[Hong Wu]

A traditional American conservative conception of democracy is that "government" can't be trusted and therefore, people have a need to educate themselves on policy and a need to become politically involved.

This is in stark contrast to the liberal conception of democracy, which is that government can be trusted (when it's liberal) and that everyone who is a liberal is by nature enlightened and therefore qualified to weigh in on every single policy issue.

The single largest differences here might be an issue of humility. The American conservative doesn't necessarily believe that he knows best on everything, which is fortunate since no one does, he just believes that he has to make an attempt. Whether any of that is true surely varies with each situation but so far at least, America's domestic conservative track record has largely succeeded in getting good results for Americans which I think makes criticism of American conservatism within America an uphill battle. One method that leftists have for getting around this obstacle is they choose not to talk about the interests of Americans to begin with, they talk about the interests of foreigners. This is probably a reason why the open borders arguments have gained so much traction among the left, it is easier to win the argument if you aren't talking about American interests in the first place. As a result, those arguments get recognized as winners and become louder and louder within the liberal echo chambers until it becomes normal for them to value the foreigner above the native.

I also don't believe that "technocracy" is the answer here because that is actually just the same hubris, only now we are trying harder. Experts are not qualified to wield absolute power in their fields because there are resource sharing and allocation issues, or one field might start to effect another field. Since there doesn't exist the person who is an expert in every field at once, putting the experts in charge without any sort of oversight might only lead to new problems. Ultimately they would need to be overseen by someone and then we would be back where we were before (should that oversight be elected and so-on) and of course, most elected officials already employ experts from relevant fields as highly influential advisors. Those people often write the bills that the elected officials represent. People who get indignant about technocracy only extend their willingness to see up to a certain point, then they extend their willingness to control beyond what they are willing to see.

If monarchies and other early forms of government claimed to be justly handling everything by divine mandate, modern liberal governments accomplishes something similar by over-complicating everything until people become exhausted and stop paying attention. The biggest difference between the two, from a material perspective, is that that modern form of justification for government requires having a tangible and material person to blame when something goes wrong, earlier forms of government did not necessarily require this according to their own rationales. The problem could be attributed to God, Gods or non-human entities. This is surely a more fair method when dealing with problems that might not be attributable towards the actions of any people. I think a person who accepts and tries to cope with their own limitations (and their societies' limitations) is more respectable than a person who pretends that those limitations don't exist because the latter ultimately leads to scapegoating.