I find that I'm pretty sympathetic to "technocratic" governance if we mean practical expertise and problem-solving, and especially if the alternative is vague and menacing platitudes about virtue and moral blame that fail to see collective social problems as such.

Some conservative/libertarian types are guilty of both abstraction and failing to abstract - they abstract practical problems into metaphysical and moral ones, but they fail to see the collective nature of the problems.

i.e., reading some stuff, you would think 90,000 Americans dead in two months is just 90,000 disparate, random tragedies, with no through-line of any relevance to public policy.

I always think of this story when I talk about the balance between individual and social responsibility. It was an icy day and we were out, and my mom told me not to run or I might slip. I ran, and I slipped on ice. And I got up and yelled "Someone should've cleaned up that ice!"

Two things are true: If I listened to my mom I wouldn't have slipped. If someone had cleaned up the ice I also wouldn't have slipped. The technocrat cleans the ice; the bootstrapper blames me for running. The technocrat misses individual agency; the bootstrapper sees nothing else

There's a weird and often not quite articulated tendency in some right-leaning thought that says social problems should not be solved, because that would absolve the individuals suffering from them. As if it's more important for people to learn the hard way than to solve problems

And there's more than a hint of this in a lot of corona commentary, and it makes me livid. I maintain that I reside on the center-right, but this way of thinking is alien to me.

It's hard to avoid the thought that the meta-problem with the U.S. reaction to corona is that we've simply lost, to the extent we ever had it, the ability to conceive of a utilitarian collective problem that simply *is*. As some like to say, facts don't care about your feelings.