Delegation of power to technocrats insulated from the public. From the 1900s to the 2000s, American progressives have looked for leadership to enlightened, nonpartisan technocrats instead of elected officials whom they fear are corrupted by special interests or demagogues who appeal to the dangerous and ignorant masses. Over the last century, progressives have favored different categories of technocratic saviors. The early progressives put great hope in civil servants; the utopian novel published in 1912 by Colonel Edward M. House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, is entitled Philip Dru: Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935. After New Deal Democrats in Congress repeatedly rejected executive reorganization plans that would have maximized the power of the White House and career bureaucrats, progressives transferred their hopes to crusading Supreme Court justices and public interest lawyers like Ralph Nader. Recently, as CEOs have trended Democratic, many on the center left have come to view corporations and social media platforms as powerful, authoritarian bureaucracies that can be mobilized to impose progressive priorities on America, without the bother of persuading citizens, winning elections, or passing laws.

The cult of Dr. Anthony Fauci illustrates the mentality of technocratic progressivism. Indeed, in the past decade progressives have treated three figures who were ostensibly insulated from electoral politics—Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former FBI chief Robert Mueller, and now Dr. Fauci—as secular saints, complete with their own votive candles. In each case, these beatified figures were said to be saving America from evil or misguided elected officials and misled majorities of the citizenry.

Top-down, comprehensive plans. As in the era of the progressive planners a century ago, today’s technocratic progressives never favor a simple, limited solution to a social problem if that problem can be used as an excuse for the radical reconstruction of American society from the top down by cadres of freshly minted experts. Many environmentalists, for example, reject two simple and straightforward approaches to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions—a tax on carbon and building more nuclear power plants—in favor of an incredibly complicated, Rube Goldberg scheme, the Green New Deal, in which governments would forward-plan the energy economy for decades on the basis of computer models, directly ban fossil fuels, discourage automobiles and single-family homes and meat consumption, and massively subsidize unreliable, intermittent solar and wind power and biogas generation.

The experiences of Black Americans in dealing with police in many American cities, and the use of incarceration as a one-size-fits-all crime prevention tool, were deservedly brought to public attention following the death of George Floyd. But instead of focusing on practical reforms to policing and court procedures, the center left has used the problem as an excuse for a radical, unrelated program of “equity,” restructuring all social institutions—governments at all levels, corporations, universities, media companies, even panels at conferences and classroom reading lists—so that their demographic composition approximates that of the U.S. population at the last census. Disguised as “anti-racism,” this version of “equity” is a profoundly illiberal form of social engineering which, if taken seriously, would require capping the representation of Jewish Americans in all organizations, publications, and syllabuses at no more than 2%—with Asian Americans capped at 7%—by imposing a system of race-based quotas of the type used in countries like Malaysia and Singapore.

Invention or exaggeration of emergencies to justify radical reforms. The “Extinction Rebellion” movement claimed that human existence on Earth itself is threatened by climate change—something that even credible scientists alarmed by global warming concede is not true. Nor is there any factual basis to claims by critical race theorists that existing statistical disparities among arbitrarily defined racial groups proves that there is massive “systemic racism” against Black and other nonwhite Americans—as distinct from the outcomes of a host of discrete if interconnected causes, including direct discrimination, socioeconomic class, levels of education and training, and different subcultures.

The COVID epidemic is the worst in a century, killing half a million Americans already. But context is necessary in every matter of public policy. According to WebMD, only 16.4% of fatalities have been among those aged 45-64, while under-45 victims amount to only 2.5%. The insistence by the mainstream center left on more than a year of strict on-again, off-again general lockdowns and the denunciation of those who questioned them never reflected “the science.” It merely reflected the nonrational preference of technocratic progressive political culture for more stringent and comprehensive government policies, rather than more limited and selective ones that still would have protected those members of society who were in fact at the greatest risk—namely, people over 65, and those with preexisting conditions that depressed their immune systems.

Justification of censorship in terms of a state of emergency. Today’s 21st-century technocratic progressives use the same excuse of a national or global emergency to shut down debate and dissent on the issues of climate change, race relations, gender identity, and COVID-19 policy: There’s no time to act, false information is dangerous, it’s an emergency, people are dying from [insert threat here—climate change, systemic racism, debating gender definitions, or questioning the efficacy of lockdowns]. It is no surprise that the “woke” apparatchiks at YouTube are pulling videos by doctors who question the “scientific” consensus—the questioning of received consensus through experimental investigation and interpretation of data being the foundations of the scientific method—while Amazon censors books on the pandemic, gender dysphoria in children and teenagers, progressive virtue culture, and other subjects that deviate from the ever-shifting Democratic Party line.

Today’s progressives often argue for canceling and deplatforming experts and pundits on the grounds that opinions deviating from progressive orthodoxy literally threaten the safety of individuals exposed to those opinions. Someone who disagrees with you, even someone who does not robotically recite the woke left formula of the day, is literally assaulting you and deserves to be fired and banned from the public square and erased from historical memory. Many on the right mistakenly attribute this mentality to “cultural Marxism,” which hoped to substitute college students and racial minorities for the working class as the agents of socialist revolution. But this is not 1960s-vintage cultural Marxism; it is 1900s-vintage Social Gospel Protestant progressivism, in a new, secular form.

Absent another lethal pandemic, at some point in the next year or two, thanks to a combination of vaccination programs and herd immunity, lockdowns will be ended by state and local governments that have not already done so. But sooner or later there will be another crisis, and the dominant culture of technocratic progressivism and its adherents will insist it can only be addressed by expert-led, top-down, centralized government allocation of resources or jobs. Once again, whatever the new problem happens to be, we will be told that it is an emergency, that democratically elected officials must defer to the policy views of unelected academics or career civil servants, and that disagreement and debate threaten the survival of America and the personal safety of us all.

Just wait and see.

Michael Lind is a Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at Austin, a columnist for Tablet and a fellow at New America. His latest book is The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite.