Virus Calls for Machiavellian Virtue, Not Technocracy

It's hard to overstate the importance of the historical moment we find ourselves in. Pundits, scholars, and public figures—being prone to hyperbole—often overstate the gravity and moment of events. But this time it is almost certainly different. When this is over, the world will have changed.

The coronavirus pandemic has become, and will likely remain for the foreseeable future, a brutal and devastating reminder that innumerable aspects of our lives are subject to forces beyond our control. More importantly, it is a rude awakening for those of us who think the world can ever be any other way.

There is a contemporary tendency to try and sever politics from fundamental and first-order questions about the nature of reality. Politics, and our political institutions, are understood in narrowly procedural terms, legitimized by aggrandizing claims of expertise that reduce what are ultimately political questions to dry technical problems to be solved by experts. Read Full Article »