The president unleashes a Marxist theory of power—but against knowledge workers, not billionaires.
Even the educated mind, or perhaps especially the educated mind, is skilled at deflecting harsh realities. That’s why so many white-shoe lawyers have failed to publicly support their colleagues in firms that President Donald Trump has targeted. It’s why universities have barely fought him in court, even as he has butchered their funding. Law partners and university presidents like to talk their way out of problems, and they apparently believe that they can ultimately evade the fate that befalls those who resist Trump. They assume that he merely craves gestures of submission—and that once obeisance has been paid, he will move on to his next target.
That, however, underestimates the social revolution that the Trump administration is trying to unleash. Its goal isn’t just to shatter a few institutions. It intends to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.
The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age. Back in the 1990s, as the group began to emerge in its current form, the liberal economics commentator Robert Reich hailed its members as “symbolic analysts”—people who identify and solve problems by thinking through ideas rather than via physical labor. A decade later, the urbanist Richard Florida put forth an even more triumphalist term: the “creative class.” That is, its members had the academic training to master the complexities of a globalized economy, the intellectual skills to conquer the digital world.
Not so long ago, the upper-middle-class Americans who exemplify the PMC would have filled the ranks of both parties. But beginning in the 1990s, professionals began migrating in large numbers to the Democrats. Many affluent people with a cosmopolitan outlook were repelled by the GOP’s social stances and drawn to the economic moderation of politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
As the group made this partisan turn, the right zeroed in on the PMC as the enemy within. Conservative populists didn’t just disagree with the PMC’s political preferences; they accused an institutional elite of conniving to extend its own power. By inculcating a worldview hatched on university campuses—call it progressive or “woke”—this elite hopes to assert its dominion over the rest of society. It masquerades as the purveyor of science and objectivity, but it really is a hegemonic caste.
Animosity to the PMC is a propulsive force in Trump’s second term. Rather than merely replacing its ideological foes—by installing its own appointees in federal agencies—the administration is bent on destroying their institutional homes, and the basis for their livelihood. That’s the lesson of the Department of Government Efficiency. In short order, DOGE has engaged in mass firings—sweeping attacks on the civil service as an autonomous bastion of power. The administration has moved to uproot the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy that sprawls across corporations and nonprofits. Although the federal government cannot crush entire universities and law firms outright, Trump has attempted to undermine their business models. The administration has eliminated many of the grants that fund research at major universities—and Republicans in Congress have proposed taxing these institutions’ endowments as well. Trump has stigmatized law firms by reprimanding them in executive orders, signaling to clients and potential clients that these firms will always be at a disadvantage in dealings with the government.
In its strange inversion of American politics, the Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize.
When Donald Trump first entered presidential politics, his attitude toward the elite was comically inconsistent. One lobe of his brain equated Ivy League degrees with intelligence. “I went to Wharton School of Business,” he once said. “I’m like, a really smart person.” He would extol his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a Harvard man. But another lobe of his brain processed the world in the blunt dichotomies of populism: The elites were shafting the people; the globalists were lining their pockets at the expense of real Americans; there was a “swamp” and a “deep state.”
The American right’s version of populism has always been the product of a divided mind. In the 1960s, William F. Buckley Jr., a Yale graduate and the child of an oil magnate, famously quipped, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
But the ideological roots of the Trump administration’s campaign against the PMC can be traced back decades further. In the 1930s, the political theorist James Burnham was a disciple of the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Burnham absorbed Trotsky’s core complaint with the Soviet Union: that it had been hijacked by a clique of bureaucrats who tended to their own interests at the expense of society, and had veered from the righteous path.
Accepting that critique of the Soviet state set Burnham on a path of apostasy. In 1940, he broke ranks with Trotsky, rejected socialism altogether, and turned rightward. But in the course of his conversion, he retained a strain of his former idol’s old analysis. Nearly everywhere he turned, he saw the danger of a domineering bureaucratic caste, even in the United States, the heart of the free-market economy.
In his 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that within the American corporation, power actually resided with managers, the experts who mastered the sprawling, technically intricate means of industrial production, not with the men who owned companies. The same dynamic held in government. It was bureaucrats, not members of Congress, who determined the path of democracy. The bureaucrats were an authoritarian cabal in the making.
The book became an unlikely hit, selling more than 100,000 copies. Burnham’s critique of the managerial elite also became a canonical text for young conservatives such as Buckley. Over time, Burnham’s idea thrived and morphed to keep pace with the zeitgeist.
Thanks to the Baby Boom, universities were exploding by the late 1960s, creating a huge new professoriate. Thanks to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the federal bureaucracy was expanding too, creating an army of social workers, government lawyers, and economists. Society showed the influence of what Irving Kristol described as “the new class.” To Kristol, an intellectual who had followed Burnham’s trajectory from Trotskyism to conservatism, this new class seemed nefarious because it showed little interest in making money. Instead, it craved power and exploited progressive ideas as a guise for achieving it. By Kristol’s account, the new class leveraged its control of the media, the academy, and the government to implant its self-serving ideas in the nation.
Conservatives weren’t the only ones who perceived the power of the PMC; indeed, the term professional-managerial class was popularized by the liberal intellectuals Barbara and John Ehrenreich. But arguments such as Burnham’s and Kristol’s have made a deeper impression on the modern right than on the left. As conservatives gained control over the levers of government, especially in the George W. Bush administration, an ever more overt disdain for expertise guided policy, as the White House eschewed opinions emanating from CIA analysts and mainstream economists. By 2016, Peter Thiel, the Trump booster and Silicon Valley investor, was fuming that America was now “dominated by very unelected, technocratic agencies.” During Trump’s first term, American Affairs, the most rarefied of the MAGA-adjacent outlets, ran essay after essay about the pernicious power of the professional managerial class. But the theories of new class and managerial caste didn’t truly become the guiding ideology of the state until the second Trump term.
In the battle between the warring lobes of Trump’s brain, his sense of grievance ultimately prevailed. Subjected to media criticism and legal investigations during his first term, he not only raged against his PMC adversaries but also began to fantasize about exacting retribution against them.
To the right’s own intelligentsia, two major developments that gathered force during Trump’s first presidency seemingly vindicated Burnham as a prophet who foresaw how the PMC would flex its power. One was the institutional embrace of left-wing identity politics. Corporations had spawned whole new bureaucracies devoted to DEI. Workers at Google, Nike, and The New York Times prodded the owners to shift politically in a progressive direction, ousting employees who allegedly held retrograde opinions on race and gender, propelling firms to promote minorities and invest in Black businesses. The PMC was flexing the power it had clawed away from corporate overlords.
The other development was COVID-19. At the behest of public-health authorities, societies ground to a halt. The shutdown exposed the entitlements of life in the PMC, whose members holed up in their homes, streaming movies and baking bread, as others exposed themselves to the disease in the course of packing meat and delivering groceries. The opinions issued by the likes of Anthony Fauci became the basis for a new gripe: that arrogant experts were using a once-in-a-century pandemic as a pretext for stifling reasonable policy debate and exerting their own control over the country.
Many titans of Silicon Valley, not just Thiel, were attracted to this critique, although they were arguably members of the PMC themselves, or at least had attended elite universities and frequented fancy conferences in mountain resorts. But they resented how the underlings in their own companies forced them to adopt progressive politics as corporate policy. And as engineers, who believed in the gospel of tinkering, they never considered themselves card-carrying members of the PMC establishment.
Elon Musk, for one, adopted a Burnham-like disdain for the PMC as a business plan. When he took over Twitter in 2022, he laid off 80 percent of the workforce, including the Trust and Safety Council and a chunk of the company’s content moderators. As the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez put it, Musk was taking a stand against “the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise elsewhere dominates.” Not only did he treat this caste with disdain; he implied that it was doomed to the dustbin of history, because its members’ functions could be so easily subsumed by artificial intelligence. A shared hatred of the PMC drew Musk to Trump, and the Twitter purge foreshadowed Musk’s approach in government.
Even before Musk attached himself and his fortune to Trump, MAGA types were making bold plans for the wholesale eradication of the PMC from American institutions during a second Trump term. Contempt for the “unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class” was a dominant theme of Project 2025, the playbook produced by the Heritage Foundation.
The attack on the PMC has proceeded with astonishing velocity. Thousands of federal employees have been fired since Trump’s inauguration, and many others have fled oppressive workplaces of their own accord. Once-thriving institutions—the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Voice of America, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, to name a few—have been either eliminated or reduced to ineffectual nubs of their former selves. Hatred for the PMC burns so intensely that it becomes the justification for sacrificing research into cures for cancer and ignoring accumulated expertise about the workings of the economy.
In a way, Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia—what the Communist Party of China memorably deemed the “stinking ninth” class. Although Trump’s purges have been tame by comparison, there are parallels. Like Trump, Mao wanted to create manufacturing jobs in the homeland. Defying expert opinion and shunning economic common sense, Mao launched his Great Leap Forward—a disastrously unsuccessful policy of rapid industrialization—in the late ’50s. During that period and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, he resorted to scapegoating his own PMC, especially the professoriate and other cultural elites. (“Better red than expert” was a rallying cry.) His minions subjected its members to public humiliation and horrifying violence; the state exiled members of the urban bourgeoisie to the countryside for reeducation.
It’s a stretch to imagine such a scenario unfolding on American soil. But voices in MAGA are floating versions of these ideas. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told Tucker Carlson that fired federal workers could supply “the labor we need for new manufacturing.” That is reeducation, Trump-style.
The lesson of the Cultural Revolution is that purging the PMC culminates in economic stagnation at best. In the aftermath of Maoism, social distrust flourished; anti-intellectualism resulted in historical amnesia and conformist thinking. Even if the United States avoids those outcomes, the global economic turmoil that has followed Trump’s tariff announcements hints at the perils of banishing and stigmatizing expertise. This is the dark reality of the Trump project—a vision far more comprehensive, and therefore far more corrosive, than an autocratic president’s mere thirst for vengeance.
[Franklin Foer]
