Technocracy as an ideological wing of the Democrats in the US. In much the same way as the Republicans have had a "libertarian" or neo-liberal wing pushing their policies further right, imagine a movement with a lot of ideological similarities to the OTL Technocracy, but which doesn't get caught up in Howard Scott's personality cult or millenialist "the price system will collapse soon...any day now." Rather, they try to become part of the Democratic Party and influence politics through New Deal and later Great Society programs. Technocrats don't necessarily have to make their way into the White House, but they'll be a vocal and possibly politically potent branch of the Democrats. ...
To a great extent, depending on how deeply developed as an ideology you demand the "technocracy" must be, this is in fact OTL to a degree that might not be ideologically recognized in the Reagan era. Consider a guy like Robert A. Heinlein. Sometime during the 1950s his personal politics went rightward, but he actually ran as a Democrat for Congress in Southern California, and not just as any Democrat but one affiliated with the political movement Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign for state Governor, nominally under the Democratic banner but a radically leftward turn of that party, founded--one that eventually achieved success in placing another candidate in the Governor's seat the next cycle. Is Heinlein not someone who fits the above profile pretty well? He was interested in making things work and had a somewhat engineering turn of mind. I think he was quite typical of many young US military officers, particularly in the Navy, in his time.
Consider all the various corporate factions that were more or less in line behind supporting the New Deal. Despite general depression, certain industries, notably aviation, advanced in the 1930s. The notion that the New Deal, en masse, was somehow inimical to capitalist industry as such is an ideological hobbyhorse. Certainly many members of the coalition were quite out and loud in their denunciation of capitalism as such, and in their hope to do it in by gradual socialization, but if you look at what FDR himself stood for you will find he was quite a conservative bastion against such things getting out of hand. The Social Security system he commissioned was particularly designed to hold the line ideologically against the notion that society collectively guarantees the good of all by directly doling out benefits; the complexity of the system linking individual payouts to lifetime earnings (which left quite a lot of people quite out in the cold) was purposefully meant to promote a role of government as insurer and broker but not benefactor. Indeed the system was immediately modified in Congress to be more socialistic (and of more benefit to more people, sooner than the pure system the President had designed to order would have). But this reflects one wing of the general movement.
Another would in fact be well described exactly as you have put it. Purified of ideology demanding the downfall of capitalism, replaced by a sleeves-rolled-up pragmatism that embraced Keynesian economics (itself another ideological firewall against pure mass socialism in favor of a top-down managerial approach). If we look past the enthusiastic rhetoric of the left wing of the New Deal, we see that real policy was quite cooperative with established private industry. Such liberals as Berle or Galbraith show us exactly this sort of mindset, the idea that tinkering and engineering fixes are sufficient to upgrade the basic machinery of a liberal democracy hosting largely still laissez-faire capitalism with some relatively small patches improving its stability and responsiveness and guaranteeing a wide enough distribution of collectively produced wealth to keep the commoners satisfied while their social betters take on the complex and esoteric tasks of running affairs most people simply do not understand and don't want to be burdened with having to. New Deal Technocracy was to the ideological Technocracy that called itself by that name as the Progressives of the early 20th Century were to such radicals as the People's Party AKA "Populists" and later Socialists. It seems to me that in the spirit of Technocracy particularly, one does not jettison and tear down largely functional social machinery to build a moderately more perfected version, when patching and modifying the existing machinery accomplishes the same goals well enough but without nearly as much opposition and doubt. So this is what real technocrats did--they went to work for corporations, or served in the government cooperatively with the corporations, and addressed themselves to patching things, winning themselves glowing resumes and being promoted to very high levels to do such similar work on a grand scale.
If one looks at American academia in the period between WWII and the election of Ronald Reagan, one finds a very similar mindset across the board in the social sciences. A few radicals, such as C. Wright Mills, existed, but by and large American scholars sought to analyze and recommend action in a very technocratic mindset. American foreign aid policy, as one branch of our general Cold War policy of containment, undertook a general theory of economic development that assumed all nations were essentially the same and that by managerial revisions of policy one could achieve "White Revolutions," as the Shah of Iran called his country's version, tinkering with some land reform here and investment policy there to overcome perceived cultural roadblocks to free up nations to develop just as the USA and successful European nations had. Such radicals as Noam Chomsky (who was moonlighting and quite political in critiquing such policies, being himself a linguist in terms of his scientific bailiwick; he acted in these writings as an engaged citizen with radical views consistent with the minor socialist party he belonged to) were quite withering in their attacks on the mindset. For good or ill, what can one call it but technocratic? All the key assumptions of technocracy were there.
To be sure by the 1960s this mindset was not the property of the Democratic Party. The Republicans out of necessity of survival absorbed it too, because to be somewhat technocratic was an essential survival skill in the complex global world the USA attempted to dominate as leader of the Western Bloc and champion of a way of life they held ought to win in the world at large.
To make it a specially Democratic position, not just in the period 1932-1948 or so, you'd have to postulate some special reason the Republicans would oppose it as a bloc. The thing is that before the various crises of the 1960s and '70s, relatively few people saw much of a downside to New Deal type pragmatism. Paleoconservatives would remain horrified at evolutions of central power, but such power being used against the general good of the common people as generally envisioned would not seem likely or reasonable to anticipate by most people. Hardcore leftists would naturally be suspicious of anything that legitimized capitalism instead of framing it as an implacable foe of the welfare of the majority, but such fears were hardly typical, and marked someone as a radical of the fringes, left or right hardly would seem to matter--either way, people without deep engagement in the hearts and minds of the majority. After the 1970s that had largely changed, in a process of numerous apparent hazards to general welfare and the complicity of the central powers of both state and private industry against that welfare seemed illustrated on many fronts.
So, there would be little reason for an anti-technocracy faction to have much traction until then, and then after that being a technocrat was much more of a liability. Why would the Republicans set themselves up to be fall guys ranting against progress and success in the golden years of the postwar era? Far better to appropriate technocratic means to more conservative ends.
So, pragmatic technocracy is not an ideological stance, though I daresay it does evolve its own ideological modifications of whatever larger ideological cause each faction of technocrats serve. It is more of a profession, that can serve any master.
Would you not recognize the mindset of the Kremlin after the death of Stalin as also very largely technocratic after all?
Technocracy is not an end, it is a means. As a means, it was indeed embraced by Democrats in their heyday of power and the mentality of the Johnson Administration can be viewed as its very apotheosis.
