Krugman surveys what he sees as a rough terminological balance:
There’s a word I keep hearing lately: "technocrat." Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn — the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into account. Sometimes it’s a term of praise: the newly installed prime ministers of Greece and Italy are described as technocrats who will rise above politics and do what needs to be done.
Right-wing word-assassination alert: like "liberal" or "community organizer," the words "technocrat" and "technocracy" are scheduled for the dustbin of searing derision. These terms were born within the reformist eras of Progressivism and the New Deal, hence they bear -- they must, right? -- the distinguishing mark of the Bolshevik beast.
I'm a bit surprised they've lasted as long as they have (although "liberalism" and "socialism" -- especially the European variety -- helped tremendously to draw the right's fire for decades). For what "technocracy" denotes is what the New Deal, organically, was all about: Forget ideology, urged Roosevelt, and just give me something -- something, anything, grounded on the best available empirical data, or even your best guess of technical expertise -- that might work. He cared not if the root of the idea sprang from conservatism or social democracy, from Edmund Burke or from Karl Marx.
"Technocracy" is essentially another way of saying "pragmatism." And to ideologues, nothing could be more abhorrent. To them, this authentic American (non)philosophy is like an unwanted quantum mechanics of their happily unified political field theory: pragmatism means that what works today may not work tomorrow; unpredictability reigns; we must forever adjust our methods to compensate for the unexpected -- in short, conscientious, hands-on governing is required. For a right winger of simplistic, notional, hands-off consistency, it's enough to induce the vapors.
But how do I know the term "technocracy" -- technocrat, technocratic, etc. -- is doomed as nothing more than a derisive substitute for "pragmatism"? I know, for He has written:
Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from "data" ... and who believes elections should be about (in Dukakis’s words) "competence," not "ideology."
That was George Will, from last month. The final Word.