by DAFYDD TOWNLEY
A movement that wanted to merge North America into one nation and extend its borders as far as the Panama Canal might sound incredibly familiar. But this group, called the “technocracy movement”, was a group of 1930s nonconformists with big ideas about how to rearrange US society. They proposed a vision that would get rid of waste and make North America highly productive by using technology and science.
The Technocrats, sometimes also called Technocracy Inc, proposed merging Canada, Greenland, Mexico, the US and parts of central America into a single continental unit. This they called a “Technate”. It was to be governed by technocratic principles, rather than by national borders and traditional political divisions.
These ideas seem to resonate with some recent statements from the Trump administration about merging the US with Canada. Meanwhile, the US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) set up by Trump and led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has also outlined a vision of efficiency cuts by slashing bureaucracy, jobs and getting rid of leaders of organisations and civil servants he thinks are advancing “woke” values (such as diversity initiatives). This slash-and-burn approach also fits with some of the ideas of the Technocrats.
In February, Musk said: “We really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people — democracy”. The Technocrats viewed elected politicians as incompetent. They advocated replacing them with experts in science and engineering, who would “objectively” manage resources for the benefit of society.
“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk told reporters after visiting the White House last month.
What did the Technocrats want to get rid of?
The 1930s’ movement was an educational and research organisation that advocated for a fundamental reorganisation of political, social and economic structures in the US and Canada. It drew on a book called Technocracy published in 1921 by an engineer called Walter Henry Smyth, which captured new ideas about management and science.
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