Total State

* Book:Auron MacIntyre. The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.

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Review

N.S. Lyons:

"MacIntyre provides a dispassionate dissection of how, without any cabal or specific conspiracy, an elite class captured all our major public and private institutions, hollowed them out, set them all marching in lockstep against the American middle-class, and made a mockery of the notion of constitutional “checks and balances.” The resulting “total state” now operates in increasingly flagrant contradiction to the interests of the American people and democratic government while “wearing the old regime like a skinsuit.”

Essential to understanding this total state is the concept of managerialism, an idea first pioneered by an older generation of political thinkers like James Burnham which has been recovered from relative obscurity and re-employed by the 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 non-profit 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 story of the fall of the American republic is the story of the managers’ rise to power everywhere.

In part, this was the inevitable outcome of technological and economic change following the industrial revolution, which made it necessary to expand the ranks of people schooled in managing large, complex organizations. But, as MacIntyre demonstrates, it was also the result of a deeply misguided urge, pioneered by early progressives, to de-risk and “depoliticize” politics by handing over decision-making to technocratic “experts.” The hope was that these experts could rationally and neutrally administer government and society from the top down, through the same principles and processes of “scientific management” first applied to the assembly line.

This proved disastrous.

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 it continues to grow larger, more complex, and less efficient, because this means exponentially more managers must be hired to wrestle with it. Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. And as new managers are 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, though. Always and everywhere, managerial power seeks to expand and to centralize without limit. Even once one organization or sector has been conquered by managerialism, new ground must be found and seized, even if simply to provide new employment for the expanding managerial class. If no supply of new managerial jobs exists, they can be created through social engineering—the top-down restructuring 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 her wings—and a taxpayer-funded salary.

Naturally, managers have a material incentive to make alleging the virtues of top-down social engineering and control the locus of their moral and ideological beliefs. Hence the progressive craze for strictly micromanaging behavior and language, the wholescale restructuring of social norms, and the redistribution of wealth, power, and positions. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs and the whole ideology commonly known as “woke” are best thought of 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 points out, 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 there is nothing left in between isolated, atomized individuals and the edifice of the managerial state.

This dissolution is the defining story of the last century of American life."

(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-total-state-and-the-twilight)