One of the fundamental problems with the liberal technocracy is that it envisions tackling problems by putting experts in charge of them. The approach gets at the cultural divide in the country between those who worship the expert class, usually college-educated upper-middle-class urbanites, and the rest of the country. And it contains within it two flawed assumptions. The first flawed assumption is that certified experts know how to solve problems.
The second is that they want to solve them.
Take Fauci and the pandemic. An obscure careerist was suddenly vaulted into a cult of personality and constant television appearances. It wasn’t a unique phenomenon with the point men for the pandemic becoming celebrities in different countries.
There are Fauci masks, dolls, and action figures. Does Fauci actually have an interest in returning to normalcy, a normalcy in which he’s an obscure figure at whose whim economies, presidents, celebrities, and industries don’t leap?
Obviously not.
That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker. Generals lose a lot of their relevance when a war ends. People pay a lot less attention to firefighters when there isn’t a fire. Any field in which your importance is proportionate to a crisis still has plenty of people who do their jobs well. But in government, the expert class is known for perpetuating problems that invest them with the power to solve them. And, especially in the social sphere, those problems never go away.
Fauci’s advice has been light on the science and heavy on the social elements. And that’s just how the Left likes its crises. A crisis which can be solved using the fruits of actual science is of much less interest than a perpetual crisis that lingers as a social problem with social solutions that never work.
Telling everyone to wear masks forever is the equivalent of treating mentally ill vagrants abusing drugs as a permanent homeless problem that can only be solved by fundamentally transforming the economy.
That’s the danger of turning to problem solvers who benefit from perpetuating the problem.
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