Originally posted Mar 31, cross-posting to the new Forum.

I’ve said that society was generally optimistic about progress until the early 20th century, and lost that confidence in the World Wars. By the late 20th century, from about the 1970s on, a deep skepticism and distrust of progress had come to prominence. But what happened in between?

I have a new theory about what characterized the attitude toward progress (in the US, at least) from about the 1930s through the ‘60s. It’s just a hypothesis at this stage, but it goes like this:

The 19th century was dominated by a belief in the power of human reason and its ability to advance science and technology for the betterment of life. But after World War I and the Great Depression, it got harder to believe in the rationality of humanity or in the predictability and controllability of the world.

The generation that went through these shocks, however, was not ready to give up on the idea of progress. They still wanted progress and still believed that reason could achieve it—but they worried that the masses could not be trusted to be rational, and that progress could not be left to the chaos of democracy and free markets. Instead, progress was to be achieved by a technical elite that would exercise top-down control.

The purest form of this, perhaps, found expression in early Communism, which valorized industrial production but sought to achieve it by subordinating the individual to totalitarian rule. The US was too individualistic for that—but it evolved its own flavor of the idea that I’m just starting to understand. Call it “technocracy.”

Historical evidence

Here are some snippets from my research that indicate this theme.

Walter Lippmann and the “democratic realists”

Lippmann wrote a number of books around the 1920s arguing that democracy doesn’t work, because it relies on an informed public, which he saw as impossible. Quoting from “Can Democracy Survive in the Post-Factual Age?” by Carl Bybee:

For Lippmann, given the inevitable tendency of individuals to distort what they see, coupled with the basic irrationality of humankind, the only hope for democratic government was to reinvent it. This new, more “realistic” democracy would be tempered and guided by a form of knowledge which, Lippmann believed, rose above subjectivity and politics: science.

Lippmann was part of a school of “democratic realists”, says Bybee:

The major t

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History