> That's not the problem - it's that whole areas of
> policy - economic and foreign, to take two - are
> written out of political discourse and reserved for
> experts. No one doubts that it requires experts to
> handle the nuts & bolts, but the big questions are
> supposed to be decided democratically and they're
> not.
Right, wonks aren't the problem. That credit goes, at first glance, to the legions of pundits who sound like hybrids between meteorologists and acting coaches. Public opinion and current events are treated like the weather, and public officials are judged more by their performance than by their policy aims. To decide such things democratically is Partisan Bickering. Debating the big questions is "ideology" and "partisanship". To write this out of the political discourse is to impartially seek what Works.
But "experts" does evoke number crunchers, researchers, those who actually read the nation's laws and budgets and decipher them and know enough to write them, etc. What Doug's describing sounds a lot more like Centrism than technocracy to me. Or is that a distinction without a difference?
-- Shane
________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!