Here’s a link to an article in the 8 June edition of The New York Times asserting that the central ideology of fhe Trump version of populism is what the author calls “anti-maferialism”.
The author’s name is Nathan Levine. I haven’t been able to find out much about him except that he was affiliated with The Heritage Foundation at some point and that he publishes a a newsletter on Substack called The Upheaval under the name N.S. Lyons.
As the author describes it, anti-managerialism is the effort to enhance the freedom of the people in general by reducing the power of public and private sector bureaucratic organizations. Those bureaucratic organizations include the federal government, big businesses, big law firms, media outlets, and universities.
In the article, the author says “… our democracy has been usurped by a permanent ruling class of wholly unaccountable managers and bureaucrats.” He says anti-managerialism is a popular reaction “…to decades of frustration with mainstream conservatives’ failure to deliver results ….”
Levine cites a 1941 book by political philosopher John Burnham as the origin of this movement. As summarized by Levine, Burnham said:
“… [T]he exponential growth of mass and scale produced by the Industrial Revolution meant that in both corporation and state it was now those people cleverest at applying techniques of mass organization, procedure and propaganda — what he called the managerial class — who effectively controlled the means of production and would increasingly come to dominate society as a new technocratic oligarchy.”
According to Levine, Burnham’s book “… made an especially significant impression on George Orwell, who remarked that a managerial class consisting of ‘scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people,’ hungry for ‘more power and more prestige,’ would seek to entrench ‘a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves.’ “
Levine goes on to say that, by the 1980s, some thinkers on the right believed “the managerial class had risen to elite status, just as Burnham predicted. This managerial elite now occupied positions across the heights of society, from government agencies to the boardroom and the faculty lounge, and was generally united in espousing liberal-progressive ideological beliefs.”
Today, according to Levine, “… only by delivering a decisive blow to the unity and control of the bureaucratic ‘deep state ‘through evicting swaths of the managerial class could the left’s structural power be successfully undermined. … Hence the administration’s determination to reassert presidential authority over the administrative state, seeing this as an urgent restoration of democratic accountability.”
If this sound like an interesting topic for discussion, here are a few questions I think Levine’s article raises:
1. Is the Trump administration following Levine’s playback?
2. If so, are they succeeding?
3. So far, who has benefitted from the anti-managerial movement? Who is bearing the cost?
4.To the extent the Trump administration is succeeding, will that success be reversed after Trump leaves office?
5. In what respects is this reduction of the power of bureaucratic a good thing?
