Parky60 Loc: People's Republic of Illinois

Although this article focuses on the current Administration, it is a global strategy employed by Technocrats around the world. Surely the injections have a separate but related purpose, using governments to enforce dystopian policies is clearly observed. When their usefulness is over, these same useful i***t governments will be thrown under the Technocrat bus. Parky60

Just before Christmas, as the Omicron surge was picking up steam, White House c****av***s response coordinator Jeffrey Zients issued a remarkable statement. He began by reassuring “the v******ted” that “you’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this”, but followed this optimistic bromide with a dose of fire and brimstone: “For the unv******ted, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.”

This rhetoric seemed unlikely to spook any of the v*****e-hesitant into getting jabbed. After all, they have already been exposed to plenty of dire warnings about the v***s and are unlikely to be receptive to the admonitions of an administration they have already ignored. Rather, the real addressees of Zients’s sermon were the v******ted, who could assure themselves that they are on the side of the good.

Early in the C***d era, many believed the v***s had made clear that “we’re all in this together”. The p******c, we were told, would instill a sense of collective responsibility premised on our biological interconnectedness. Yet the reality, starkly revealed by Zients’s proclamation, is that we have entered a new age of biopolitical balkanization, evident not only in the drastic policy divergence between red and blue states but also in the latter’s attempts to exclude the unv******ted from public life.

Zients’s boss, Joe Biden, campaigned on the idea that technocratic competence and faith in expertise would end the p******c. He also promised to scale back the culture wars of the Trump era. “We can,” he said in his inaugural address, “join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature.” This may have been standard political pablum, but it reflected a genuine hope that a less d******e — even pleasantly boring — four years might follow the tumultuous Trump era.

Instead, a year into the Biden administration, we have seen a ratcheting up of the propagandistic weaponization of “science” and a series of self-inflicted blows to the credibility of experts. Much has been said about the CDC’s inconsistent messaging, and during the current Omicron surge, as during previous surges, the administration has been criticized both for being overly aggressive and overly timid. But underlying these inconsistencies is a new mode of liberal technocratic governance, driven by moralizing fervor and partisan animus rather than calm neutrality and rational calculation.

In the C***d era, the Biden administration and its state-level allies have embraced mandates. The presumed justification for this is that the severity of the C***d crisis required drastic measures. But something differentiates C***d technocracy: a remarkable incuriosity about whether the strictures it imposes actually work. This incuriosity has become all the more glaring in recent weeks, as Omicron has brought cases to unprecedented levels in cities like New York, where both v*****e passports and mask mandates are in effect.

And as Zients’s holiday announcement demonstrated, when mandates fail to achieve the desired results, it is the fault of those who don’t follow the rules, not those who imposed them. A more empirical approach would treat the reality of noncompliance as part of what needs to be measured in order to assess the efficacy of a proposed policy. But such a strategy would imply that the technocrats themselves, rather than the anti-v**xers or anti-maskers, should be held accountable for policy failures. Small wonder it has fallen out of favor.

Before last year it might have seemed obvious that the guiding ethos of technocracy was cold utilitarian calculus, but in the past two years it has become something like the opposite: moral fervor. Various factors brought about this shift, but the reaction of the technocrats and their constituency to Trump, with his “war on the administrative state” and love of the “poorly educated”, was arguably the crucial one. Tinkering behind the scenes, as was favored in the Obama era, was no longer a viable approach for a class that felt its interests threatened.

Early on in the p******c, the p******c was described as “technocracy’s end-of-life rally”. At least temporarily, it had put the experts maligned over the previous half-decade back in the drivers’ seat. But the populist fervor that had driven the Trump movement re-energized itself in reaction to lockdowns and mask and v*****e mandates. Initially, this seemed to place the technocrats in an unassailable position, since they could impugn their allies as aiders and abettors of disease and death.

However, this high ground is illusory: the track record of their mandates has proven middling at best. For instance, Los Angeles county, with v*****e and mask mandates, fared no better after implementing them — slightly worse, in fact — than neighboring Orange County, which had neither. Furthermore, v*****e mandates for health care workers, many of whom already have immunity from prior C***d infection, have led to staffing shortages nationwide as reluctant workers have resigned or been fired, leaving hospitals worse-prepared to confront the Omicron case surge. The refusal to acknowledge such failures and tradeoffs is even more self-discrediting.

But there is also a more profound issue at play: while technocrats’ rule by moral fiat has allowed some critics to be bludgeoned into submission, it also exacerbates the deeper problem of governance by unelected bureaucrats in a system nominally premised on the consent of the governed. Sunstein and his Obama-era acolytes were aware of this risk even if their project was informed by anti-democratic assumptions. This was why they were so concerned to preserve at least nominal freedom of choice on the part of citizens.

Biden, however, seems to have forgotten this. His administration’s devotion to mandates, regardless of the evidence piling up against them, looks more and more like a punitive backlash against political enemies. Far from a means of transcending hyperpartisan antagonism, as both Obama and Biden once promised, technocratic management has become another means of pursuing it. Public health messaging has become another opportunity for partisan pep rallies — and America will suffer for it.