ORDO WEEK 30 SATURDAY MORNING PRAISE
Dialogue Before Doctrine Rescuing Catholic social teaching from the textbooks Timothy Kirchoff What the Experts Got Wrong Traces of the very technocracy they oppose are also evident in Macedo and Lee’s tendency to assume that the true actors of policy are an elite set of elected representatives and that it is the job of these—and only these—elites to check other kinds of elites. They argue, for instance, that scientific and public-health experts need “to be checked and balanced” by “members of Congress” who “play a vital role in representing the interests and perspective of ordinary people.” They claim that “elected representatives [and] members of Congress are generalists, not policy experts” and can also serve in “balancing” between “profound class and cultural divisions.” This is true as far as it goes, but it narrows democratic agency to members of one branch of the U.S. government. It elides the role of local deliberative assemblies at the city and town levels. It overlooks ...