Managerial state
Encyclopedia
Managerial state is a paleoconservative concept used in critiquing modern social democracy
Social democracy
Social democracy is a political ideology of the center-left on the political spectrum. Social democracy is officially a form of evolutionary reformist socialism. It supports class collaboration as the course to achieve socialism...

 in Western countries. The term takes a pejorative context as a manifestation of Western decline. Theorists Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried
Paul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...

 say this is an ongoing regime that remains in power, regardless of what political party holds a majority. Variations include therapeutic managerial state, welfare-warfare state or polite totalitarianism.

Francis, following James Burnham
James Burnham
James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...

, said that under this historical process, “law is replaced by administrative decree, federalism
Federalism
Federalism is a political concept in which a group of members are bound together by covenant with a governing representative head. The term "federalism" is also used to describe a system of the government in which sovereignty is constitutionally divided between a central governing authority and...

 is replaced by executive autocracy
Autocracy
An autocracy is a form of government in which one person is the supreme power within the state. It is derived from the Greek : and , and may be translated as "one who rules by himself". It is distinct from oligarchy and democracy...

, and a limited government replaced by an unlimited state.” It acts in the name of abstract goals, such as equality or positive rights, and uses its claim of moral superiority, power of tax
Tax
To tax is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law. Taxes are also imposed by many subnational entities...

ation and wealth redistribution
Redistribution (economics)
Redistribution of wealth is the transfer of income, wealth or property from some individuals to others caused by a social mechanism such as taxation, monetary policies, welfare, nationalization, charity, divorce or tort law. Most often it refers to progressive redistribution, from the rich to the...

 to keep itself in power.

The Managerial Worldview

Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried
Paul Edward Gottfried is Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient...

, in After Liberalism, defines this worldview as a "series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and it maintains its power by pointing its finger accusingly at antiliberals." He calls it a new theocratic religion
Theocracy
Theocracy is a form of organization in which the official policy is to be governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided, or simply pursuant to the doctrine of a particular religious sect or religion....

. In this view, when the managerial regime cannot get democratic support for its policies, it resorts to sanctimony and social engineering
Social engineering (political science)
Social engineering is a discipline in political science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups. In the political arena, the counterpart of social engineering is political engineering.For various reasons,...

, via programs, court decisions and regulations
Judicial activism
Judicial activism describes judicial ruling suspected of being based on personal or political considerations rather than on existing law. It is sometimes used as an antonym of judicial restraint. The definition of judicial activism, and which specific decisions are activist, is a controversial...

.

This includes mass welfarism
Welfarism
Welfarism is a form of consequentialism. Like all forms of consequentialism, welfarism is based on the premise that actions, policies, and/or rules should be evaluated on the basis of their consequences. Welfarism is the view that the morally significant consequences are impacts on human welfare...

, positive rights
Negative and positive rights
Philosophers and political scientists make a distinction between negative and positive rights . According to this view, positive rights permit or oblige action, whereas negative rights permit or oblige inaction. These permissions or obligations may be of either a legal or moral character...

, laws punishing racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

, sexism
Sexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...

 and homophobia
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...

, and centralized control of public education
Public education
State schools, also known in the United States and Canada as public schools,In much of the Commonwealth, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, the terms 'public education', 'public school' and 'independent school' are used for private schools, that is, schools...

. (While paleocons often criticize neoconservatism, they still see these opponents as just one of many power blocs that support this managerialism.) He elaborated that

A regime engaged in behavior modification
Behavior modification
Behavior modification is the use of empirically demonstrated behavior change techniques to increase or decrease the frequency of behaviors, such as altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of...

... [will] begin by appealing to unproved premises, which the reader is nudged into accepting, move on to therapeutic criteria for right reasoning, and finally, as seen in recent hate speech
Hate speech
Hate speech is, outside the law, any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or other characteristic....

 and anti-Holocaust revisionist
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...

 laws, end by reverting to the Argumentum ad baculum
Argumentum ad baculum
Argumentum ad baculum , also known as appeal to force, is an argument where force, coercion, or the threat of force, is given as a justification for a conclusion...

, which may mean arresting those considered criminally insensitive. At stake here is not the idle pastime of scribes. It is an attempt undertaken by prominent intellectuals to elevate pluralism into behavioral coercion.


Francis argued that this system oversees "the managed destruction of such relationships of civil society as property, patterns of association, education, and employment." He elaborated:
The managerial ruling class, lodged primarily in the state and the other massive bureaucratic structures that dominate the economy and mass culture, must undermine such institutions of traditional social life if its power and interests are to prevail. Disparities between races--rebaptized as "prejudice," "discrimination," "white supremacy," and "hate" to which state and local governments and private institutions are indifferent or in which they are allegedly complicit-provide constant targets of convenience for managerial attack on local, private, and social relationships. Seen in this perspective, as a means of subverting traditional society and enhancing the dominance of a new elite and its own social forms, the crusade for racial "liberation" is not distinctly different from other phases of the same conflict that involve attacks on the family, community, class, and religion.


In a more general way, Joseph Sobran
Joseph Sobran
Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...

 argues that technology and false notions of progress give people a false sense of autonomy
Autonomy
Autonomy is a concept found in moral, political and bioethical philosophy. Within these contexts, it is the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision...

:
C.S. Lewis remarked that every increase in man's power over nature can turn out to mean an increase in the power of some men over others, with nature as its instrument. Given technological progress, we need to fight hard to retain our clarity about the nature and rights of human beings, or we face what Lewis called "the abolition of man."
The Abolition of Man
The Abolition of Man is a 1943 book by C. S. Lewis. It is subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools," and uses that as a starting point for a defense of objective value and natural law, and a warning of the consequences of...

 Abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...

 and totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...

 both represent new possibilities of some men's power over others, and both are defended by certain ideologies
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...

 of "progress." We hear of human "autonomy" and of man's "control of his own destiny." But the autonomy is enjoyed by a select (or self-selected) few, and the control is exercised by a shrinking elite; those who are powerless, whether unborn children or the subjects of a totalist dictatorship, simply don't count.


Thomas Fleming argues that the managerial problem extends to issues of war, peace and international order:
I prefer the old Adam of strife and carnage to the new Prometheus
Prometheus
In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan, the son of Iapetus and Themis, and brother to Atlas, Epimetheus and Menoetius. He was a champion of mankind, known for his wily intelligence, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals...

 of peace and human rights. Better a world torn apart by Husseins
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003...

 and Qaddafis
Muammar al-Gaddafi
Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar Gaddafi or "September 1942" 20 October 2011), commonly known as Muammar Gaddafi or Colonel Gaddafi, was the official ruler of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then the "Brother Leader" of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011.He seized power in a...

, better a war to the knife between the PLO
Palestine Liberation Organization
The Palestine Liberation Organization is a political and paramilitary organization which was created in 1964. It is recognized as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" by the United Nations and over 100 states with which it holds diplomatic relations, and has enjoyed...

 and the Likud Party
Likud
Likud is the major center-right political party in Israel. It was founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin in an alliance with several right-wing and liberal parties. Likud's victory in the 1977 elections was a major turning point in the country's political history, marking the first time the left had...

, between Zulus and Afrikaaners, than a world run by George Balls and Dag Hammarskjöld
Dag Hammarskjöld
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld was a Swedish diplomat, economist, and author. An early Secretary-General of the United Nations, he served from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. He is the only person to have been awarded a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize. Hammarskjöld...

s, because a world made safe for democracy is a world in which no one dares to raise his voice for fear that mommy will put you away some place where you can be reeducated
Reeducation
Reeducation may refer to:* A euphemism for Brainwashing, efforts aimed at instilling certain beliefs in people against their will* Reeducation through labor, also called laojiao, a form of penal detention in China; or the Soviet gulags for "re-education of class enemies" and reintegrating them...

."

Anarchy and tyranny

Samuel Francis argued that the problems of managerial state extend to issues of crime and justice. In 1992, he introduced the word “anarcho-tyranny” into the paleocon vocabulary. He once defined it this way: “we refuse to control real criminals (that's the anarchy
Anarchy
Anarchy , has more than one colloquial definition. In the United States, the term "anarchy" typically is meant to refer to a society which lacks publicly recognized government or violently enforced political authority...

) so we control the innocent (that's the tyranny).” Francis argued that this situation extends across the U.S. and Europe. While the government functions normally, violent crime remains a constant, creating a climate of fear (anarchy). He says that “laws that are supposed to protect ordinary citizens against ordinary criminals” routinely go unenforced, even though the state is “perfectly capable” of doing so. While this problem rages on, government elites concentrate their interests on law-abiding citizens. In fact, Middle America winds up on the receiving end of both anarchy and tyranny.

Other paleos have expanded upon Francis’ original idea. Paleolibertarian Lew Rockwell
Lew Rockwell
Llewellyn Harrison "Lew" Rockwell, Jr. is an American libertarian political commentator, activist, proponent of the Austrian School of economics, and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.-Life and work:...

 extended it to foreign policy, saying that the U.S. military unleashed this condition on the Iraqis
Iraqi people
The Iraqi people or Mesopotamian people are natives or inhabitants of the country of Iraq, known since antiquity as Mesopotamia , with a large diaspora throughout the Arab World, Europe, the Americas, and...

. Some of the VDARE
VDARE
VDARE.com, or VDARE, is a website that advocates reduced immigration, especially illegal immigration, into the United States. Former Forbes editor Peter Brimelow supports the site through his VDARE Foundation, also known as Lexington Research Institute Limited...

 team, including Francis himself, use the term to describe illegal immigration
Illegal immigration
Illegal immigration is the migration into a nation in violation of the immigration laws of that jurisdiction. Illegal immigration raises many political, economical and social issues and has become a source of major controversy in developed countries and the more successful developing countries.In...

. Thomas Fleming argues that the breakdown of the American system leaves a "country with a civilized elite class sitting on top of a powder-keg of anarchic welfare-dependents who can defy the government. This gives "encouragement to our own domestic rabble," endangering Middle America:

Does anyone remember the Rodney King
Rodney King
Rodney Glen King is an American best known for his involvement in a police brutality case involving the Los Angeles Police Department on March 3, 1991...

 riots? Watts
Watts Riots
The Watts Riots or the Watts Rebellion was a civil disturbance in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California from August 11 to August 15, 1965. The 5-day riot resulted in 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, and 3,438 arrests...

? What happens every time a big city wins or loses a Superbowl (sic) or NBA championship? The next time you are in a large crowd -- at a downtown pop concert or metro station -- look around and imagine how many people on the street, if the lights went out and the cops disappeared, would be pulling the gold fillings out of the teeth in your dead body.


Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Eugene Pournelle is an American science fiction writer, essayist and journalist who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte and has since 1998 been maintaining his own website/blog....

 provides his own variation on this theme:

We do not live by rule of law, because no one can possibly go a day without breaking one or another of the goofy laws that have been imposed on us over the years. No one even knows all the laws that apply to almost anything we do now. We live in a time of selective enforcement of law.


Francis argues that anarcho-tyranny is built into the managerial system and cannot be solved simply by fighting corruption or voting out incumbents. In fact, he says that the system generates a false “conservatism” that encourages people to act passively in the face of perpetual revolution. He concludes that only by devolving power back toward law-abiding citizens can sanity be restored.

In addition, Thomas Fleming describes anarcho-tyranny as "law without order: a constant busybodying about behavior that does not at all derive from a shared moral consensus." He suggests stoicism
Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early . The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.Stoics were concerned...

 as a survival skill. He wrote,
"he only response to this regime is to follow the boxing referee's advice: protect yourself at all times..... The only freedom we have is the moral freedom that even ancient slaves enjoyed. Read Epictetus
Epictetus
Epictetus was a Greek sage and Stoic philosopher. He was born a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia , and lived in Rome until banishment when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece where he lived the rest of his life. His teachings were noted down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses...

."

Criticism of the center-right

Gottfried says paleoconservatives show contempt for the modern state, "not as an energizing force but as a leveling and homogenizing instrument." Conversely, he says mainstream conservatives no longer challenge the managerial system, except at the extremes. For example, decades of activism rolled back neither the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...

 nor the Great Society
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States promoted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice...

. He argues that classical conservatives
Traditionalist Conservatism
Traditionalist conservatism, also known as "traditional conservatism," "traditionalism," "Burkean conservatism", "classical conservatism" and , "Toryism", describes a political philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, tradition, hierarchy and...

 wanted "traditional hierarchical society and a state that assumed the existing social arrangements," both of which today’s center-right rejects and condemns, while reinforcing “Western self-hate and self-indulgence.” He writes:

A political and cultural war
Culture war
The culture war in American usage is a metaphor used to claim that political conflict is based on sets of conflicting cultural values. The term frequently implies a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal...

 has been fought and largely won by the social left against gender stereotyping
Gender role
Gender roles refer to the set of social and behavioral norms that are considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex in the context of a specific culture, which differ widely between cultures and over time...

 and the nuclear family
Nuclear family
Nuclear family is a term used to define a family group consisting of a father and mother and their children. This is in contrast to the smaller single-parent family, and to the larger extended family. Nuclear families typically center on a married couple, but not always; the nuclear family may have...

. Gay/lesbian
LGBT social movements
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movements share inter-related goals of social acceptance of sexual and gender minorities. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their allies have a long history of campaigning for what is generally called LGBT rights, also called gay...

 and abortion rights
Pro-choice
Support for the legalization of abortion is centered around the pro-choice movement, a sociopolitical movement supporting the ethical view that a woman should have the legal right to elective abortion, meaning the right to terminate her pregnancy....

, together with a powerful centralized administration enforcing them, are taken for granted by most members of Congress. Opposition to quotas and to the media's bashing of white males increasingly has become restricted to the political fringe. Only extremists now call for a debate on further immigration, which Beltway conservatives avoid bringing up lest they seem insensitive.


Gottfried also argues that the democratic center-right, such as the GOP, is not a restraining force against the managerial state. He says that such political leaders espouse a dubious moderation and accommodate the Left, while treating traditional conservative positions as political liabilities.

The center-right has gradually embraced most of the Left’s historical positions but has merely restated them with apparent moderation, for example, by rallying to the original, less radicalized form of feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

, by advocating an extensive welfare state
Welfare state
A welfare state is a "concept of government in which the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those...

 with lower marginal tax rates, and by praising Martin Luther King while lying about his endorsement of racial quotas.... Equally important, if the "conservative movement" were as concerned about small-government as it is about waging global democratic wars, it might be influencing public opinion accordingly. Movement conservative leaders and the Republican Party have opted for big government and leftist missionary wars but not because of public demand. Rather they have worked long and hard to manufacture a demand for their interests.


In addition, Samuel Francis argued that since the center-right and center-left refuse to deal with major civilizational issues, they reduce domestic political debates to narrow economic issues. This preoccupation views human beings as “resources” and treats them like inanimate objects. Using a phrase from Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was an influential writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist.”-Introduction:...

, he says this
“reflects the myth of Economic Man - that human beings are mainly or entirely economic in their motivations and that therefore the business of America is business, even if it takes the federal leviathan to conduct it or regulate it.”

See also

  • Paleoconservatism
    Paleoconservatism
    Paleoconservatism is a term for a conservative political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government, civil society, anti-colonialism, anti-corporatism and anti-federalism, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity. Chilton...

  • Paleolibertarianism
    Paleolibertarianism
    Paleolibertarianism is a school of thought within American libertarianism associated with the late economist Murray Rothbard, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It is based on a combination of right-libertarianism in politics and cultural conservatism in social thought...

  • Constitutional economics
    Constitutional economics
    Constitutional economics is a research program in economics and constitutionalism that has been described as extending beyond the definition of 'the economic analysis of constitutional law' in explaining the choice "of alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the...

  • Political economy
    Political economy
    Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...


Resources

  • "The Cultural War for the Soul of America", by Patrick J. Buchanan, speech dated September 14, 1992.
  • "James Burnham, The New Class, And The Nation-State", by Samuel T. Francis. VDARE.com, August 23, 2001
  • Gottfried, Paul E., After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, 1999. ISBN 0-691-05983-7
  • Gottfried, Paul E., Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy, 2003. ISBN 0-8262-1520-3
  • "The Tyranny of Liberalism", by James Kalb. (Originally published as Liberalism, the Transcendent, and Restoration, in Modern Age, Summer, 2000.)
  • "The Origins of Political Correctness" by William S. Lind
    William S. Lind
    William S. Lind is an American expert on military affairs and a pundit on cultural conservatism.-Education:Lind graduated from Dartmouth College in 1969 and from Princeton University in 1971, where he received a Master's Degree in history.-Military expertise:Alongside several U.S. officers, Lind...

    , Accuracy in Academia, 2000.
  • Lukacs, John, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age, 1993. ISBN 0-395-58472-8
  • Nisbet, Robert, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, 2003. ISBN 0-86597-409-8
  • Nisbet, Robert, Twilight of Authority. 2000. ISBN 0-86597-211-7
  • Roberts, Paul Craig and Lawrence Stratton, The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, 1997. ISBN 0-89526-423-4
  • "How Tyranny Came to America", by Joseph Sobran
    Joseph Sobran
    Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...

    , Sobran's, n.d.
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