Liberalism remained slightly kinder than pure reaction — not quite so racist, not so terribly brutal to the poor — but even these commitments were subsumed by the ideology of pure competence. Bigotry wasn’t evil, it was just stupid, an impediment to growth. Health care reform and the welfare state were not moral necessities, they were the best means of keeping workers healthy and productive. The notion that knowledge asymmetries lay at the root of all political conflict was quickly transmuted into the basis of policy itself. If liberals became masters of the world due to their superior respect for facts, then education — not redistribution — was the only hope for the dispossessed. If liberals believed in climate change because scientists told them they should, then the trouble was not the metastatic excesses of capital but the failure of reactionaries to bow to empirical consensus.