The slug on Jason L. Riley’s latest Wall Street Journal column is “When did Democrats stop trusting people to know what was best for them and their children?” Apparently, he has only now noticed that the Democratic Party has a strong technocratic wing. Odd, since both of the last two Democratic presidents held that view. He remarks:
A troubling trend in recent decades has been the transfer of decision-making authority to expert intellectuals. Environmental regulations and health-care mandates are two obvious examples. But there’s also the more general nanny state mentality emanating from liberals who tell you that politicians, bureaucrats and academics know better than you do how to live your life and raise your children. The result is fewer decisions made through democratic processes, and more choices determined by an intelligentsia that suffers few if any consequences for being wrong.
My problem with the technocratic wing of the party is somewhat different and one I have aired before. Experts are well and good. We should take their advice in the areas of their expertise. But no one is an expert on everything and there is an inescapable tendency, human beings what they are, to try to leverage your expertise in one area into areas in which you have no expertise, cf. Paul Krugman.
Actual technocracy would be one thing. A technocracy in which all decisions about everything are made by lawyers, bankers, or any other specialists is no technocracy at all.
That is not to say that the Republicans don’t have their issues. For example, there is some tendency to “Know Nothing”-ism in the present Republican Party, a populist tendency in which the contributions of experts are ignored because they’re the contributions of experts.
There is a tension here. We must come up with a way to place the opinions of experts in proper perspective. They have a role but they can’t be the last word.
I think there’s a broader issue with which Mr. Riley does not even attempt to come to terms. When specializations are increasingly narrow, how do you make use of experts? It’s a difficult problem. I think the solution is less centralization, more subsidiarity, a lot more humility, and a willingness for policymakers to take stands that aren’t ideological. The first two mitigate the risks of failures in the latter two. I’m not hopeful.
Plus, governing and policy is not just about utilitarianism. If it were, we could perhaps rely on technocracy, but it’s not. So experts have an important voice and input into the process, but that process must consider more than expert opinion and analysis.
Woodrow Wilson was one of the first Americans to push for rule by experts and a resultant concentration of government power. He had an accompanying dismissive attitude towards the Constitution as being too outmoded for ‘modern’ days because it wouldn’t allow him to do what he thought ought to be done because he was smarter than anybody else. The Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, and the selection of senators by voters rather than by state legislators were among the objectives he managed to push through under his watch. I doubt he’d all like the policies being promoted by the technocratic state, but I think he’d be happy with the concentration of power. Because it more easily enables the Wise and Connected to Git-R-Dun, their way.
‘So experts have an important voice and input into the process, but that process must consider more than expert opinion and analysis.’
Not according to the experts. Their opinions and only their opinions matter. And the most infallible expert of them all was Karl Marx. You can never go wrong if you follow Marx and his interpreters.
One thing I notice among many of these often self-proclaimed experts; a relative lack of humility. They may be wrong, but they’re always certain. And increasingly they are able to cancel their critics, because it is obvious to anybody with a brain that anybody who disputes their assertions is either evil/stupid/greedy or worst of all BIGOTED.