I just realized that the word for “left authoritarian” is “technocrat”.
Change my mind.
The word "technocrat" usually has negative connotations, but evokes different things for different people. When I hear "technocrat" my first thought is of people like Bill Gates and Steve Pinker who are enamored with techno-modern solutions to every problem and who generally favor neoliberal structures promoting "market" processes to promote industrialization. To my way of thinking, those groups aren't really on the left, although they are certainly further to the left than the U.S. Republican Party.
Then I remember that for other people "technocrat" refers to agencies such as the EPA that have a government mandate to protect people and natural life support systems from destruction by individuals and industry. To my way of thinking, this kind of regulation is not authoritarian. Some of the rules might be created in a centralized way by scientific authorities, but the power of those authorities is granted through democratic processes. That's the opposite of authoritarian.
@dynamic I have not heard "technocratic" applied to anyone but politicians, but you've never dealt with the EPA if you think they're not authoritarian. They're not just authoritarian but undemocratic. Which I suppose is unsurprising for an organization founded largely by Richard Nixon.
Please provide concrete examples of ways that the EPA is authoritarian.
@dynamic Sure. You own property in the desert and want to do something with it. First you need to spend millions of dollars proving to the EPA that there are no desert tortoises on your property or that whatever you're doing won't harm them.
You're a farmer and you find some nest of a rare owl on your property. Easiest thing to do is to quietly kill them before anyone else finds out.
@dynamic I have been involved with the "new space" movement since 2000, and the EPA has been one of the biggest hurdles to any private space operations. Often much harder to deal with than the FAA.
The issue isn't that they shouldn't be protecting the environment. The issue is that their job has nothing to do with protecting the environment but just enforcing a set of rules, and nobody gets fired if they bankrupt businesses even if doing so does nothing for the environment.
@dynamic There is no feedback loop where any human being ever asks if the EPA's set of rules is actually sufficient or necessary for protecting the environment, or where the correct trade-off lies. The incentive is to *appear* to be protecting the environment, and if anything bankrupting businesses is one way they can trick people into thinking they're doing their job. People presume the EPA is on the side of the environment, but they're just a faceless bureaucracy.
What is your proposal for how to protect the environment?
@dynamic Through actual law and not "rules", for one thing. By applying "innocent until proven guilty", due process, etc across the board. We should also have a universal system of civil district attorneys.
Are you saying is that democratically elected lawmakers should be fully credentialed to make decisions on every conceivable technical topic that would come up and should never delegate decision-making to bodies of specialists with actual training in whatever technical area is under consideration?
@dynamic No, I'm saying that things that it's not appropriate for them to make such decisions on should be beyond the scope of government. Government should not micro-manage the country.
I still think you should be more specific. If the plurality of the voters in a country decides that it wants to protect biodiversity across the board, how exactly does that get implemented without empowering agency experts to make their own rules?
@dynamic There are a lot of presumptions packed into a small space there. One is that the EPA is actually led by experts. Another is that those experts are incentivized to actually protect the environment. A third is that their actions are effective in protecting the environment. A fourth is that in cases where they are successful in protecting the environment that they made the trade-offs those voters expected when they voted.
I'm not interested in dissecting the inner workings of government agencies. I would be *very* interested in hearing a clear proposal on how we could handle these kinds of very complicated issues through what you would see as more democratic processes.
It's also interesting to me that you are challenging the assumption that the EPA is run by experts because policy implementation by experts is part of the definition of technocracy. If the EPA is not run by experts then it fails to qualify as a technocratic institution.
@dynamic What I said was that "technocrat" is the word we use for "authoritarian", not that we only use it in cases where its dictionary definition is appropriate, or that everything that matches its dictionary definition is necessarily authoritarian.
I was making a statement about our beliefs about "rule by experts" or "rule by science". We forget about incentives and the fact that these things are run by human beings.
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@dynamic And thus governing in the name of "science" or 'truth" ends up being authoritarian, because those things become a tool for stamping out dissent.
@dynamic In fact, I think your presumption-riddled statement about the EPA exemplifies exactly the phenomenon I'm talking about. The EPA protects the environment and is run by experts, therefore they are beyond question.
I don't think the EPA is beyond question. But that is very different from saying that they are authoritarian.
@dynamic I think they are *effectively* an authoritarian institution. Most of the US bureaucracy is.
The critical question for me is whether we would be better off if U.S. bureaucracy (which, I reiterate, was put into place through democratic process, whether or not the bureaucracy itself is democratic in nature) were simply removed.
Large abusive corporations support dismantling or defunding the EPA, so I have to think that overall the people who democratically chose to put the institution into place were basically on the right track. Even if the system is imperfect.
@dynamic Trump was elected. The Nazis were elected. The fact that an organization, policy, or whatever was put into place through a democratic process is irrelevant to whether the thing itself is authoritarian, so for the sake of avoiding confusion let's just take it as stipulated that the EPA came about democratically, since no part of my argument has anything to do with how it came about.
@dynamic Also, having people you think of as bad oppose something doesn't prove that thing is good. There is no question that there are some things that would be bad for the environment which the EPA prevents. The question is whether the EPA itself is necessary, effective, or itself a democratic institution. My answer to all three of these is no.
@dynamic I also think the general concept of "people I dislike dislike this thing, therefore its good" is an excellent example of how a democracy can bring about authoritarianism. Just from reading the kind of stuff people post here, I am convinced that a significant amount of the desire for vaccine and mask mandates is driven more by the desire to harm people with different beliefs than it is by evidence of necessity or effectiveness.
@dynamic Just to be clear, I am not saying they are not necessary or effective, just that I am convinced that most people care a lot less about whether they're actually effective or necessary than that people they don't like don't like them.
I obviously can't prove this, but it fits with the rhetoric, and obviously people consider "people I don't like don't like it" to be a reason to support something.
I agree with you that there is probably some tribalism going on with regard to how people on the left talk about masks and vaccines (I support both masks and vaccines, but I also wish that [so far as online discourse goes] both sides would chill out).
I also think that it's important to distinguish between people and institutions. Saying that the EPA has to be doing important work because (say) a big oil company would like them out of the picture is different from saying that the EPA is a good thing because white gun-toting property-rights fanatics hate it. I said the former, not the latter.
There is something dangerously compelling in the rhetoric that points to dysfunction of a system and says "this system embodies [bad thing], and therefore we'd be better off without it." I don't know that this is precisely what you have been doing, but equating the EPA, the USDA, the FDA, and the CDC with the embodiment of authoritarianism strikes a chord with that line of reasoning.
Donald Trump was democratically elected, but he was on an explicit mission to dismantle democracy. That is essentially what authoritarianism means, as defined on Wikipedia: "Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting."
Institutions like the EPA are not on that mission. In fact, the kinds of dysfunction that we see in the EPA are extremely similar to the kinds of dysfunction that we see in democratic government.
@dynamic @freakazoid It should also be pointed out that agencies like the EPA don't have unilateral power. They are bounded by all three branches of the government.
