Trumpism, the Empire, and the Managerial Revolution
This is still the post I intended to write, although the lede has to change. Time moves too fast now. My pithy intro was superseded by actual events.
About two weeks ago, a potential series of blog posts came to me: a deep dive into the right-wing thought that best represents Trumpism. Trump himself is almost certainly a cypher. He has no ideology except a will to power. Trump is a villain in the Chuck Klosterman sense of the term: he knows the most and cares the least. Trump may not have much expertise in geopolitics, but as an avid CNN and Fox News viewer, Trump understands the wasteland that is modern media better than nearly anyone else on the planet. He knows its weak spots, how to manipulate coverage and how to siphon all journalistic attention. I am yet to be convinced that Donald Trump cares at all for policy, and I would say that there is a fifty-fifty chance that the Bannonist wing is purged within 18 months. Trump, perhaps, saw white nationalism and embraced it as the momentary path to power. If better paths to power appear and the white nationalist worldview turns into an albatross, he will abandon it. I admit, this reading represents me at my most hopeful. Other “hopeful” visions: that Trump will start a trade war with China, the effects of which will be so all consuming that Social Security cuts and the dismantling of medicare and Obamacare will have to be postponed. “Hope” means something different now.
Here is my original lede:
“We spent so much time wondering where Donald Trump came from, that many of us never asked the question, ‘Where did Donald Trump come from?’ Many of us now take as self-evident the idea that he represents an American iteration of the global authoritarian strongman. We worry, also, that he is a Russian-backed strongman, like the leader of Ukraine. America won the space race and the cold war but we are losing the room temperature war for democracy. Even Mitt Romney, who seemed so dumb for naming Russia as the biggest global threat back in 2012, appears willing to concede defeat, should he be granted the status of envoy to the puppet masters. Sad!”
Now, of course, our Russian-worries are confirmed reality, and the Mitt is history, banished forever to the dim lit dining room of Republican hasbeens.
But to return to the main topic: there are conservative thinkers who explain Trump, or, rather, a conservative ideology that resonates with the attitudes expressed at his rallies. The Donald’s message legitimately maps onto a specific intellectual discourse. It was wrong and silly for Peter Beinart to outright dismiss these writers as sycophants. They came from a once marginal branch of conservative thought and ideology, and they, bizarrely, made their publishing platform of choice Blogspot, but they came to it honestly. I am not a political scientist, nor do I especially enjoy reading political philosophy. But I’ve always been fascinated by the thought of the American right and the earnestness of its policy journals. The mainstream American left banished ideology and critique to the academic margins while subconsciously and perhaps unwittingly accepting a particularly technocratic inflection of neoliberalism. (What a sentence!) The right, on the other hand, lit a million think tank fires and supported its most nebulous thinkers with sinecures at magazines like The National Review, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary. But there was also a second-tier conservative intelligentsia (PLEASE, put quotes around whatever words that rile you) that wrote syndicated columns for tabloids and axe-grindy newspapers and who articulated an anti-elite, anti-managerial worldview. We have to read them if we want to understand the Donald’s political drive and what to expect from certain Trump appointees.
Like Marxism during its heyday, the American conservative movement is riven by factionalism and opaque intellectual battles. Unlike Marxists, the American right is largely willing to suck it up and vote for whomever the Republican party puts forward. The party doesn’t decide, but party labels identify who conservatives eventually vote for. And for as much as Trump-the-candidate embraced the Bannonist world view of global, anti-capitalist right wing populism, his election also marks the unlikely triumph of paleoconservatism. Did you have paleoconservatism in your office pool? I didn’t.
I lost track of paleoconservatism in the din of competing conservatisms. There are too many conservatisms! Rand Paul’s anti-interventionalist faux-libertarianism. Evangelical, “faith-based” religious conservatism. Paul Ryan and the deification of Ronald Reagan. Ryanism and his “Better Way” makes a cult of the Reagan revolution. Paul Ryan is the First Order imitating the Empire through worship, Kylo Ren seeking approval from Darth Vader’s helmet.
Then there is neoconservatism. Neoconservatism is my conservatism, the conservatism of Jewish intellectuals who sometimes wear bow-ties. If neoconservatives are “liberals who’ve been mugged,” then I would consider myself a liberal mugged by neoconservatism. My most important political education was the failure of the Iraq War and the devastating costs of the Bush tax cuts and extreme financial deregulation (Home Edition). When rumors surfaced that Trump might appoint John Bolton secretary of state, I got so excited I collapsed with exhaustion from caffeine pills. John Bolton is the neocon’s neocon. He may even be the neocon’s neocon’s neocon, the guy at the Shimeni Atzerat party who mongers aloud talk of war that others are afraid to whisper, and he hasn’t had anything to drink because they don’t serve alcohol at Shimeni Atzeret parties, because there are no such events. The point is, even neoconservatives are embarrassed by John Bolton. But here, I thought, is a devil I know. Known devils are comforting. The terror of Trump is the unknown devil. Now it seems that Bolton will be the deputy secretary of state because trusting Boltons to serve as your second-in-command worked so well in Westeros.
Like the Paleo Diet, paleoconservatism idealizes the past and fears legumes. The most prominent paleoconservative politician is Pat Buchanan, who remains one of its leading thinkers. The most important paleoconservative thinker was, arguably, Samuel Francis. To those outside the paleo-orbit, Francis was a marginal, obscure figure until a few months ago when the Guardian published a fantastic overview of his writing. This is how I learned about Francis and this is how I came to think that reading James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, a book I only knew from intellectual history, would help me make sense of the paleo-conservative worldview. It did not. Not really. Maybe a little.
Burnham was a Trotskyite-on-the-wane when he wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941. The core thesis of the book is actually easy to explain and digest: the age of capitalism is ending, but instead of a march toward socialism, the world is experiencing the rise of managerial society. The Soviet Union was the clearest example of a managerial society for Burnham, but Nazi Germany and New Deal America were likewise experiencing a managerial revolution.
In a managerial society, the real power lies with the managers, both private and public. (This was one of Burnham’s major innovations as against earlier theories of bureaucracy.) There may be capitalist “owners” of a corporation, but the day-to-day control resides with the managers. Collectivism, “the state” and planning replace the individual and his lust for freedom. A greater percentage of the economy comes either under the direct control of the state, or becomes so regulated by the state as to effectively mark it under state control.
In my opinion, it’s not worth exploring the book in greater detail. When Burnham is being descriptive — as when he explains the transformations of the Soviet Union — it has value, as George Orwell noted in his trenchant critique of Burnham. (This is the extended reading of Burnham you are looking for.) Burnham’s geopolitical predictions are very frequently wrong. His reading of the New Deal is especially unconvincing. For Burnham, the New Deal is embodied in the managers and bureaucrats and the generation of smart, wealthy Americans who dreamed of taking jobs at government agencies in order to better society. Roosevelt is almost incidental. Alas, the New Deal did not survive FDR, and the American economy moved away from heavy industry and further in the direction of finance capital. A new class of capitalists arose. Although the book was a bestseller in 1941, it was comically wrong by the time it was republished in the early 1960s to capitalize on the success of The Organization Man.
It would not be going out on too much of a limb to say that Burnham is not the embryo of paleoconservatism (which I deliberately haven’t really defined) but rather the kind of text that inspires misreadings, perhaps specifically Bloomian misreadings. I’m going to guess that Samuel Francis’s work amounts to a Tessera of Burnham: it uses the original terminology and original logic, but it transforms the work in the process of completing it. Did you have that in your office pool? I did not.
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As it happens, before I had the chance to finish writing this, I saw Rogue One. Rogue One is easily the best Star Wars movie about middle management, and I’m increasingly convinced that the Empire is less a feudal empire than a Burnham-esque managerial society. Power supposedly resides with the emperor, but, within the films, he only appears interested in titular control.
Although Palpatine comes to power by challenging the managers and bureaucrats, power in the Star Wars films resides with the various bureaucracies. Rogue One and A New Hope are fantastically interested in the board meetings and maneuverings of the Imperial military. Vader struggles with Tarkin and the other leaders of the imperial military for control in A New Hope. Weapons initiatives with the potential to win promotion and reshape the layers of management are seized from their project managers by other managers in order to secure their benefits. Does Darth Vader have an official position within the Imperial hierarchy? We never get a satisfactory answer, though we implicitly understand that only the Sith can exert titular control over the Empire. But the real power will lie in the hands of the managers who actively administer the galaxy.
In conclusion, we need another Star Wars movie about the logistics of Kyber mining and a better grasp of the supply chain.
