Technocrats may wonder how they should view actually existing socialism, historical examples of socialism, and even modern countries such as the US or European nations in terms of political development. This does not mean technological development which can be separate and we have historically seen cases of technologically advanced societies actually being more primitive politically if we look at the technocratic markers of political development.
If we understand the four phases of development being religious, nationalist, marxist, and technocrat then we can look at historical societies as not just being exactly at each stage, but typically combining characteristics of these different stages, such as Christian nationalists and Socialist states with extremely nationalistic ideas and policies. For example, we see that many right-wing extremists as well as monarchists (Yes, people exist who advocate monarchy in the modern world) are somewhere between the stages of religious and nationalist. Modern China, Stalin and Mao would be in stages between nationalist and marxist. Modern Russia is even less politically advanced than the Soviet Union, regressing towards nationalism with religious backing. We can also begin to understand similarities in different societies in different stages in development, with the most barbaric societies in world war 2 being cult-like and therefore both religious and nationalistic in nature which shows how they are even more primitive and less politically developed regardless of their technological capabilities.
Many western societies are easily categorized as nationalistic, since they are engaging in various forms of colonialism and imperialism. From this point of view, we can even determine that liberalism is a nationalistic ideology and it all begins to make sense. However, regions of the country as well as some sectors of the population can be more politically advanced leaning into early marxism, or more primitive leaning into religious or tribalistic ideologies they apply to politics. However it should be noted that many liberal ideas are not progressive because they try to end the mistreatment of people and improve living standards through ways we would consider nationalistic and not Marxist. The ideas of creating more black billionaires or improving the standards of LGBT by allowing them into the military are extremely nationalistic ideas, because they serve to integrate minorities into a nationalistic and capitalistic society rather than progress it towards the next stage of development which is Marxist.
Party politics is also a good example of nationalistic thinking because all the parties of modern societies assume the national identity of the society, but represent the different social classes and interests which give an illusion of social cohesion, national unity and collaboration between all the social classes for the betterment of the nation. In marxist societies, it is understood that the origin of political parties are economic social classes and as such, a society with more equal distributions of wealth would find political parties redundant.
If you’re wondering what a society would look like once it passes the stage of Marxism where nationalism is entirely abandoned, you would find traces of the proto-technocracy. Many marxists and socialists can accomplish similar things to technocrats, but people are unlikely to accept ideas that are more politically advanced than what they understand because it will sound idealistic or unrealistic to them. The technology exists nowadays that allows technocracy or other ideologies to the left of marxism or communism to exist in the modern world, but political development is constantly being sabotaged and even violently suppressed which is why the world is stuck with nationalistic, religious regimes dominating most of the world with a few societies managing to evolve into nationalistic Marxist ones, usually requiring extremely large militaries or needing to constantly deal with interference and external sabotage from the less politically advanced societies that fear revolutions and the downfall of their ruling classes and social orders.