Managed Dehumanization
25th December 2022
In 1941 James Burnham published The Managerial Revolution to explain the fundamental transformation of society around the world. While it appeared that communism, fascism, and liberal democracy were competing for supremacy on the world stage, Burnham noted that these systems shared a common trait of empowering highly-specialized managers who operate a network of large bureaucracies with the goal of standardizing and planning their societies from the top down. This dynamic was easier to observe in the hard totalitarian states where official state organs dictated social and economic behavior. The tight grip of the managers in those societies drove them to collapse, but in the liberal West managers used a gradual approach that proved more resilient.
The lighter touch of the managerial class in the liberal democracies allowed their citizens to believe they had escaped the fate of nations that had grown too top-heavy. Comforting notions of the free market and social tolerance made American citizens feel victorious as the last remnants of the Soviet Union collapsed under the rot of hard totalitarianism, and the soft managerial elite that dominated the West was thus able to bring more aspects of society under its control. Government agencies, corporations, media outlets, and educational institutions increasingly seemed to act with one voice and one agenda, instead of behaving as the separate self-interested actors described by classical liberalism. With an incredible degree of coordination, our elite institutions demonstrated their ability to impose widespread pandemic lockdowns, vaccination protocols, and to rewrite election law on the fly with scarcely any significant protest.