Nowhere is this mystification more intense than in their approach to the family, where the failures of the modern administrative state are most clear.
Over the course of the 20th century, technocrats oversaw the near total obliteration of domestic life in America. From the very start, the progressive administrative state stood in opposition to the teleology of the family. About the early progressives, Christopher Lasch writes in Haven in a Heartless World: “Educators and social reformers saw that the family, especially the immigrant family, stood as an obstacle to what they conceived as social progress… The family preserved traditions that retarded the growth of the political community and the national state.”
Influencers of the time believed that the industrial revolution’s dislocation of work from home to the factory should be mirrored socially, and that, ideally, all key functions of the home would transfer to society at large. “Progress” in the social sphere would mean rational, secular homogeneity, because that would be most conducive to advances in science and technology. For those functions most difficult to extract from the home, the experts would intercede, mandating participation in public school, as well as the burgeoning “public health” system and therapeutic state. Family authority dissipated, family responsibilities evaporated, and family relations disintegrated.