive-Drive vMeme, etc.). The "Analytical Frame" is a brilliant term for this mode of thinking. It indeed treats problems as Complicated systems that can be solved using Complicated (if/then/else) process thinking. It simply cannot handle governance of Complex systems, much less Complex Adaptive ones. In a sense "governance" as a term should be depricated like Frankly the whole piece is brilliant and easily explains ideas I've been wrestling with for years.
The part I think you did not highlight is that when process-based technocratic governance fails it leaves open the possibility to collapse back to earlier, simpler forms like simple rules-based hierarchies and top down authoritarianism. It does so to quell the perceived chaos and force top-down order. Since the U.S. Constitution established a hierarchical system enforced by rules (laws) based on traditional elite governance with a representative twist, it tends to be subject to "falling back" to pure authoritarianism when it is under stress (WWII, 9/11, Pandemic, etc.). I can understand why you didn't touch on this since it was already taking on a big idea and this dynamic deserves its own article(s).
Bah. Editing fail on my phone. Just ignore the "governance" sentence fragment. I wish we could edit comments
It’s a well-crafted argument, so full marks for that. But it’s purely conceptual, based in part on questionable assertions, and with nary a connection to day-to-day reality, and so not very useful. “The technocratic liberal establishment promised that rational analysis could perfect democratic governance.” - ??? When, by whom, and if so, how exactly, with specific examples, was that promise implemented to the detriment of democratic governance?
The major error is the failure to connect the argument with any of the myriad specific events and trends of Western history in the last about 50 years that have so influenced individual voters as to lead to Trump 2.0 - Vietnam, Watergate, globalization, laws and policies favouring capital over labour, the 24-hour news cycle, 9/11 and the War on Terror, right-wing and social media degrading public discourse from thoughts to feels, the save-the-banks-not-the-people response to the Great Recession, COVID, the unregulated and pervasive power and influence of big tech, etc. My view is that human history proceeds along a path of events and their consequences rather than in response to analytical frameworks.
I mean, every time we talk about anything in society, we are using conceptual frameworks. The question is not whether what I said is conceptual, but whether or not it is coherent and has explanatory power. And I don't think any of your appeals to historical contingencies does any violence on my arguments against liberal technocracy. My arguments against liberal technocracy are not even completely novel. Other political philosophers (like my friend Vlad Vexler) are making similar interventions.
Many thanks for your further response. I haven’t spent a lot of time considering the present moment from the perspective of political philosophy, but, respectfully, it seems to me that asserting the primacy of destructive “liberal technocracy” (which I don’t really understand; is there an illiberal technocracy operating somewhere?) ignores for no good or helpful reason the root causes - the numerous distinct, tangible forces that directly influenced voters to bring us Trump 2.0. Frankly, experts aren’t even a force, they are just a delivery system.
On a different issue, although you don’t provide a ‘way forward’ from the problem, the implication seems to be that governance by non-expert is preferable. If so, does it please you to see that Trump 2.0 is running that experiment?
I am not saying technocratic thinking is the primary problem. Nor am I making a comprehensive statement about what we ought to do. I am critiquing a way of thinking that is predominant in elite liberal discourse. A lot of people are suggesting I'm saying it's the root cause of all of our ills, which is in fact, not a claim I'm making. In fact, if you take my argument fully on board here, I would suggest that it would be hypocritical for me to make such a claim. I certainly think there are many factors—and I write about them all the time.
Your observations about right-wing and reactionary propaganda are not wrong. I make these same observations in my writings on the regular. But I might observe that they are exploiting vulnerabilities of democratic dissatisfaction that elite technocracy has played into. Opaque bureaucracies and a sense that policymaking should be left to qualified experts, is fertile ground for populists to demagogue against.
This comment resonates with me. It’s a beautiful written article that amounted to saying very little. The premise is so broad, the framework is so vague, it’s functionally useless. Ironically, it ends up doing the very thing it rails against: tying up the complexities of life into a very neat bow
I'm an expert on certain things... and have been an expert on other things in the past. But every time I started a rotation, whomever the counterpart I was evaluating/coaching was, the first thing I would say is "I teach common sense, and whether what you did was the right thing is driven by results."
The problem with the expert class these days is a tendency to say "well, actually...", and then something that runs counter to common-sense. We as Americans worship on the alter of expertise, but outside of a few narrowly technical fields (I want the helicopter I'm flying in designed by an expert, never mind that common sense says it should fall out of the sky), "expertise" is frequently just another word for "credential" in our society. And the credentialed class is increasingly out of their depth.
You've identified exactly the distinction I'm trying to make. Your approach—"I teach common sense, results drive whether you did the right thing"—embodies the epistemic humility I'm advocating for. You're an expert who understands the boundaries of expertise.
I absolutely trust virologists on virology, engineers on helicopter design, and experts within their technical domains. The problem isn't expertise itself—it's when "expertise" becomes credentialism, when technical knowledge gets extended beyond its domain, and when expert recommendations become substitutes for democratic deliberation rather than inputs into it.
Your point about results-driven validation is crucial. In genuinely technical fields, expertise can be tested against reality. But in many domains where credentialed experts claim authority, there's no clear feedback mechanism. Political scientists who couldn't predict Trump, economists who missed 2008, public health experts whose confident COVID predictions proved wrong—their credentials granted them authority that exceeded their demonstrated knowledge. That said, I still trusted them a lot more than the people telling me to take ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. I did get vaccinated, and I do not regret it to be clear. My point here is, quite nuanced.
The analytical frame I'm critiquing treats political and moral questions as if they were technical problems with objectively correct solutions. But as Hume understood, you can't derive "ought" from "is." A virologist can tell us how viruses spread, but they can't tell us what level of risk we should accept or how to balance competing values. Those are questions for democratic deliberation informed by—not replaced by—technical expertise.
When expert recommendations consistently violate common sense intuitions, that should prompt questions about whether expertise is being applied appropriately, not automatic deference to credentials.
The goal is expertise that serves democratic reasoning, not expertise that replaces it.
Expertise and credentials have been frequently used to shut down debate, which is why they have become so discredited. Politicians (and public health experts) saying "trust the science" to not just justify shutdowns, but persecute those who disagree that shutdowns were an appropriate response to the threat posed by covid. Climate change advocates (and scientists) saying to "trust the science" when advocating the destruction of our economy to halt climate change. These "experts" are pushing their own politics in advocating solutions and then act shocked when people treat them like political actors.
The flip side of this is that politicians get an out, by claiming to not be fully responsible for the consequences of their actions. And they also get an appeal to authority, which over the short-term was useful to them.
The cost of all of this is of course our institutions. Founded on at least the perception of being impartial, most of them have, due to their own actions, lost that, and as a result are now being targeted. Based off your writing, I think you and I probably differ as to whether we believe most of our institutions are salvageable in their current form, but I think we largely agree as to where their root problems lie.
I certainly do not think these post-truth populists burning the institutions down is going to make things better, no. I think they might get us all killed and drive us to civil war or worse.
I know, I read your work. I just don't view them as worse than the post-truth leftists who've marched through our institutions and have been imposing their views on the rest of us for the last decade. Honestly, I see an authoritarian right rising against a soft-totalitarian left, and that left has been the driving force behind the changes that have been shattering our societies norms and destroying the neutrality of our institutions.
And since I don't see a side that is standing up for the "reasonable people who just want good government that adheres to America's founding principles and could have a conversation with an average person from the 1990's without that person thinking that they were a lunatic," I think we're all in the position where we have to choose what we view as the least bad option.
I must confess I think anyone who thinks Trump is "less bad" that Harris would have been, is sorely mistaken. Even taking on board on the faults of the technocratic center.
That's the thing. I don't view the "technocratic center" as being anywhere near the center anymore. They used to be, but that view is about 20 years out of date. The official institutional perspective of all of these "technocratic" organizations was wholly captured by the left. How many mandatory left coded trainings have people who work for institutions had to sit through regarding all sorts of issues? I've had more than my fair share, and my institution is probably the least captured. The right didn't fight back because it outwardly professed to believe in the neutrality of those institutions... which handicapped them while those institutions were being captured.
Trump first did this with the legacy media... he stopped deferring to them, recognizing that they had long since ceased being worthy of being deferred to as anything other than a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party establishment. This term he has been going after everyone else. The right is (finally) fighting back instead of just acquiescing. My issue with this? He isn't actually fixing problems... but then, Democrats refused to acknowledge that problems even exist. So I'm left with... least bad options.
From my perspective on a national level? The side that acknowledges that problems exist, doesn't talk down to me or scorn me for being a white male, won't discriminate against my children for being half-white and half-asian when it comes to college admissions, job applications etc, and won't form a mob to come after me online and try and get me fired in real life for expressing opinions that 15 years ago were completely uncontroversial is the "least bad" option. As far as international relations go (something I'm very much involved in, and have been for quite some time)? I think the US had a choice between managed decline or something radically different, and we are now doing radically different. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but my view is a lot more nuanced than the people saying, "but our allies!?"
Since I'm retiring from my first career soon and am looking across the country (and around the world) for places to live, at the local level? The party that I can be confident over the next 20 years will continue to enforce laws, support economic growth, allow development to keep housing available and cost of living low, prioritize parents in public schools and try and keep taxes as low as possible is where I'm looking at as far as states to live in. There are a number of red, and some purple, states that meet that criteria. There are no blue states that do.
The Democratic party has huge problems when it comes to governance. My view of national politics has been shaped by a lot of things outside of the country that I've seen. One of the most important was how it was easier to understand what the rules of conduct were living in an authoritarian country in 2020 than it was in America. But where to live is local. It amounts to trust in a party to govern... and a lot of Americans are voting with their feet right now, and so am I.
Roe vs Wade - I think it can be summed as technocratic change; i don't think the nation was taken on a journey by politicians (would / will it fail, yes many times!); instead it was punted by them to SC. Same with gay marriage. they should have been constitutionally or by legislature legalised; or live with a detente of varying state policy.
I've seen it happen in other countries (India); politicians punt difficult social questions to Courts or other institutions ill equipped to deal with the complex fabric of society.
Matthew, I think you see yourself as pragmatic, but in truth you are guilty of naivety. We 'white males' have had the upper hand for a while now, but we are the minority in a world interconnected in ways unimaginable only a few years ago.
What you see as some uniform 'left/woke' agenda is the process by which some adaptation to this reality is being attempted. Your hope to resist this adaptation is ultimately doomed. Republicans/Conservatives and their unsteerable Trump/Farage bulldozers think to keep reality at bay, but the cost is too high. The rest of humanity, the climate and biology in the form of say, viruses, will not be pacified by Executive Orders and Supreme Court logic twisting.
It appears you were happy to experience authoritarianism, and are welcoming its arrival in America. No doubt the authoritarian you experienced was male, wealthy and presenting as heterosexual, like yourself. No doubt then likely to have congenial views to the likes of us. But consider what it might be like to be less naturally aligned with the regime, or to become so? History has a lot to tell us here.
To avoid negative-sum conflict and destruction we have to seek a negotiated (democratic) future within our states and the world, as Mike argues. It is naive to think fighting for 'Business As Usual' in social and economic terms has any long-term chance of success.
You are making a lot of false assumptions in this statement that I find incredibly naive, as well as inaccurate.
This belief that the left-woke agenda is somehow the vanguard of history and inevitable is the biggest one. Very typical of American liberals, but incredibly blinkered. I've spent most of my adult life living and working in other countries (mostly developing) with foriegners. The progressive left is more disconnected with people, all people, today than it has ever been, and believing that it is somehow unstoppable is both the height of arrogance and ignorance. You're talking about an agenda that has lost at the ballot box twice, in the US, to Trump. One that has caused their own "Trump" to be elected in Italy, may well lose France in the next presidential elections, has made Germany and Britain essentially ungovernable, and doesn't hold sway anyplace else of consequence. You need a lot more than arrogance to convince me, or anyone who isn't already a true believer like you, that somehow the ideology you support is destined to succeed.
Welcoming authoritarianism in America? Why can't people on the internet ever address arguments that I make instead of making up an argument in their own head and then addressing that while pretending it is mine? I guess because they prefer to argue with caricatures instead of other people.
You read what you want to read, I think. I speak not of what should happen as an 'ideology', but what is happening as a reality. The mass of non- white, western, male, straight, wealthy humanity is demanding its share of resources; the atmosphere is protesting against our indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels; our disruption of the natural world is releasing disease we need public scientific intervention to survive.
I don't propose any 'ideology' to tackle these challenges other than genuine liberal democracy as described by Mike. What policies might emerge, I can guess at and hope, but not predict.
As for your preference for authoritarianism - you speak apparently approvingly of more easily understanding the rules of conduct under such a regime. If I misinterpreted this remark, perhaps you would like to explain what you meant?
Soooo, you aren't really addressing any of the points that were made above, and just want to argue that the white race is on the way out? Since I didn't make a statement on that one way or another (my kids are only half-white, and that is far from uncommon in today's America), methinks you are creating a bit of a straw man to argue against. DEI/Affirmative Action, soft on crime policies, internet mobs and institutions that are anything but non-partisan and growing discredited because of it are what I was talking about, and are hardly inevitable. If that isn't what you were talking about, then I don't know why you were replying to me.
As for authoritarianism vs liberal democracy, I was making the point that liberal democracy is not what the progressive left wants or has been pushing for. The ever changing standards of conduct that existed in 2019-2020 America as far as free speech were much more constraining and difficult to follow than those of an authoritarian nation, where at least the restrictions on free speech were clearly articulated, universally understood, and didn't change.
Now I was very clear, I would love to have a liberal Democracy. If there were a political party or dominant political force in America that stood for that, I'd support them. But that isn't where we are. If the center-left manages to reclaim the Democratic party from the progressives that control it lock, stock and barrel right now, then we may have that again. If traditional Republicans reclaim the Republic Party from MAGA, same thing. But neither of those things is looking likely right now,, and all we've got a choice between two bad options. I will pick the option I view as least bad, and so will most voting Americans.
You are saying in many words what I was thinking as I read the article: "the main problem was the enormous amount of bullshitting from the alleged expert class."
I fear that if there is a way back from this cliff, the answer the liberal technocrats will take away from it is not that more democratic participation was necessary in crafting policy solutions in order to ensure people felt their voices were heard in the creation of the laws by which they must live, but rather that the people have proved they are too stupid to be trusted with their own governance and an enlightened aristocracy of philosopher-kings that is beyond democratic accountability (since democracy brought us figures like Donald Trump) is necessary to ensure that society runs optimally.
This is an argument that probably goes back to at least Plato: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/559
I shall respond to the feeling of despair here with a passage from one my mythopoetic pieces to capture how I think about how to orient myself against these despairing feelings:
"You've been in the ring long enough to know how this works. The clamor, the spectacle, the high-wire act of meaning-making in a world that wants to pull everything apart. You know the flood is always rising, that the center is always under siege, that entropy never sleeps. But here, in this fleeting moment of stillness—between the trapeze swings, beneath the roar of the crowd—this, my Note from the Circus.
Because love, too, is a balancing act. A dance with gravity, a defiance of the fall. It is the wire beneath your feet, the tension that holds, the invisible force that makes coherence possible in a world that should, by all accounts, collapse into noise.
And if there is a message scrawled on this note, a whisper passed between acts, it is this:
Hold the center. Push back the flood. Keep walking the wire.
This is the Grand Praxis. This is the work of being human. This is the path that was established at the beginning of all things and remains open to us now, in this moment, as we face the challenges of our time not with despair or denial but with the courage to create.
Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. And in the constructing, we participate in the rhythm established by the first movement—the only movement—that makes all existence possible.
In the beginning, there was tension. And in every moment of creation, the beginning happens again." (https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-grand-praxis)
The most gut-rumbling danger of the intellectual arrogance you describe involves nuclear weapons, deterrence theory and their command and control systems. Technical expertise is an absolute necessity for obvious reasons, but then we immediately veer off into trying to prevent nuclear war by counting on fallible human beings operating in countries with wildly divergent political systems, histories and cultures to manage those differences indefinitely without someone, somewhere making one final miscalculation that extinguishes the human race within hours. You place a lot of faith in a spirit of cooperative adaptation in responding to unexpected events and new information but what should we do when confronting unforgiving complexity that allows for no second chances?
If we confront an unforgiving complexity that allows for no second chances, then there will be no second chances, I suppose. If this game of civilization we are playing ends, it ends. But I intend to keep playing, and I know my orientation in the game.
Beautiful you have nailed the tail on the donkey, by distinguishing complicated from complex systems, as if more data centers will save of from the messy business of participatory democracy, and the hard work building our ear muscles to be able to listen to and get to know our neighbors regarding the issues that confront us all, especially where we live and breath in the watersheds and habitats of our local and regional lives!
Your voice is authentically your own
Don’t change a thing!
But also stay open to your “emergent” voice.
The unspoken thing that you’re missing in this article about technocratic elite is that they don’t like voters very much. They are overwhelmingly democrats and progressives, overwhelmingly, college, educated, increasingly cloistered, in a few key regions, and are increasingly distant from what the average American thinks or believes.
What about everyone that supports what he's doing? We shouldn't tolerate rampant crime and homelessness in cities, or the subversion of our needed immigration system. Hiding behind progressive interpretations of constitutional rights to preserve the decay of civilization isn't something normal Americans will support. They want secure borders and safe neighborhoods.
And then what? Once they've traded their freedom for a police state, to achieve these ends, that is?
I'm not a criminal or an immigrant here illegally. Not really worried about it.
What do you mean by police state? A state that competently enforces the law to preserve society?
Is it your contention that our society would have fallen apart, sans Trump's election?
Now you know full well he isn’t suggesting that. I do find it funny you wrote the entire article about democratic participation and yet you struggle to fathom that voters can and do want things different from you
No
> " For decades, the technocratic liberal establishment promised that complex social problems could be solved through sophisticated analysis, expert knowledge, and evidence-based policy. Democracy would be perfected through better data, institutions would be strengthened through careful design, and progress would emerge from the systematic application of human intelligence to human problems.
Instead, we got Donald Trump."
Nice story bro. But you might give some thought to the argument that "you" "got Donald Trump" because much of your vaunted "liberal establishment" has been rotted out by postmodernist claptrap. Apropos of which, you might also consider this comment from Terry Glavin, a Canadian journalist of some repute:
TG: "Much of this newsletter’s content has been about the erosion of the disciplines necessary to establish broad consensus about how to go about determining what constitutes the truth. It’s about the crisis of epistemology that has given us Left-wing postmodernism, post-truth Trumpism and a fatal incoherence in the mass media generally."
https://therealstory.substack.com/p/when-too-much-news-happens-too-fast
My elaboration on that theme in a comment there:
QUOTE: Amen to that. A couple of precursors on that theme, the first from US psychologist "Scott Alexander" currently writing in the Substack Astral Codex Ten (not as wooish as it sounds though he has his biases and blind-spots), and previously at Slate Star Codex:
SA: "Topics here tend to center vaguely around this meta-philosophical idea of how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs, and especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all." [Doomed!, I say doomed! 😉🙂]
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/;
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration/comment/49625356;
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/x-fact-check-does-gender-integration/comment/49666376
And something from a US/UK lawyer and professor of philosophy, Elizabeth Finne, in her Quillette article on "The Tyranny of the Subjective":
EF: "The primacy of subjectivity is by no means limited to politics. It now permeates the framework through which we have traditionally mediated our competing narratives. Journalism, academia, science, and law are all affected. In short, any institution that exists to accommodate competing perspectives is being undermined by a new paradigm that privileges the subjective ‘lived experience.’ And, in the process, the meta-values which have traditionally enabled us to transcend our differing subjective experiences suffer. Foundational principles such as audi alteram partem (listen to the other side), the presumption of innocence, proportionality, empiricism, and even the rule of law now must bow before the sovereignty of the subjective."
Archive link: https://archive.ph/3sdwg;
Quillette: http://quillette.com/2018/03/19/the-tyranny-of-the-subjective/
UNQUOTE
https://therealstory.substack.com/p/when-too-much-news-happens-too-fast/comment/151470243
And that "primacy of subjectivity" and "privileges the subjective 'lived experience' " doesn't get much starker (raving mad), and more in-your-face, than Kamala Harris gushing about transwoman -- AKA, male transvestite -- Dylan Mulvaney "living authentically as a woman":
https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/03/23/kamala-harris-dylan-mulvaney-birthday-card-backlash/
And the ACLU: "Like 4.5 million other TikTok users, I’ve recently become enamored with Dylan Mulvaney, a spritely Los Angeles-based performer who came out earlier this year as a transgender woman."; https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/trans-joy-is-most-necessary-when-it-feels-the-most-impossible
Mulvaney is most certainly NOT a woman -- just a male if he still has his nuts attached, and a sexless eunuch if he doesn't. Saying he is "living authentically as a woman" doesn't make him one, doesn't make him an "adult human female"; it only proves that he, and all his fellow travelers and enablers, is madder than a hatter.
Which is rather like Robert Westman, the Minnesota shooter responsible for the deaths of two children, and like the NYTimes which insisted on referring to HIM as "Ms.", "she", and "her":
NYTimes: "The document noted that Ms. Westman 'identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification.'
In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, the assailant fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices ..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/us/minneapolis-school-shooting-minnesota.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iU8.0Fqi.mCSN1OXFjCPt&smid=url-share
NO ONE gets to "identify" as a female if they're male, or as a male if they're a female -- as ACLU "lawyer" in the Skrmetti case and transman Chase Strangio does. You might just as well say that someone who's 47 years old can "identify as a teenager" and play in juvenile sports leagues.
There's your smoking gun for why your "liberal establishment" is something of a joke. Being charitable.
In many ways the technocrats were just doing what we asked of them. Americans didn’t want to squabble over details, they wanted to live their lives and not worry about things. I agree the old systems are not meeting the moment but I’m wondering how you are accounting for the fire hose of slop convincing the population the experts are out to get them.
Both things are a problem. I write about the firehose of slop (flooding the zone with shit) all the time. But I think what I'm talking about is why democratic culture has become increasingly vulnerable to it.
They definitely got caught in the trap of thinking good governance would be enough. Besides running again the last admin’s inability to message their works was an enormous failure. It would be such a same to lose all of the knowledge of the technocrats so my hope is that we can find a way for political leadership to be more agile while keeping the knowledge and expertise of the people staffing the government.
Thank you, interesting read. How can your complex problems be solved by two-party Democracy where all is a simple Black or White. Let's have the chaos of multiparty politics to better navigate our chaotic world. Or is that too simplistic a solution? Even in politics something can be greater than the sum of its parts, your 2+2 can equal 5.
Put another way, I'm getting from this that the analytical frame is self-absorbed in good faith, while remaining either willfully or stupidly ignorant of the history of bad faith. If things are going your way -- and "money doesn't talk, it swears" (Bob Dylan) -- you could be insulated from the bad faith that regular people have to deal with and which has been growing in complexity under profiteering algorithms of self-referential narcissists (see Bandy X. Lee). Those of us with plenty of serious business keeping food on the table and paying bills, rely on good faith and play along as the wealthy capitulate to extortion and other corruptions. Our need for community requires us to pool our time and experience, to share insights (thank you, Mike!), and to formulate ways out of this gas-bag of pseudo-democracy. We're still here, still humping, and still welcoming equal opportunity in the eyes of god and in the eyes of the law.
Fascinating reflection, even if the vessel required to navigate collectively through increasing complexity feels pretty broken about now, and taking on a lot of water.