Barack Obama won the White House promising a politics of change, yet he presides over an administration that has become a mortuary for dead ideas. In the year since his election, he has given the country not novelty, but the same old, same old, serving up policies that might have been arresting in the time of McKinley but have long since lost their luster.

From his administration’s profusion of “czars” and “special masters” to his party’s push to compel Americans to eat certain kinds of food and do certain kinds of exercise (that they might conform to whatever behavioral models are at present deemed good for them), from the drive to regulate the Internet to the proposal to require doctors to offer patients the latest refinements in “end-of-life counseling,” the president and his acolytes peddle the hoarier clichés of a now archaic politics of social regeneration.

It’s a “we know what’s good for you” philosophy that has come to grate on the nerves. Surely it is the inalienable right of every citizen to go to hell in his own way. President Obama has spoken of the moment in politics when “the perfection begins.” Sometimes one would just as soon the perfection ended. We are human beings, and deeply imperfect by nature. The last thing we need is a nosey, cajoling, and meddlesome state forcing a spurious gospel of betterment down our throats.

Once upon a time, social reform, with its ideal of government by enlightened administrators versed in the latest social technic, sounded like a good thing. It was hot stuff — in the 19th century, when Bismarck and Disraeli pioneered it. But what was exciting in the 1870s now seems not merely wrongheaded but old. Creaking.

By the 1950s, Hannah Arendt was warning that social reformers were drawing from a poisoned well. The social sciences to which they looked for inspiration were, she said, “behavioral sciences.” They aimed to “reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal.”

Why has President Obama, a man who if anything has been a little too free with the word “change,” chosen a way of governing that was old hat half a century ago? It might be that he truly believes in the millennial promise of social-justice theology. Some go so far as to claim that the president has swallowed a secular version of the new-heaven-and-new-earth eschatology of the twelfth-century mystic Joachim of Floris.

I rather doubt it. The president almost certainly regards his prophetic conceits and shamanistic mannerisms as little more than a useful form of political theater. He is less a mystic than a man of power, and the administrative philosophy of social control, whatever else it might be, is a formula of power. Its first champions were the defensive patricians of the 19th century, who were threatened by a new class of industrial magnates. The feudalists could no longer lord it over the little people with whips and chains in the way seigneurs like the Marquis de Sade had in the good old days. They needed a more up-to-date method of coercion. Disraeli and Bismarck found it in social legislation; across the ocean, the two Roosevelts aped them.

The castle paternalism of the Ancien Régime was transformed into the bureaucratic maternalism of the administrative state. The chastising office once filled by the feudal seigneur was taken up by the modern social technician, part babysitter, part prison warden.

This new noblesse de robe was initially a high-bred patrician affair, but today the administrative clerisy is less an aristocratic elite than an Ivy League one; it is a caste founded not in blood but in expertise. One enters it by going to certain schools, sitting in certain lecture halls, and obtaining certain degrees. President Obama, who bears all too evidently the stigmata of Columbia and Harvard, has been deeply influenced by the ideals and assumptions of the technocratic elite; his presidency, which was supposed to bring reform, promises instead to enlarge a tired and cynical mandarinate.

The creation by the president and his followers of more machineries of compulsion will only exacerbate the elements of banality and despair in modern life, and further undermine town-square institutions that once provided pastoral guidance and charitable care of a higher caliber than today’s social-scientific regimes. The historian Johan Huizinga, in his book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, observed that the 19th-century progressive philosophies on which the Obama administration has so largely drawn were “inimical to the play-factor” in life. Their bureaucracies crushed the spirit of flexibility and improvisation, of imagination and poetry, that are essential to the health of a civilization. Yet Barack Obama, a year after his elevation, appears resolved to add one more chapter to this dismal history.

– Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.