#james burnham

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Why Trump’s second term agenda is so wildly different from his first

The deeply online origins of MAGA 2.0.

Andrew Prokop at Vox:

President Donald Trump wants larger nonprofits and academic institutions investigated for the “egregious” use of DEI. Elon Musk is trying to purge the federal workforce, and accusing nonprofits and the media of corruption in conspiratorial and factually inaccurate ways. Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist who deeply influenced the administration’s hiring, has cited grand theories of how Trump could smash the power of “managerial” elites. And 25-year-old administration official Marko Elez, who’d made racist online comments and initially resigned, will be rehired, Musk has said. All this and more from Trump’s first four weeks back in office show that his new administration is profoundly influenced by what might be called the online right: perpetually plugged-in posters who’ve become united by their desire to combat and defeat “woke” progressives. Complaints about the liberal leanings of various institutions — the media, nonprofits, the civil service, academia — are nothing new for Republicans, or for Trump.

But the new Trump administration — and, specifically, very online officials like Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Musk — isn’t just complaining. Officials are now trying to use the tools of government against these institutions, in hopes of taking progressives’ power away and establishing cultural dominance for conservatives. This reflects the theories, beliefs, and obsessions that have become widespread among the online right, who’ve spent years seething over the Great Awokening, coming up with explanations for why it happened and how it can be reversed. Now these very online people’s fixations are becoming the policy of the United States government. For instance, Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders bear the stamp of online right opinion influencers Chris Rufo and Richard Hanania. So while Trump’s first administration was heavily influenced by traditional Republican figures, his second one is far more influenced by a burgeoning new establishment — a very online one.

What unites the online right: attacking the woke and smashing their power

The online right can be said to span different classes and subcultures; its members include no-names like Elez and billionaires like Musk. But they’re essentially a team forged in combat against progressives. They’ve spent years seething over the “Great Awokening” — the leftward move of the culture around race, gender, and sexuality in the mid-to-late 2010s, which many feel chilled their speech, endangered their careers, or advanced ideas and policies they believed to be wrong and harmful.

The online right’s roots go back years, to Gamergate and the alt-right, though in the 2010s such subcultures were viewed as somewhat disreputable even by Republicans. Few prominent figures openly associated themselves with them, and Trump relied on traditional Republicans for most of his appointees.

But the backlash to progressive governance and cultural power that occurred under Biden’s presidency swelled their ranks — spurring prominent people like Vance, Musk, and Andreessen to openly break with the mainstream consensus. (When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he trashed its previous leaders as censorious wokes and reinvented the site as X, making it a more welcoming home for the right.) What drew people to the online right was resentment of progressive power, as well as a desire to figure out where that power comes from and how it could be broken. And many arrived at a roughly similar worldview: the idea that “woke” progressives gained their power by dominating many elite institutions in American life — academia, media, the culture industries, nonprofits, the civil service, and so on. Some cite more highbrow or middlebrow versions of this theory — for instance, James Burnham’s writings about the managerial class, or Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral” — while others rely on more instinctive and inchoate resentments.

The 2nd Trump term is more tied into the terminally online MAGA weirdo influencers than his 1st one.

[quote-bomber]

“He remembered the forceful hand that cast him to the earth. He'd fallen like a shooting star, his flesh burning until his wings fell away. Pain was something he had never known before. But even worse than the physical affliction was the knowledge that he would forevermore be denied Heaven.” James Burnham, The Fruit of the Fallen

[the-funtime-autocrat]

(James) Burnham’s most important intellectual contribution was his theory of the “managerial revolution,” first articulated in a 1941 book bearing that name. His primary argument was that classical bourgeois capitalism, which had become dominant in the West in the 19th century, was becoming obsolete in light of subsequent events. The older bourgeoisie was being replaced by a new class of managerial elites, educated technocrats that specialized in the management of large organizations. Within the realm of business, technocrats had largely supplanted the shareholders and the boards of directors as the dominant decision-makers. However, a similar process was taking place in government, labor unions, universities, foundations, and other organizations. The managerial revolution transcended not merely the differences between the public and private sectors, but also national, cultural, and ideological boundaries, as well as specific forms of government. Burnham believed that a comparable managerial revolution was taking place in both the Western liberal democracies and in totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Arguing against the Marxist view that dominance of the bourgeoisie within classical capitalism would eventually result in revolutions leading to the creation of workers’ states, Burnham instead argued that it was the new managerial elite that were destined to supersede the older bourgeoisie. In 1943 Burnham published The Machiavellians, which examined the ideas of several Italian theorists of the early 20th century—Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels—along with the French “national syndicalist” Georges Sorel. These thinkers postulated that modern democracy is largely an illusion, and that elites within key political, economic, and cultural institutions continue to hold the reins of power, albeit in a way that allows for superficial opposition in the form of competing electoral parties and a general freedom of the press. In reality, genuine political conflict occurs within the ranks of existing elites as factional elements attempt to advance their own interests and objectives, and between the governing elites and the non-governing elites that seek to replace them. The masses generally accept the rule of elites based on what Sorel considered to be popular myths that provide a veneer of legitimacy for the elite factions that happen to hold power.

Keith Preston, “Remembering James Burnham” (July 2020).

[7reinostargaryenkoala]

•Chris Evans And Sebastian Stan•

[freebroccoli]

Many modern politicians habitually tell the people that "their fate is in their own hands," they rule themselves, they make the final and fundamental decisions, they are the court of last appeal. Remarks of this kind are all derivations expressing some variant of the democratic formulas. Their real purpose is to enable the politicians, while ruling in their own interest, to protect their regime by the moral sanction of the myth of the popular will.

An honest statement to the masses, which by the nature of the case of a politician cannot give, would have to say: you cannot rule yourselves; distrust all leaders, and above all those who tell you that they are merely expressing or representing your will; erect and cherish every possible safeguard against the unchecked exercise of power.

James Burnham, The Machiavellians

[your-instructions-from-moscow]

For Burnham, nothing Stalin did was accidental, arbitrary, or improvised. Seeking to uncover a coherent "pattern" in Soviet conduct, Burnham ascribed to Stalin a fixed geopolitical ambition: the "domination of Eurasia." Anyone who talks about "Eurasia" as if it were a real locale has already transported himself to a cosmic wonderland, devoid of people, regional politics, religious discord, and ethnic animosities. Nevertheless, Burnham's ominous metaphors summoned up the deepest fears of the Cold Warriors. The source of Soviet power emanated from the "Eurasian heartland," he intoned; then flowed outward, almost hypnotically, like a turbulent and unharnessable river, "west into Europe, south into the Near East, east into China, already lapping the shores of the Atlantic, the Yellow and China Seas, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf."

Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (1985), 79.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

A Nietzschean civilization would be one where men were once again not only invited but encouraged to live dangerously. Clearly, such a society would be an aristocracy, but not just any kind of aristocracy. It is doubtful that Nietzsche would have seriously regarded the hereditary nobility as a manifestation of his ideal. An authentically Nietzschean aristocracy would certainly maintain more stringent requirements for admission than mere birth. A Nietzschean aristocracy would therefore be an aristocracy of merit rather than inheritance, but it would not be the pseudo-aristocracy of the bourgeoisie elites for whom prowess at money-making represents the highest human type. Nor would it be the New Class bureaucratic elite that emerged in the 20th century and from which most of the contemporary upper middle class is drawn. It is this class at present challenging the domination of the traditional bourgeoisie. Nietzsche would have regarded the New Class as even more degenerative than the bourgeoisie.

Keith Preston, “Beyond the End of History: Rejecting the Washington Consensus” (2016).

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Initially, it might appear to be a mystery that bureaucratic measures should have intensified under neo-liberal governments that have presented themselves as anti-bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist. Yet new kinds of bureaucracy -- 'aims and objectives,' 'outcomes,' 'mission statements,' -- have proliferated, even as neo-liberal rhetoric about the end of top-down, centralized, control has gained pre-eminence. It might seem that bureaucracy is a kind of return of the repressed, ironically re-remerging at the heart of a system which has professed to destroy it. But the resurgence of bureaucracy in neo-liberalism is more than an atavism or an anomaly.

Mark Fisher, “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?” (2009).