The be-all and end-all: On California's all-consuming “managed democracy”
Depicted: Marvel's Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds consuming multiple planets to gain power.
Opp Now has likened city gov't mission creep to '50s movie "The Blob," as jurisdictions like SJ expand programs and positions that drain the budget while pushing out more essential services. City Journal's N. S. Lyons agrees with this assessment; in his article below, he defines and discusses political “managerialism"—and its devastating cultural consequences.
Essential to understanding this total state is the concept of managerialism, an idea first pioneered by an older generation of political thinkers, like National Review’s James Burnham, recovered from relative obscurity and re-employed by this emerging 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 nonprofit 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 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 the organization keeps growing larger, more complex, and less efficient, because that means more managers must be hired to wrestle with it. Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. And as new managers get 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. Always and everywhere, managerial power seeks to expand and to centralize without limit. After managerialism conquers one organization or sector, new ground must be found and seized. If no supply of new managerial jobs exists, they can be created through social engineering—the top-down reordering 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 his or her wings—and a taxpayer-funded salary.
Naturally, managers have a material incentive to make alleging the virtues of control and top-down social engineering the locus of their moral and ideological beliefs. Hence the progressive craze for micromanaging behavior and language, the restructuring of social norms, and the redistribution of wealth, power, and positions. On this account, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs—indeed, the whole ideology commonly known as “wokeness”—function 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 observes, 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 nothing is left between isolated, atomized individuals and the managerial state.
The second big problem with managerial elites is that they end up thinking exactly alike. As we’ve seen, they are 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 that have become the credentialing mechanism for the managerial class, regardless of profession. There, they are enculturated with the same language, cultural sensibilities, and ideological prejudices as their peers. …
Together, these factors have produced a vast, self-reinforcing managerial apparatus—a regime—of public institutions, private corporations, and non-governmental organizations that moves together like a flock of birds. On the New Right, it’s dubbed “the Cathedral,” in which everyone in power—from Harvard to the press to the White House—sings from the same hymn sheet. But whereas the twentieth century’s totalitarian governments needed a dedicated propaganda ministry and secret police to impose the coordination of society, we’ve managed to achieve a softer version of it through the invisible hand of managerial status-seeking.
Faced with the need to maintain a façade of democratic legitimacy, the managerial regime’s solution has been, 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; 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.”
Read the whole thing here.
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