In the absence of a new ideological framework, neoliberalism hung over the Obama presidency—but now in a new form.

Although neoliberalism had little to offer, in the absence of a new ideological framework, it hung over the Obama presidency—but now in a new form. Many on the center-left adopted what we might call the “technocratic ideology,” a rebranded version of the policy minimalism of the 1990s that replaced minimalism’s tactical and pragmatic foundations with scientific ones. The term itself is somewhat oxymoronic, as technocrats seem like the opposite of ideologues. But an ideology is simply a system of ideas and beliefs, like liberalism, neoliberalism, or socialism, that shapes how people view their role in the world, society, and politics. As an ideology, technocracy holds that the problems in the world are technical problems that require technical solutions. It is worth pointing out what this implies: First, it means that the structure of the current system isn’t broken or flawed; it thus follows that most problems are relatively minor and can be fixed by making small tweaks in the system. Second, the problems are not a function of deep moral conflicts that require persuading people on a religious, emotional, or moral level. Instead, they are problems of science and fact, in which we can know “right” answers and figure out what works because there is consensus about what the end goals are. Together, the result is that the technocratic ideology largely accepts the status quo as acceptable.

The technocratic ideology preserves the status quo with a variety of tactics. We might call the first the “complexity canard.” Technocrats like to say that entire sectors of public policy are very complicated and therefore no one can propose reforms or even understand the sector without entry into the priesthood of the technocracy. The most frequent uses of this tactic are in sectors that economists have come to dominate—international trade, antitrust, and financial regulation, for example. The result of this mind-set is that bold, structural reforms are pushed aside and highly technical changes adopted instead. Financial regulation provides a particularly good case, given the 2008 crash and the Great Recession. When it came time to establish a new regulatory regime for the financial sector, there wasn’t a massive restructuring, despite the biggest crash in 70 years.

Instead, for the most part, the Dodd-Frank Act was classically technocratic. It kept the sector basically the same, with a few tweaks here and there. There was no attempt to restructure the financial sector completely. Efforts to break up the banks went nowhere. No senior executives went to jail. With the exception of creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, most reforms were relatively minor: greater capital requirements for banks or increased reporting mandates. Where proponents claimed they were doing something bold, Dodd-Frank still fell prey to the technocratic ideology. The Volcker Rule, for example, sought to ban banks from proprietary trading. But instead of doing that through a simple, clean breakup rule (like the one enacted under the old Glass-Steagall regime), the Volcker Rule was subject to a multitude of exceptions and carve-outs—measures that federal regulators were then required to explain and implement with hundreds of pages of technical regulations.

Dodd-Frank also illustrates a second tenet of the technocratic ideology: The failures of technocracy can be solved by more technocracy. Whenever technocratic solutions fail, the answer is rarely to question the structure of the system as a whole. Instead, it is to demand more and better technocrats. Those who acknowledge that voting for the Iraq War was a mistake regretted not having better intelligence and postwar planning. Rare was the person who questioned the endeavor of policing vast regions of the world simultaneously with little knowledge of the local people, customs, or culture. All that was needed was better postwar planning, they said: It was a technical, bureaucratic problem.