The War Against Managerial Rule

Progressive thinkers and politicians now routinely warn us of threats to “our democracy” purportedly emanating from the populist Right. But they protest too much. It is the progressives themselves who swell the ranks of the managerial elite that governs us. And as N.S. Lyons writes, “the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.” 

For many decades, we’ve been governed by faceless bureaucrats who span our public and quasi-public institutions, not to mention large private corporations. They benefit personally from the obfuscating processes they design and administer and then cloak in “empty public rituals and the meaningless rhetoric of legalism.” These governing authorities form a coherent class for whom actual democracy is an existential threat because it elevates the majoritarian choices of people who do not share elite class interests.

The managers are engaged in a “markedly moralistic project of political and social transformation.” Their core beliefs include “science,” along with the pursuit of material and hedonistic satisfaction. Their conceit is that they are uniquely well positioned to understand and deliver rational goods in a way that the unwashed masses never could. They are therefore at war not only with democracy, but with human nature itself. They see ordinary citizens as raw material for a project that aims at reducing men to a collection of base impulses and economic calculations to be manipulated by the cognoscenti. All traditions, cultures, and old ideas must be overcome in the name of universal progress and homogenization.

My main interest here is in how we are responding to our managerial moment and everything that has led up to it and continues to support it. President Trump has signaled that he understands we’re in a war — a war to save not only America, but Western civilization itself. It’s now clear that the dramatic rhetoric of his most recent campaign was not merely rhetoric.

In almost everything he has said and done since his convincing victory last November, he has been disposed to disrupt, and to do it quickly. This is evident in his bold cabinet choices, his selection of informal advisors, and his dealings with the media, whether legacy or new. Whatever one thinks of the president’s personnel, policy, or rhetorical choices, he has telegraphed to the world that his administration will not play the usual inside-the-Beltway games — the games that brought defeat not only to the Republican Party but to the republican form of government. 

More than most, President Trump is aware that we live in a post-truth, post-consensual world. It’s a world wherein repeated lies become reality in the minds of our so-called elites and the many people they control or seek to control. It’s a world wherein the consensus of elites replaces the consent of the governed, because consent is viewed as an antediluvian nuisance.

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The good news, of sorts, is that we’re not alone. Confidence in the progress of history, and the sense of moral superiority that goes along with it, is not confined to American college students and cat ladies. It is not a uniquely American philosophical error, or mental illness. Lyons catalogues the spread of the managerial ethos across the developed world, including in Canada where “Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.”

Across the West, elites “tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.”

More broadly, throughout the Western world, both Athens and Jerusalem are under attack. And so is the fragile moral-political artifact that grows out of them — self-government. From Athens we learn of nature, and the fact that reason is an attribute of man as a political animal. From Jerusalem, we learn of the infinite worth and dignity of each human being in the sight of God. Blended together in the mixmaster of Western civilization, Athens and Jerusalem revealed the truth that legitimate government must be based on the consent of the governed.  

But from the Left, and even some quarters of the Right, consensual government is under assault. Each seeks to replace it with a government of expert diktat, in the name of higher goals than mere self-government. From the Left they are the secular goals of fairness, and nowadays anti-racism and inclusion. From a new and largely young Right, they are the unspecified elements of a “common good constitutionalism” undertaken in pursuit of God’s purposes. 

Concrete evidence of these assaults, especially from the Left, has been apparent for years. From 2020–2024, it surfaced most dramatically in the form of unprecedented measures undertaken in the name of public health, not to mention the studied unwillingness of Western elites to defend the West and its moral and cultural foundations — either in theory or in practice. Instead, our elites concentrated on trying to anesthetize Western peoples through a never-ending stream of propaganda transmitted through the censorship-industrial complex, consisting of the iron triangle of government, woke corporations (including legacy media), and a tech sector that has increasingly taken on a life of its own.

But it’s fair to say the attack on the foundations and political liberties of the West continues to be a little less comprehensively advanced in America compared to other Western nations. While the trends are still worrying, America enjoys more robust protections for speech and political argumentation than many other Western nations. And at the state, local, and now federal level, we have proved capable of making at least some political and cultural choices that are out of step with the woke obsessions of the moment, particularly on matters of racial and sexual identity politics.

American exceptionalism is largely due to the obvious incompatibility of elite rule with America’s written Constitution, including the foundations on which it was built. America’s constitutional settlement is a high water mark of the blending of Athens and Jerusalem, buttressed by the practical supports of English constitutionalism. 

Relative to other Western peoples, our constitutional settlement has given us more time, and more breathing space, to fight back. This extra time and space have allowed us to work, and — in American fashion — to pray, for the appearance of some necessarily imperfect but providential vehicle, in the form of a figure who understands our moment and is willing to fight, fight, fight! 

But the consensual form of government that is characteristic of the West ultimately depends on the wisdom of a demos that is awake enough to smell a rat — to know, at least, where they don’t want to go, even if they can’t quite articulate where they do. The American people have smelled the rat, but the moment they now enjoy is perishable. The elite Left has been beaten back, but it has not gone away. We should reflect on the Left’s stunning successes over a stunningly short period of time, and on what they portend.

First, the Left proved its ability to run, and win, a presidential election campaign without a functioning candidate, and to govern for four years without a functioning president. Our deep state has to be very deep indeed to pull off such things. 

Second, the Left orchestrated and maintained the greatest sustained coverup in American political history, with the queen of that coverup still winning 226 electoral votes and some 48 percent of the popular vote. The rejection of the Left last November was dramatic but not decisive. 

Third, the Left demonstrated a sustained ability to control the censorship-industrial complex in a manner that actively conceals, misdirects, and gaslights vast numbers of people. For example, this complex worked overtime to obscure the origins of a worldwide pandemic and to overstate, or outright fabricate, the efficacy of containment measures, from vaccines, to masks, to social distancing, to travel restrictions. And with these things, it obliterated the right of locomotion, one of the most basic natural and common law liberties. And of coursethe complex proved its ability to gain widespread compliance from the American people, thus proving that a working majority of Americans can be prodded to prioritize remote gains in physical safety over massive losses of political liberty. It showed that Americans will simply defer to expertise if told by purported experts to do so. Perhaps more disturbingly still, the managerial class that runs the propaganda-industrial complex demonstrated that a large number of Americans can be counted on to work as fifth columnists against self-government, working as scolds, schoolmarms, and snitches on behalf of elites against their neighbors.

Fourth, the Left flexed its muscles by fabricating outrageous falsehoods concerning their main political opponent, and indeed their only effective opponent, while at the same time lying about what they said, did, and schemed to do in order to destroy him. For nearly a decade, they lied, rinsed, and repeated, and got away with it. 

Finally, the Left shamelessly demonstrated its willingness and ability to muster federal, state, and local lawfare apparatuses across multiple jurisdictions, directed at convicting, bankrupting, and imprisoning their primary opponent on transparently trumped-up charges. They even sought to deny him ballot access in the name of democracy. And the Left went further still, siccing this lawfare apparatus not only on him, but on those who publicly or privately supported him, including even those who offered him legal advice. 

Each of these successes demonstrates that, in the eyes of the Left, democracy is doing what the elite consensus demands. In recent years much has been revealed about the soul of the American people, and it will be used against them at the first opportunity. The censorship-industrial complex is now simply lying in wait. Given the stunning hubris and undeniable successes of our elites, they willalmost certainly attempt a resurgence. It will come in short order, if it’s not happening already. And for this we must be prepared. 

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In addition to threats from the Left, there is another from the Right. There is now a New Right, especially popular among young males. Its acolytes embrace the authority of the non-consensual administrative state. They do so not simply opportunistically, in order ultimately to do away with it, but in principle. Buttressed by their belief in the inevitability and permanence of managerialism, they seek to preserve and take advantage of it, on the hunch that somehow the right people can be put in charge. 

The ur-text of this movement is probably a short essay by Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, which was published in The Atlantic on March 31, 2020. It is a piece that has not aged well for anyone suspicious of our managerial moment. Vermeule argued then that “this time of global pandemic” called for a concentration of power in the name of the common good. Government, he said, “must have ample power to cope with large-scale crises of public health and well-being — reading health in many senses, not only literal and physical but also metaphorical and social.” Not wanting to let a good health crisis go to waste, he maintained the “procedural rules” of the liberal legal order may now be dispensed with. Instead, “officials” must read “substantive moral principles” into “the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution.”

Vermeule said such principles would include “respect for the authority of rule and rulers,” and respect for “hierarchies.” Practically speaking, this means a “powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy.” Forced vaccinations were only the beginning. The moral experts would also enjoy free rein to deal with “climate change,” among many other things. No “selfish” claims to “private rights” can be allowed to stand in their way. When the fullness of time came, God sent the administrative state.

In his orgiastic embrace of managerialism, Vermeule claims there is little risk to his “moral readings” of the Constitution — because all we need are the right rulers with the right morality. His common-good constitutionalism “is not tethered to particular written instruments of civil law or the will of the legislators who created them.” The goal is not to “minimize the abuse of power,” but simply to ensure that power is used for good. The law, he says, must be seen as “parental,” regardless of what its “subjects” might think. In fact “subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires.”

Common good constitutionalists veer toward Christian heresy insofar as they deny, in the name of God, the moral reality of human equality and the choice — the consent — that follows from this moral reality. They command us, in effect, to put our faith in princes. The risk is that  some members of the young generation, who have rightly and resoundingly rejected leftist managerialism, will waste their time and finite energies on a functionally indistinguishable substitute, instead of concentrating on the urgency, and perishability, of the reprieve that has been granted to us. As Lyons notes, “populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.” 

This has been evident at least since the rise of the Tea Party movement almost two decades ago. Then, Republican Party elites studiously ignored or condescendingly mocked it, hoping it would simply go away. The sentiments and sensibilities of the Tea Partiers have in many ways been assimilated into the new populism, both here and abroad. Lyons notes that “many around the world are already in political revolt against managerialism, pitting a reassertion of democratic power against the oligarchic, with us Americans leading the way.” But the success of this revolt depends on whether or not we are still capable of self-government. Taking to heart the Platonic lesson that the city and the soul are related, the managers will continue to stoke fear and demands for protection from imagined dangers, thus doing what they can to ensure we lose both the desire and the ability to govern ourselves. 

The American people must become self-governing once again. They must be shown what can be accomplished, not just economically, but morally and politically, through action, example, and argument. Practically speaking, this means helping our disruptor-in-chief to make sure that Humpty can never be put back together again — even by all the King’s men. Donald Trump’s victory is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. 

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