Twilight of the technocrats

On both issues and others, the appeal of Sanders has less to do with the details of his plans and more to do with a simple formulation: The experts had their chance; let the moralists and radicals have theirs.

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However, that’s only one possible response to disillusionment with technocracy. The other response is to prefer a return to transactional politics, to dealmakers who keep the system running rather than optimizing for efficiency, to machine politicians who aren’t going to dramatically improve the status quo but also aren’t likely to embrace clever plans that accidentally make it worse.

This is clearly the appeal of the other non-technocrat in the Democratic field, the still-front-running Joseph Biden. Of course the former vice president also has plans and policy papers — no Democrat lacks them — but even more than Sanders he’s running as a non-wonk, an anti-technocrat, the guy who’ll shout “malarkey!” when the clever McKinsey guy shows up with the white paper and says you need to overhaul a popular program because there’s a more efficient way.

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