The Total State and the Twilight of American Democracy
NS Lyons

Reviewing Auron MacIntyre's new book, and why conservatives need the New Right

Even when our nation's dysfunction becomes too obvious to ignore, average Americans tend to comfort themselves with the story that it at least remains a democratic, constitutional republic. For such Americans, it's probably been a confusing summer.

One moment the sitting president was, according to the near-universal insistence of mainstream media, sharp as a tack— all evidence to the contrary declared merely dangerous disinformation. The next he was suddenly agreed to be non compos mentis,unceremoniously ousted from the ballot for reelection, and replaced, not in a democratic primary but through the backroom machinations of unelected insiders. Overnight, the same media then converged to aggressively manufacture a simulacrum of sweeping grassroots enthusiasm for that replacement, the historically unpopular Kamala Harris. To call this a palace coup via The New York Times would seem not to stray too far from observable events.

What, some may wonder, just happened to our sacred democracy?

For those on the growing segment of American politics broadly known as the “New Right,” none of this was a surprise. The basic premise of the New Right—whose ranks notably include now-vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance—is that the governance of our country simply doesn’t function as we’re told it does. In fact, the United States has not operated as a constitutional republic for some time now; it is only the façade of one, effectively controlled by an unevictable cadre of rapacious plutocratic elites, corrupt party insiders, unelected bureaucrats, and subservient media apparatchiks—in short, a wholly unaccountable oligarchy.

Among the sharpest recent guides to this argument—and, in my view, to our current broader political moment—is a slim new book by the columnist and influential young New Right thinker Auron MacIntyre, titledThe Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.

MacIntyre provides a dispassionate dissection of how, without any cabal or specific conspiracy, an elite class captured all our major public and private institutions, hollowed them out, set them all marching in lockstep against the American middle-class, and made a mockery of the notion of constitutional “checks and balances.” The resulting “total state” now operates in increasingly flagrant contradiction to the interests of the American people and democratic government while “wearing the old regime like a skinsuit.”

Essential to understanding this total state is the concept of managerialism, an idea first pioneered by an older generation of political thinkers like James Burnham which has been recovered from relative obscurity and re-employed by the New Right. In this framing, America is today effectively run by a “managerial elite,” which presides over a broader professional managerial class—think college administrators, corporate HR managers, and non-profit activists. Fundamentally, the business of such people is not producing or building anything, providing any essential service, or even making critical leadership decisions, but the manipulation and management—that is, surveillance and control—of people, information, money, and ideas.

The story of the fall of the American republic is the story of the managers’ rise to power everywhere.

In part, this was the inevitable outcome of technological and economic change following the industrial revolution, which made it necessary to expand the ranks of people schooled in managing large, complex organizations. But, as MacIntyre demonstrates, it was also the result of a deeply misguided urge, pioneered by early progressives, to de-risk and “depoliticize” politics by handing over decision-making to technocratic “experts.” The hope was that these experts could rationally and neutrally administer government and society from the top down, through the same principles and processes of “scientific management” first applied to the assembly line.

This proved disastrous.

The first big problem with managers, it turns out, is that they multiply. Managers inside an organization—or a government—have a strong incentive to ensure that it continues to grow larger, more complex, and less efficient, because this means exponentially more managers must be hired to wrestle with it. Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. And as new managers are hired, the relative institutional power of all managers increases: eventually it is they, not the titular leadership, who effectively control the organization.

The process doesn’t end there, though. Always and everywhere, managerial power seeks to expand and to centralize without limit. Even once one organization or sector has been conquered by managerialism, new ground must be found and seized, even if simply to provide new employment for the expanding managerial class. If no supply of new managerial jobs exists, they can be created through social engineering—the top-down restructuring of existing social, moral, and economic structures. Every time something that was once the business of family, church, or local community is “problematized,” “deconstructed,” and turned over to “expert professionals” to be “improved,” a new member of the professional managerial class gets her wings—and a taxpayer-funded salary.

Naturally, managers have a material incentive to make alleging the virtues of top-down social engineering and control the locus of their moral and ideological beliefs. Hence the progressive craze for strictly micromanaging behavior and language, the wholescale restructuring of social norms, and the redistribution of wealth, power, and positions. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs and the whole ideology commonly known as “woke” are best thought of as a massive jobs program for the expanding managerial class.

A managerial regime is politically and culturally destructive, homogenizing, and totalizing by nature—from its perspective, as MacIntyre points out, any independent institution, community, or association inherently “hinders the uniform application of managerial techniques” from above. Thick bonds of place and community, religious traditions, parental rights, unregulated markets, national borders—all must be dissolved and replaced with bureaucratic mechanisms, until there is nothing left in between isolated, atomized individuals and the edifice of the managerial state.

This dissolution is the defining story of the last century of American life.

The second big problem with managerial elites is that they all end up thinking exactly alike. As we have established, they are all united by the same basic incentive—to expand the centrality and status of managers—but they also tend to have the same formational background, passing through the same educational institutions, which have become the credentialing mechanism for the entire managerial class regardless of profession. Here they are enculturated with the same language, cultural sensibilities, and ideological prejudices as the rest of their peers.

Moreover, the skills and talents required to succeed in any managerial organization are essentially identical. Whether one is a McKinsey consultant, a university vice president, or a Defense Department official, the same basic lingo and PowerPoint proficiency will do. These skills are easily transferable. This means that, as MacIntyre points out: “The managerial class easily crosses the public/private barrier that has been so effectively constructed in the American psyche.”

In fact, he argues: “The ability of managers to move from public government postings to private corporate positions while using the exact same language and skill set is key to the unification of the state and economy” that we now see in managerial America.

Critically, this unification means that competence in a given organization is of far less importance to one’s overall career than one’s ability to demonstrate loyalty and acceptancewithin the managerial class as a whole. Refuse to hold the correct opinions and your professional future across the whole managerial world—now a global network—is permanently tarnished. No one’s more hated than a class traitor. In America, MacIntyre writes, “the dream of social mobility through independence was replaced by a social mobility… entirely dependent on utility to an interconnected network of mass organization.”

If you want to rise to the top in America, then your “cultural fit”—your ideological reliability—is your most important asset.

Together these factors have produced a vast, unified, self-reinforcing managerial apparatus—a regime—of public institutions, private corporations, and non-governmental organizations that moves together in near complete synchronicity, like a flock of birds. On the New Right, it’s been dubbed “The Cathedral,” in which everyone in power—from Harvard, to the press, to the White House—sings automatically from the same hymn sheet. This bears resemblance to that hallmark of totalitarian societies that the Nazis called gleichschaltung, or the sweeping “coordination” of society. But whereas they or their Leninist counterparts needed a dedicated ideological propaganda ministry and secret police to impose such coordination, we’ve managed to spontaneously achieve it through the invisible hand of managerial status-seeking.

To compare our system to other managerial “party-states” such as the old Soviet Union or today’s China, where a single oligarchic apparat controls public and private institutions alike, is therefore not too unreasonable. In such a system there can be no “neutral” institutions, staffed by impartial civil servants or businessmen driven only by profit. Nor can there be any actual constitutional checks and balances on power, when all major institutions march always in the same direction, and the formal rules are reinterpreted however benefits the party.

Faced with the need to maintain at least a façade of democratic legitimacy, the managerial regime’s solution was, naturally, to seek to manage the will of the people. “The ruling class thus became deeply involved in controlling the information the public receives and the narrative that information shapes,” MacIntyre explains. Hence the belief in the need to tell “noble lies” to the peasantry embraced by all our elite institutions; hence the constant media gaslighting; hence the vast, “whole-of-society” censorship-industrial complex established to manipulate the public’s “cognitive infrastructure”—in other words, our perception of reality. What we have now is most easily described as “Managed Democracy.”

This regime wields powers of control undreamed of by the most absolute of feudal monarchs, but it ably obfuscates that power by draping it in empty rituals and diffusing it across faceless bureaucracies and nameless processes. This makes holding it accountable for its actions nearly impossible. In truth, there really isn’t anyone in charge, even our elected politicians. In the end President Biden proved little more than a figurehead for real power, pushed aside despite being, on paper, the world’s most powerful individual.

President Trump fared little better when he struggled in vain to get even his own administrative agencies to follow orders on issues like border enforcement or foreign policy. His diplomats and generals, for instance, later admitted to “playing shell games” to keep the titular commander-in-chief from knowing where American troops were deployed and in what numbers. Time and again, the unelected managerial “deep state” simply steamed ahead as it pleased. Putting an end to this status quo is the essential vision of the New Right.

Which brings us to J.D. Vance. Openly familiar and conversant with the ideas and intellectual figures of the New Right, including MacIntyre, Vance represents a potentially decisive shift in the overall approach of his party, from the ineffective institutional conservatism of the old GOP to a genuine opposition movement prepared to take on, take over, and dismantle the managerial apparatus.

As Vance has put it, if a would-be political opposition hopes to achieve any real change at all, it must become “something that can genuinely overthrow the modern ruling class” by striving to “seize the institutions” from them.

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice,” Vance said in 2021, would be to “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people.” Only through such a decisive blow could the unity and control of the total state be successfully undermined.

Here an underappreciated potential divide is visible between Vance and Trump, and between the New Right and what could be described as the “orthodox MAGA” wing of the party. New Right thinkers like MacIntyre are deeply pessimistic that anything can be accomplished without a focused, disciplined, and sustained assault on the strongholds of the managerial regime—not only the administrative state but also the universities, the philanthropic-NGO-industrial complex, and financial giants like BlackRock; meanwhile, the more orthodox MAGA faithful remain optimistic that Trump alone can fix it and usher in meaningful political change by force of personality. Many on the New Right would call this deeply naïve.

Consider the recent squabbles over “Project 2025.” The nearly thousand-page document, compiled by the Heritage Foundation, assembles a litany of policy proposals. Describing a number of them as extremist, Democrats including Harris have sought to tie the project to Trump and make it a centerpiece of their campaign messaging. Trump, reportedly affronted by the project’s place in the limelight, has in turn vocally disavowed it—his campaign even declaring that its “demise would be greatly welcomed.”

Its actual demise, should that happen, would represent a significant problem for the conservative right. Some of Project 2025’s grab bag of wishful policy proposals may be more radical than others, but its policy ideas were never actually the point—the real purpose of Project 2025 is to solve the problem that, in our managerial system, “personnel is policy,” as they say in Washington. The core of the project has always been a plan to quickly reclassify tens of thousands of un-fireable, unaccountable, and decidedly un-neutral “civil servants” as political appointees so that they can be removed or replaced using an expansive database of pre-vetted new hires. In this way the country’s hostile bureaucratic leviathans might at least begin to actually be brought to heel.

Without the disciplined implementation of such a plan, nothing is likely to significantly change in Washington, even if Trump returns to the White House. Just as in his first term, the institutions of the managerial regime would simply continue to operate in their own self-interest without accountability, unified in their bureaucratic “resistance” to the elected president.

Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 is therefore a signal that the New Right’s continued rise within his party, as represented by Vance, is no guarantee. Should Trump prove too hesitant to execute such a deliberately disruptive maneuver, or should he seek to ingratiate himself with managerial elites rather than subjugate them—as some of his comments, such as on potentially hiring financial establishment darling Jamie Dimon to his cabinet, suggest—then the total state’s strangulation of American democracy is likely to continue unchecked.

If conservatives fail to take on board the New Right’s critique of their complacency, the result is likely to be not only their effective defeat (even if elected), but a long-term acceleration of political instability across the board in the United States. Something like Project 2025 may sound radical, but it is the right’s only honest answer to meet popular demand for actual reform in governance. “Populism” is above all an organic backlash to the cancerous growth of the total state and its brazen intrusion into every aspect of life. It represents an impassioned plea for the restoration of democratic accountability and institutional trust. Only a movement that actually threatens the managerial elite’s death grip on power has a chance of delivering on that demand.

America’s political right has, for the first time in a very long time, been making some progress in this direction. Hence the managerial elite’s panicked rhetoric about the need to protect “our democracy”—by which it means the unelected oligarchy and its institutions. Should this movement go nowhere, however, popular disillusionment with America’s system of managed democracy will only continue to build.

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N.S. Lyons

Chronicling the shared upheavals of our era.

 

theupheaval.substack.com