When Michael Dukakis ran for president in 1988, he presented himself as a technocrat rather than a politician. Good government, he suggested, was about implementing what science and its derivatives, social science and the dismal science of economics, had shown to work. Technocratic solutions founded on science should, he implied, trump less tangible and more emotional phenomena such as optimism, the entrepreneurial spirit, and patriotism.

His was an unappealing and chilly candidacy, and he lost heavily to George H.W. Bush, who, despite not being adept at “the vision thing,” nevertheless rode into the White House on the unspent tide of Reaganism.