Polemical Commentary plucked a quote from Andrew Rich's Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise:, repeated here:

p. 220, "The biggest worry for liberals, conservatives, and scholars alike should be the trend for think tanks - and increasingly experts of all kinds - to produce research that is little more than polemical commentary. This work diminishes the potential for its producers to have substantive influence with policy makers. Even more, this work, especially in its most ideological and most aggressively marketed forms, damages the reputation of experts generally among policy makers. The distinction between experts and advocates is tenuous. As we head into the future, the weakness of that distinction presents a fundamental challenge for think tanks, experts, and those who rely on them. The weakness threatens the quality of policy produced; for if trusted research and analysis is not available, what becomes the foundation for informed policy decisions?"

It's a good question but it assumes that trusted research and analysis was at some point a foundation for informed policy decisions. I don't think this has ever been entirely true, and to the extent that it was true it was mistaken since the trust was misplaced. The trust wasn't deserved because of the quality of the research and analysis, but was given anyway because of the social authority of the "intelligentsia". A lot of really crappy policies have been implemented in the last half century.

What a dilemma! The old systems of authority punked themselves with shoddy results, and the new systems of authority are merely ideological. No careful thinker could approve of either system.

This Michael Lind article [via A&L Daily] laments the decline of the "mandarin", which he defines as a self-perpetuating cultural elite that controls the education system with the objective of preserving a sense of nation independent of the passing desires of its citizens. Their task is to be better than normal people and instruct them in right living while controlling policy. This is a continental European institution mainly, the successor to both religion and aristocracy, one that never gained a solid foothold in Britain and was mostly rejected in the US. The northeastern WASP establishment was the closest the US came to having a mandarin elite and like elsewhere it has been denounced from all sides - left, right and other - for its taint of regressive old European aristocracy.

The mandarin thus is a scapegoat for all of the major forces in contemporary society. The humanist programme of mandarin education is rejected alike by the professional (for whom education is vocational), the positivist (whose task is to expose the power relations that works of literature or history conceal, in preparation for doctrinal instruction in an ideological system), the populist (whose goal is either to replace the classics with a contemporary canon or to reinterpret them to make them "relevant" for today) and the religious believer (for whom the substitution of mandarin humanism for revealed religion was always an enormity). The mandarin is an amateur, to the professional; a statist, to the libertarian; an elitist, to the populist; and a heathen, to the religious believer. What possibly could be worse than a society run by such people?

The answer is a society without them. The contemporary US, and to a lesser extent Britain, shows the consequences of turning a modern democracy into a mandarin-free zone.

Now that's ideology! Lind, as usual, steps on his thesis. And what an ugly ideology!

In continental European countries, the existence of mandarin-dominated civil services has retarded the development of a "court" around prime ministers and chancellors. In the US, however, the kind of political patronage system abolished in other democracies generations ago means that every time the White House changes hands, thousands of appointees are given positions throughout the government.

What a convoluted argument. It's not a "court" if it changes every 4 to 8 years with election of a new president. That's how the system was designed so that it would not be captured by a mandarin elite and operated for their benefit to the detriment of society. Instead, the electors - a combination of members representing population and members representing geography - would respond to the desires of citizens while moderating the tyranny of the populous majority. Such a system cannot become degenerate as the continental European countries have done repeatedly. It can veer off track, as id did for example during the Johnson "Great Society" period, but is subject to correction as it was during the Reagan "Morning in America" period. Lind mistakes this for lack of control.

America's unofficial mandarinate, the northeastern establishment, crumbled in the last quarter of the 20th century. The result is a social experiment in today's US as audacious, in its own way, as that of Soviet collectivism: an attempt to have a government without a governing elite. The US ship of state veers now in one direction, now the other. From a distance, one might conclude that the captain is a maniac. But a spyglass reveals that there is no captain or crew at all, only rival gangs of technocrats, ideologues, populists and zealots devoted to Jesus Christ or Adam Smith, each boarding the derelict vessel and capturing the wheel briefly before being tossed overboard.

The decline of mandarinism in modern democracies has profound implications for political power and cultural authority. If I am right, the informal "mixed constitution" of mandarin democracy averted the formation of the mass society that liberal thinkers dreaded. But even though it failed to materialise in the liberal democracies of the 20th century, the nightmare of mobocracy may come to be in the 21st.

Right. There's no captain, no ship of state really. That's not what modern societies are about. Indeed, they explicitly reject that antiquated notion. The US, for example, is a republic, a federation of many states which each retains significant control of its affairs. Europe, as it gropes toward some form of functional union, recognizes the need for the same sort of system, the idea of subsidiarity, where the authority for everything rests ultimately at the lowest level of society and policies are implemented no higher than they must be as determined by the scope of the issue.

The US has always been an audacious experiment, and fusty old Europeans have always sneered at it. Yet in the past two centuries the US system has out performed all the European systems individually and severally, in fact, pulling their bacon out of the fire two or three times. What Lind fails to grasp can perhaps be best understood by thinking about real Mandarins, the Chinese sort - what they did to their society and how it turned out. The rigidity and disconnection of a mandarin class from the society it rules - and let's not pretend it is anything but minority rule - guarantees instability on the grand scale. Instead of a rapid change of leadership and frequent course correction, mandarin societies sail on serenely until the ram into a cliff and sink.

Lind is merely the latest in a long line of complainers about progress. See the old post from 2003, Whitmanesque Multitudes, that refutes a previous prig:

Free thinking societies seem chaotic to priggish observers. They are offended by the diversity and obvious futility of some parts of society. A more useful attitude is one of bemused and watchful tolerance, like watching a child at play, doing the serious work of learning. Childlike blunders are precursors of mature behavior when allowed to proceed to completion. Sick societies result from interrupting child play, like an over controlling parent, never allowing the child to learn and grow to maturity. Similarly, societies sicken when activists and demagogues stifle diversity, too impatient to wait for society to arrive at its chosen destination.

The flood of new knowledge that has accompanied our transition to an information society has created islands of unequal progress, lumps in the stew. This isn't something to be alarmed about, to try to correct. It is the normal and expected consequence of change. Short sighted attempts to quell the chaos, to control the flood, will prevent the long term maturity of society. The discomfort of priggish observers is the problem, not the exuberance of a newly empowered society that can google up answers for itself and listen to a profusion of new voices rather than the same few authorities that once dominated the public sphere.

It is important to remember [Donnela] Meadow's belated insight; "For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize." Human society is a natural system like any other. It should be respected as the greatest existing discovery machine and assisted to achieve its purposes rather than controlled to achieve the pale purposes of priggish observers. Learn to admire the muck and mystery, smile at the blunders as you marvel at the astonishing creations of the multitude. Accepting them as they are allows you to see their value... and perhaps your own as well. You are a multitude too and only present as an integrated singleton to keep your secrets, your Whitmanesque multitudes, hidden.