[pjc50]

No, it very much isn't, although obviously the Kissingers of the world want to pretend that they're in the first category of clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists while they're actually in the second.

That doesn't mean that rational policy planning has never been a thing. The EU while imperfect and frustrating is explicitly orientated towards technocratic consensus rather than the mid-20th-century Europe of nationalist mass murder. Only a tiny number of people think that Von der Leyen and Hitler are equivalent.

(or rather, if you think technocrats and blood-and-soil are the same side, what do you call the "other" side?)

[Planktonne]

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I wouldn't describe the EU as technocratic at all; I'd reserve that label for the people who self-describe as the logical ones--"clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists" as you say--while pushing endlessly for more technology, less regulation and (pretty consistently) hawkish and nationalistic policies. That's very much not the EU.

I don't disagree that there are different approaches in conflict, but the binary of forward-looking technologists vs backward-looking nationalists is very out-of-date.

[pjc50]

Right, yes I think this is just a confusion caused by my use of "technocrat". I've always used it for the technologically assisted bureaucracy, the tendency to view the economy as a cybernetics problem that can be solved by PID control (like inflation targeting). Thiel et al are more "techbro" than "technocrat". Crucially they operate outside of regular politics - they're not running for office, they're not part of the civil service (apart from the brief terrible conflagration of DOGE, an explicit Stalinist purge of old school technocrats)