Elon Musk may be swapping insults with President Trump after pivoting away from politics and stepping down from the Department of Government Efficiency, but the broader initiative, driven by what he described as a mission to end the “tyranny of the bureaucracy,” will soldier on. Even if its impact on government spending remains limited, DOGE’s aggressive approach has rattled Washington’s political establishment.
The administration’s war against the bureaucracy didn’t emerge from the mind of Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk alone. Nor is it the product of traditional conservative preoccupations with shrinking government and reducing spending. Its roots and motivations are far deeper.
It is the culmination of a once marginalized, now transformative strand of political thought about who really holds power in the modern American system. Namely, that our democracy has been usurped by a permanent ruling class of wholly unaccountable managers and bureaucrats.
Anti-managerialism is back. Well positioned to answer decades of frustration with mainstream conservatives’ failure to deliver results, this old idea has become the central principle of the New Right.
The idea’s intellectual history begins with the political philosopher James Burnham, who argued in his seminal 1941 book, “The Managerial Revolution,” that the aristocratic capitalist class was in the process of being overthrown by a revolution — just not, as the Marxists predicted, by the working class.
Lambert here: What a melange, “aristocratic capitalist class.” Some “philosopher.”
The 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.”
Lambert here: Another melange.
[The writer Samuel Francis, a key member of the paleoconservative faction,] noted that 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.
Lambert here: Yet another melange.
Nominally a democracy, the country was run by an oligarchic elite that had a total lock on power and worked only in the interests of its own class. Moreover, the spread of globalization meant this managerial elite had transcended borders. Francis therefore argued for a “Middle American Revolution” to sweep the elite from power by breaking their institutional dominance as a class.
Pat Buchanan, to whom Francis was an adviser, took up this revolution as a rallying cry, making it the basis of insurgent presidential runs in the 1990s and in 2000, prefiguring another outsider: Donald Trump. Mr. Buchanan’s bids failed, and the right turned to neoconservatism, a movement that sought to embrace the growing managerial state and co-opt its elites rather than overthrow them.
Lambert here: The natural habitat of the oligarch is not the faculty lounge.
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