Daniel H. Fernald thinks TSA administrator John Pistole's response to the growing "Don't touch my junk" movement is a symptom of a problem that won't be solved by defeating Obama in 2012. It's much more fundamental. Woodrow Wilson is implicated. And French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul explained it almost fifty years ago:
Politicians are decision makers. They control the levers of power. The trouble, according to Ellul, is that in an increasingly complex environment, they often don’t know how to use them.
This is where the expert, the “technician,” comes in. At the outset, the expert’s role is merely to advise political leaders on how best to accomplish politicians’ stated policy goals. The expert’s role soon progresses to determining the “one best means” of accomplishing those goals. Finally, the expert technician decides on not merely the means of pursuing the “one best means” but also determines the policy goal toward which “the one best means” is directed.
As the power of the technician waxes, that of the politician wanes, until he is little more than a rubber stamp.
…
The monstrous Leviathan into which TSA has quickly, albeit all too predictably, morphed is a textbook illustration of Ellul’s thesis. Several elected representatives of the people politely suggested that a political technician, a bureaucrat, might possibly want to think about maybe giving, you know, just a bit of thought to not forcing American citizens to choose between being irradiated or groped, and he simply said:
“No.”
That’s a quote. He didn’t mince words, he didn’t equivocate, he didn’t evade the question. He simply said, “No.”
And the politicians did nothing, because they had no power to do anything. The technician had the power, and they all knew it.
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