John Samples, a vice president at the Cato Institute, argues in A Fourth Republic? that the New Deal era characterized a Third Republic dominated by experts and that this era has come to an end. He raises questions about how a Fourth Republic might be constituted and structured:

These changes meant the Third Republic would be a technocracy. …

The rule of experts had its successes and failures; space does not permit naming them in any persuasive way. But at the height of their power – the 1960s and 1970s – the technocrats began to lose public confidence. By 1980, only a minority thought the federal government would do what was right most of the time. In the ensuing four decades, public confidence in government recovered modestly at times only to fall again. Then came the failed war in Iraq and the global financial crisis of 2008. By then, the Third Republic was as old as the Second Republic when it died.

People were right to doubt the experts, but the latter had failed on their own terms. Max Weber had reconciled popular rule with science by arguing that elected politicians should determine the ends of policy while experts informed leaders about the consequences of their chosen means to those ends. Over the past two decades, and especially since 2016, the policy advice of experts has become more predictable and partisan. Experts rarely tell the leaders of the party of the left things they do not wish to hear; the same is true of the right, perhaps more so, but the relatively few right-wing experts played second fiddle during the Third Republic. In the home of expertise, the universities, only one set of ends was increasingly heard, and those who dissented were suppressed or discarded. And intellectuals became more cynical and more ambitious.

Knowledge was power, a weapon to rule over the rubes. So confident were the professors that they no longer bothered to cover their ambitions with high-minded rhetoric.

The legacies of the Third Republic will live on in the Fourth. Presidential power in service to the most recent electoral majority will define the new regime. Progressives have yet to find their Donald Trump, but they will. The Madisonian in me fears this tendency, but we have not been a Madisonian nation for some time. Rather than indulge my pessimism, I will end with hope. In a republic, the people are allowed to fail and, thereby, to learn. Experts might conclude that their loss of credibility counsels a return to tend their own gardens of policy advice shorn of political ambitions. The people and their champions may eventually learn that achieving their ends demands better knowledge of means. The arc of history, in other words, may tend toward humility and thereby to a better world. Intellectuals have it in their power to move first toward that happy future.