James Burnham: Prophet of Anti-wokeness

This is an interesting piece on the revival of Trotskyite crank-turned right-wing crank James Burnham, whose 1941 book The Managerial Revolution has remained intermittently influential among intellectuals of various stripes (One thing not mentioned in the piece is that the book had a big influence on Orwell’s initial conceptualization of his satirical novel Nineteen Eighty-Four):

Burnham’s early thought has in fact experienced a renaissance of late, including in unexpected quarters: the right-leaning titans of Silicon Valley and allied political thinkers. Why?

The answer, in brief, is the culture war. The right’s new Burnhamites have revived his theory of managers as a distinct social class — the one, in their view, most responsible for imposing the malign ideology of “wokeness” on the American public.

“Woke managers want to impose a new political and social order,” Malcom Kyeyune argues in City Journal, a publication of the right-wing Manhattan Institute. “Wokeness has accomplished what New Dealism never set out to do in the 1940s: it serves as a comprehensive, flexible, and ruthless ideology that can justify almost any act of institutional subversion and overreach.”

Modern Burnhamites have come to see their most fundamental enemy not so much as the Democratic Party but as a series of institutions that they believe have been fully captured by this ideology: academia, Hollywood, the media, and (for some) Big Tech. These institutions make up what Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and anti-democratic political theorist, calls “the Cathedral”: America’s true power elite, one that uses its cultural hegemony to impose far-left values on everyone else. (Yarvin, not coincidentally, is deeply influenced by Burnham.)

The brute reality of economic inequality creates some difficulty for this theory. In today’s America, the billionaire class has far more power to shape society than random university professors or even most celebrities. Their sheer wealth allows right-wing billionaires like Musk and Peter Thiel to do things, like purchase Twitter or shut down Gawker or bankroll a Senate campaign, that are unthinkable for 99.999 percent of Americans. When these people exist, it seems implausible to describe the Harvard faculty office or Twitter Trust and Safety team as the true loci of social power.

Burnham’s theory helps the modern right square this circle. If power is increasingly moving away from capitalists and toward the managers they employ, then it’s totally coherent for even the wealthiest people in the country to see themselves as victims of a “woke mind virus” infecting middle and upper management. This is how you get the odd spectacle of people like Musk deploring alleged censorship perpetrated by their own companies: They see their staff not as subordinates whose conduct is an internal company matter, but as rivals in the struggle for power who must be defeated.

Elon Musk’s bizarre obsession with “wokeness” becomes more understandable when interpreted against this particular intellectual milieu. And the essentially paranoid idea that billionaire capitalists are being betrayed by their own Professional Managerial Class employees has proven to be surprisingly attractive, not just to people like Musk, but also to many putatively left writers, whose own weird obsession with the “PMC” is never far from the surface.