Momentarily on the back burner in 2020, the global emergency of carbon dioxide could still be summoned as needed. But with climate, as with Covid, the politically supine character of technical bodies tasked with science-settling, on behalf of the emerging order, shocked the intellectual conscience of many observers.
Each of these putative emergencies has a solution: Net zero, the hygiene state, DEI. Each solution requires a tightening net of surveillance and social control. Each has its cadres of moralists, as well as its institutional functionaries. All solutions point toward the relocation of sovereignty from representative, parliamentary bodies to experts empanelled at some undisclosed location.
This is confusing to those of us with liberal political instincts. It feels like a concentration of power, of the sort that should set off alarms. But it is also a dispersal of power – to unaccountable bodies which seem to coordinate with one another somehow, without engaging in anything so crude as a conspiracy. As though they communicated by political pheromones. For a sociologist, the question of how this elite coordination comes about is one of the most fascinating questions of our times.
Matt is correct. Whatever your political views — whether you endorse or repudiate the initiatives described here — the question of how this clerisy emerged, for indeed it was emergent rather than planned, is enormously important and enormously difficult to answer.