Below is a selection excerpts from James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution concerning the nature and use of ideologies.
In this book, Burnham (a reformed Trotskyite, and future conservative luminary) argues that Capitalism was in the process of dying and being replaced by something quite different from capitalism — a sort of officialized crony capitalism presided over by well-trained experts who would serve and benefit this new economic order in a hybridized public-private sphere. These expert administrators would form a managerial class, with its own new class interests, reflected in a new ideology justifying its class dominance.
Note, this book was published in 1941, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and well before an Allied victory was anywhere near assured, or even likely. Also note, at this point in history, the shock and still present devastation of the Great Depression was, for many intellectuals, taken as a decisive refutation of the capitalist and liberal order. Planned economies appeared to be the future. Finally, this book was written before the public was able to make retrospective sense of the war. In reading this book now, we are witnessing history-in-the-making, as opposed to history-ready-made, with all its clean tidy lines and mythologized motivations. Few people today seem aware of how long it took to attach the Holocaust retroactively to the USA’s involvement in the war. Even the passions whipped up by Pearl Harbor were still lacking. The youth of the “Greatest Generation” felt apathy toward the ideologies that still stirred the hearts of the adults — an apathy erased by war myth.
It is the coat of mythologizing varnish that makes history unavailable to us, and makes the present seem uniquely alive and real. I find the passages below to be fascinating time-capsules, which reveal how closely what happened “back then” resembles what is happening now.
It is even harder than in the case of political institutions to generalize about the belief patterns of capitalist society. For our purpose, however, it is not necessary to be at all complete. It is enough if we choose a few prominent beliefs — the prominence can be tested by their appearance in great public documents such as constitutions, or declarations of independence or of the rights of man — which nearly everyone will recognize as typical of capitalist society and which both differ from typical feudal beliefs and are sharply at issue in the present period of social transition.
The beliefs with which we are concerned are often called “ideologies,” and we should be clear what we mean by “ideology.” An “ideology” is similar in the social sphere to what is sometimes called “rationalization” in the sphere of individual psychology. An ideology is not a scientific theory, but is nonscientific and often antiscientific. It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events — though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories. Thus the theory of evolution or of relativity or of the electronic composition of matter are scientific theories; whereas the doctrines of the preambles to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, the Nazi racial doctrines, Marxian dialectical materialism, St. Anselm’s doctrine of the meaning of world history, are ideologies.
Ideologies capable of influencing and winning the acceptance of great masses of people are an indispensable verbal cement holding the fabric of any given type of society together. Analysis of ideologies in terms of their practical effects shows us that they ordinarily work to serve and advance the interests of some particular social group or class, and we may therefore speak of a given ideology as being that of the group or class in question. However, it is even more important to observe that no major ideology is content to profess openly that it speaks only for the group whose interests it in fact expresses. Each group insists that its ideologies are universal in validity and express the interests of humanity as a whole; and each group tries to win universal acceptance for its ideologies. …
and
…the ideologies of capitalism, the bourgeois ideologies, have become impotent. Ideologies, we have seen, are the cement that binds together the social fabric; when the cement loosens, the fabric is about to disintegrate. And no one who has watched the world during the past twenty years can doubt the ever-increasing impotence of the bourgeois ideologies.
On the one hand, the scientific pretensions of these ideologies have been exploded. History, sociology, and anthropology are not yet much as sciences; but they are enough to show every serious person that the concepts of the bourgeois ideologies are not written in the stars, are not universal laws of nature, but are at best just temporary expressions of the interests and ideals of a particular class of men at a particular historical time.
But the scientific inadequacy of the ideologies would not by itself be decisive. It does not matter how nonscientific or antiscientific an ideology may be; it can do its work so long as it possesses the power to move great masses of men to action.
This the bourgeois ideologies once could do, as the great revolutions and the imperial and economic conquests prove. And this they can no longer do.
When the bourgeois ideologies were challenged in the Saar and the Sudetenland by the ideology of Nazism, it was Nazism that won the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the people. All possible discounts for the effects of Nazi terrorism must not delude us into misreading this brute fact.
Only the hopelessly naive can imagine that France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine — that might have been sufficient in a longer run, but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war — as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals; but they must at least believe in those ideals.
Nowhere is the impotence of bourgeois ideologies more apparent than among the youth, and the coming world, after all, will be the youth’s world. The abject failure of voluntary military enlistment in Britain and this country tells its own story to all who wish to listen. It is underlined in reverse by the hundreds of distinguished adult voices which during 1940 began reproaching the American youth for “indifference,” “unwillingness to sacrifice,” “lack of ideals.” How right these reproaches are! And how little effect they have!
In truth, the bourgeoisie itself has in large measure lost confidence in its own ideologies. The words begin to have a hollow sound in the most sympathetic capitalist ears. This, too, is unmistakably revealed in the policy and attitude of England’s rulers during the past years. What was Munich and the whole policy of appeasement but a recognition of bourgeois impotence? The head of the British government’s traveling to the feet of the Austrian housepainter [Hitler] was the fitting symbol of the capitalists’ loss of faith in themselves.
Every authentic report during the autumn of 1939 from Britain told of the discouragement and fear of the leaders in government and business. And no one who has listened to American leaders off the record or who has followed the less public organs of business opinion will suppose that such attitudes are confined to Britain.
All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead, to hold power and privilege in society, is boundless self-confidence.
I am sure it is obvious to anyone who knows me at all that I am reading this book because I believe that Burnham’s predictions were mostly spot-on.
It is obvious to anyone who wants to see it that the class interests of the Managerial Class are perfectly served by Progressivism. Of course loyal Managerial Class members are passionate about “doing the work” of discovering every other identitarian false consciousness than the central, monstrous interest of their own Class — a diversionary tactic I enjoy calling “the herring of color”.
I awoke to this truth with the help of Thomas Frank, who wrote what is in effect the sequel to Burnham’s book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, where Burnham’s predictions play right out in the story of the Democratic party embracing the interests of clever young overclassers and kicking the working class to the curb:
Our story begins in the smoking aftermath of the 1968 election, with its sharp disagreements over the Vietnam War, its riots during the Democratic convention in Chicago, and with a result that Democrats at the time took to be a disastrous omen: their candidate for the presidency, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon. Soul-searching commenced immediately.
There was one bright spot in the Democrats’ 1968 effort, however. Organized labor, which was the party’s biggest constituency back then, had mobilized millions of working- class voters with an enormous campaign of voter registration, pamphlet-printing, and phone-banking. So vast were their efforts that some observers at the time credited labor with almost winning for Humphrey an election that everyone believed to be lost.
Labor’s reward was as follows: by the time of the 1972 presidential contest, the Democratic Party had effectively kicked the unions out of their organization. Democratic candidates still wanted the votes of working people, of course, as well as their donations and their get-out-the-vote efforts. But between ’68 and ’72, unions lost their position as the premier interest group in the Democratic coalition. This was the result of a series of reforms authored by the so-called McGovern Commission, which changed the Democratic party’s presidential nominating system and, along the way, changed the party itself.
Most of the reforms the McGovern Commission called for were clearly healthful. For example, it dethroned state and local machines and replaced them with open primaries, a big step in the right direction. The Commission also mandated that delegations to its 1972 convention conform to certain demographic parameters — that they contain predetermined percentages of women, minorities, and young people. As it went about reforming the party, however, the Commission overlooked one important group: it did nothing to ensure representation for working-class people.
The labor leaders who, up till then, had held such enormous sway over the Democratic Party could see what was happening. After decades of toil on behalf of liberalism, “they were being taken for granted,” is how the journalist Theodore White summarized their attitude. “Said Al Barkan, director of the AFL/CIO’s political arm, COPE, early in 1972 as he examined the scenario about to unfold: ‘We aren’t going to let these Harvard-Berkeley Camelots take over our party.’”
But take it over they did. The McGovern Commission reforms seemed to be populist, but their effect was to replace one group of party insiders with another — in this case, to replace leaders of workers’ organizations with affluent professionals.
Byron Shafer, a political scientist who has studied the 1972 reforms in great detail, leaves no doubt about the class component of the change: “Before reform, there was an American party system in which one party, the Republicans, was primarily responsive to white-collar constituencies and in which another, the Democrats, was primarily responsive to blue-collar constituencies. After reform, there were two parties each responsive to quite different white-collar coalitions, while the old blue-collar majority within the Democratic party was forced to try to squeeze back into the party once identified predominantly with its needs.”
Years ago, when I first became interested in politics, I assumed that this well-known and much-discussed result must have been an unintended effect of an otherwise noble reform effort. It just had to have been an accident. I remember reading about the McGovern Commission in my dilapidated digs on the South Side of Chicago and thinking that no left party in the world would deliberately close the door on the working class. Especially not after workers’ organizations had done so much for the party’s flat-footed nominee. Besides, it all worked out so very, very badly for the Democrats. Neglecting workers was the opening that allowed Republicans to reach out to blue-collar voters with their arsenal of culture-war fantasies. No serious left politician would make a blunder like that on purpose.
But they did, reader. Leading Democrats actually chose to reach out to the a?uent and to turn their backs on workers.
We know this because they wrote about it, not secretly… but openly, in tones of proud idealism, calling forthrightly for reorienting the Democratic Party around the desires of the professional class.
I am referring to a book called Changing Sources of Power, a 1971 manifesto by lobbyist and Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton, who was one of the guiding forces on the McGovern Commission. … Dutton’s argument was simple: America having become a land of universal and soaring a?uence, all that traditional Democratic stuff about forgotten men and workers’ rights was now as relevant as a stack of Victrola discs. And young people, meaning white, upper-middle-class college kids — oh, these young people were so wise and so virtuous and even so holy that when contemplating them Dutton could scarcely restrain himself. They were “aristocrats — en masse,” the Democratic grandee wrote (quoting Paul Goodman); they meant to “rescue the individual from a mass society,” to “recover the human condition from technological domination,” to “refurbish and reinvigorate individuality.” Better: the young were so noble and so enlightened that they had basically transcended the realm of the physical. “They define the good life not in terms of material thresholds or ‘index economics,’ as the New Deal, Great Society, and most economic conservatives have done,” Dutton marveled, “but as ‘the fulfilled life ’ in a more intangible and personal sense.”
And this — this grotesque class narcissism and its efforts to achieve total class supremacy, dictating what is ethically permissible and factually correct in public discourse and, increasingly, private opinion — is what passes for “left” today.
And whatever criticizes it must, necessarily be “far right”! And we all know what far right really means. It is a teflon chute to national socialist hell. We need to tilt it to the left, where the HR departments of international corporations want it to go.
Everybody’s taking pills of various kinds these days, that give them privileged access to True Truth, lifting them out of the illusions of the Matrix into the true reality. That true reality, of course differs depending on the color of pill. A pill peddled by an Ibram X Kendi gives you one True Truth and one pushed by a Mencius Moldbug will give you another. (Somehow all these pill-poppers always forget that the red pill did not actually work as advertised, but only simulated an escape from simulation.)
I subscribe to this simulated escape from simulation view of the world.
I’ve got a whole medicine cabinet stuffed with these wonderful sorts of pills. They’re called books. History books, sociology books, religious texts. I’m partial to philosophy books, and by “partial” I mean “strung out”.
So soft-headed, warm-hearted, schoolmarmish progressive ladies, cold-blooded, hot-headed basement-dwelling aspergers cases and dried-up old hipsters who try to keep pace with the kids on social media — these poor souls might be fooled by the old “scales falling from your eyes” born-again, enlightenment fairytale — but I only pity the naive, gullible fools who take these kinds of shifts at face value and think they now number among the Knowers.
But I’m a weltanschauung whiplash veteran and I promise you: I know better than you about how perspectival shifts work. I shift paradigms and standpoints faster than you cycle through sneakers. Every month, I’m seeing through a different philosophical lens.
I’m like that friend of yours from college who was on drugs so much of the time he was able to drive, study, work, socialize and function better than normal while stoned, drunk and tripping. I’ve done enough of these shifts to have developed an understanding of shifts (or at least the range of shifts I’ve allowed myself to undergo so far), as well as becoming a discerning consumer of these mind-altering word drugs. As an addict/connoisseur I’m here to tell you, Listen Liberal is the Acapulco Gold of political shifts. +oO(-
It won’t give you Real Reality, but it will give you a new angle from which you can very distinctly and vividly see why some people — most of all me — see Progressivists not as they do — as brave, altruistic, critically-thinking heroes fighting on the right side of history — but rather as detestably smug, brittle, conformist, cowardly, presumptuous, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-oblivious, self-serving, self-absorbed, collectively-narcissistic, crybaby pricks.