Democracy Gave Birth to Managerialism

N.S. Lyons, who runs the provocative Substack “The Upheaval,” has been a relentless critic of managerialism, and he notes the incompatibility of this development with “national democracy.” Lyons views this form of democracy as the only genuine one — that is, a democratic order in which citizens with a shared national culture determine their own collective destiny. 

The primary — and, at least at the present time, inescapable — enemy of such a democratic regime is managerialism, established in a surveillance state informed by an “homogenizing cosmopolitan universalism.” This managerial oligarchy has become particularly overbearing in recent years, as “in country after country governments are moving desperately to tighten their grip over the people they rule.”

Part of the reason for this alarming suppression of independent thought is a response to populist movements that have emerged throughout the West during the last twenty years. These movements are not typically made up of “fascist” malcontents or blithering idiots, as our managerial rulers would have us believe. They are an entirely justifiable reaction to the loss of self-rule by self-identified people who have retained some sense of their collective identity and who resent being jerked around by faceless bureaucrats.

Unfortunately for those who value both freedom and national identity, our managers are committed to a post-democratic, post-national vision of the world. All human problems, we are supposed to believe, should be made subject to scientific management; and therefore, a fully developed democracy is one in which experts decide what is good for the rest of us. Troublemakers like MAGA Republicans, the Reconquête party in France, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, or Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in England should therefore have no place in civil discourse or in the approved party system. Such populist interference, we have heard, introduces a crude, uneducated, bigoted element into what should be a process conducted by globalist experts.

Allow me to note that I agree with the main points in Lyons’s commentary. Furthermore, his positions are exhaustively developed in my trilogy on the managerial state and its changing ideologies and methods of control. One of Lyons’s key points cannot be stressed often enough, namely that the only authentic form of democracy is self-rule as practiced by citizens of a nation. All post-national forms of government are utterly inimical to “the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy.” Indeed, those parties that European managerial dictatorships go after, like the AfD, are usually the only truly democratic elements in countries run by coalitions of indistinguishable parties, under the aegis of an all-controlling bureaucracy.

Self-conscious nations, including those that are democratically run, should have the right to determine who is allowed to settle in their country and who should be given the right of citizenship. That the English city Rotherham elected as mayor a Muslim woman with a head covering expressing fidelity to the Pakistani government is not a tribute to democracy. It shows the utter disintegration of English nationhood. Please recall this happened a few weeks ago in a city where Muslim gangs were habitually raping English girls in a scandal that shook the country.

Another ominous development was made evident when the Biden administration, which was obviously not really run by its demented figurehead president, allowed American territory to be overrun by ten to twenty million illegals. To the consternation of many of us, this treasonous act went unpunished, and now district judges are working to keep the Trump administration from deporting even the criminally violent interlopers among the violators of America’s borders.

Where I must respectfully differ from N.S. Lyons is in his insistence that democracy and managerialism are necessarily incompatible. In my work After Liberalism, I closely examined the relationship of managerial government to the process of democratization that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century West. As property and other qualifications for voting were removed in Western countries and something like universal male suffrage established, a managerially administered welfare state quickly took form.

That was exactly what the enfranchised populace wanted, in contrast to the narrower electorates in nineteenth-century France, England, and Germany, which were far less eager to have government redistribute their incomes or engage in social programs. As the social theorist Robert Nisbet tellingly argued in his work on the modern nation state, centralized, managerial government often went together with democratic nationhood and with governments speaking in the name of nations. In modern industrial and urban societies, moreover, the connection between democratic nationhood and expanding government has been even stronger.

It might be possible to curb the power of faceless bureaucrats controlling our lives and pumping us with their fashionable ideologies, but it’s not clear how that battle can be won unless we first address other problems. The managerial and now multicultural Left holds power because (if I may divulge this dirty secret) lots of people in every Western country vote for their agents. Our managerial, globalist dictators did not seize power in a coup. They gained widespread support from those who voted in publicly held elections.

Although the AfD in Germany gains the most votes in a multiparty system, those votes come almost entirely from the Eastern part of the country, which had been under Communist rule. The rest of Germany seems cool about living under an “antifascist” government that undercuts their basic constitutional rights in the name of fighting Hitler’s ghost. And while 31 percent of Germans polled nationwide oppose the outlawing of the AfD, close to a majority endorse that ban.

Of course, I’m aware that the educational systems and the mainstream media in all our managerialized pseudo-democracies tirelessly support the ruling class and treat any serious opposition to their hegemony as a recurrence of “fascism.” But from what I can tell, the electorates in those countries mostly believe, or seem to believe, what they are told; and I’m not quite sure how one gets them to think differently without doing other things first, for example removing a massive power block embracing universities, the legacy media and the entertainment industry, which provides among other things invented “facts and faithfully serves managerial, globalist government.

Finally, it seems to me that some Western countries have become too diverse and give out citizenship too freely to return to the national democratic model being advocated by, among others, N.S. Lyons and Yoram Hazony. These Western societies may no longer be able to practice self-government as members of historic nations to the same degree as say, Poland, Latvia, or Israel.

What such populations can do to restore meaningful self-governance may be limited by what their ruling class has already done, and which has been confirmed by the political choices made by their electorate. In such countries as Germany, Canada, and perhaps eventually the United States, democracy may work best as a form of localism, providing that state managers and their power bloc can be reined in sufficiently to allow some form of genuine self-rule to take place.

At this point, however, it may be relevant to ask whether anything close to a sustainable majority in some countries even want what N.S. Lyons is offering. Many of these subjects still view self-government like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, glimpsing reality with their heads rigidly chained in place as dancing images moving against a wall. 

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