Government is not a science, Mencius Moldbug argues:
Any process which is not science, but claims to be science, or claims that its results exhibit the same objective robustness we ascribe to the scientific process, has surely earned the name of pseudoscience. Thus it is not at all excessive to describe 20th-century “public policy” as a pseudoscience. A good sanity check is the disparity between its predictions and its achievements.Moreover, all the major 20th-century regimes maintained, and generally intensified, the underlying mystery of Whig government: the principle of popular sovereignty.
Even the Nazis acknowledged popular sovereignty. If the NSDAP had defined its leadership of Germany as a self-explaining proposition, it could have laid off Goebbels in 1933. Instead it went to extraordinary lengths to capture and retain the support of the German masses, and most historians agree that (at least before the war) it succeeded. If you don’t consider this an adequate refutation of the principle of vox populi, vox dei, perhaps you are a Nazi yourself.
This is the terrible contradiction in the political formula of the modern regime. Public opinion is always right, except when it’s not. It is infallible, but responsible educators must guide it toward the truth. Otherwise, it might fall prey to Nazism, racism, or other bad thoughts.
Hence the Cathedral [the university system, which generates public policy, and the mainstream media, which shapes public opinion]. The basic assumption of the Cathedral is that when popular opinion and the Cathedral agree, their collective judgment is infallible. When the peasant mind stubbornly resists, as in the cases of colonization or the racial spoils system, more education is necessary. The result might be called guided popular sovereignty. It wins both coming and going.