I have been puzzled and heart-broken on how to explain the rise of nativism and isolationism underpinning Trump's wins. An article I stumbled on some time back, Trump Knows Best: Donald Trump’s Rejection of Expertise and the 2020 Presidential Election (1) by Mark Brewer that discusses anti-expertise as one reason. (Those who have read Richard Hofstadter, of course, will recognize this common thread.) Well, this led me down several rabbit holes, culminating recently in a New York Review of Books review of two new books dealing with similar concepts but focusing on anti-managerial class as a rationale.
"Conservatism" and "Liberalism" have become meaningless terms. I remember in the sixties wondering at the use of the terms even then. We really had four political parties: southern Democrats who were pro-segregation; northern Democrats, ostensibly more "liberal" until it came to busing; northern Republicans, ostensibly more "liberal" and at least pro-government; and then the so-called "conservative" Republicans, in the mold of Russell Kirk, more moderate at least until the tirades of McCarthy who presaged the intemperate right of Newt Gingrich and pro-southern strategy of Richard Nixon, which has now morphed into what John Ganz in his book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s calls paleoconservatives who harkened back to the isolationism and nativism of pre-war America First movements, if not the Know-Nothings of the early nineteenth century.
Ganz sees the rise of MAGA not as the apotheosis of conservatism or the failure of moderation, rather the result of growing pro-white nationalists epitomized by the win of David Duke in Louisiana. Walker Percy, the writer, in an interview with the New York Times warned in 1989, "Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos…. Don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens."
Trump and MAGA are the result of this white supremacist, anti-managerial class, movement that had been spear-headed intellectually by a couple of college professors: Sam Francis who had a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina, and James Burnham, an NYU philosophy professor and Trotskyite, who saw that underlying superficial differences between the New Deal, Naziism and Stalin, a movement controlled by party apparatchiks. Burnham wrote an influential book, The Managerial Revolution* about their rise. This book was to have a huge influence on Francis who thought it had the makings of a counter-revolution from below against the perceived exploitism of the managerial class. Francis weaponized the ideas of Burnham.
Francis argued that the United States was no longer a capitalist republic ruled by owners, families, or the independent bourgeois class. Instead, following Burnham, it had become a managerial state — dominated by bureaucrats, technocrats, corporate executives, academic administrators, and media professionals. It governed through large organizations — corporations, universities, and government agencies — which he viewed as fusing into a single “regime of management.” The managerial regime’s ideology was egalitarianism, globalism, and technocratic rationality, not property or liberty. (3) Francis went on to become isolated from mainstream society as his writings became increasingly nativist and anti-multicultural and pro-white. Sound familiar?
Obviously, Trump's followers, and certainly not Trump himself read any of Francis or Burnham, but each reflected values that were developing in American society and explain to a large extent MAGA and its rise. MAGA rhetoric about the "deep state" and "Washington swamp" echoes concerns about the managerial state. Franci's (and Tucker Carlson's) concept of anarcho-tyranny in which the government punishes the law-abiding while tolerating lawlessness (immigration, riots, etc.). shows up in Trump's speeches "They persecute patriots and let criminals go free." Almost too ironic on a day when he commuted the sentence of George Santos because he "always voted Republican."
Francis described a Trump demographic in 1992 as a culturally traditional, tax-paying middle class — despised by both parties which would revolt against elites. They did, in 2016 and 2024.
The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 provided an intellectual framework for Trump's second term, but Furious Minds by Laura Fields provides an analysis of the intellectual underpinnings for the Charlie Kirks and Tucker Carlsons and Laura Ingraham's who fuel Trump's social media account rantings: The Claremont Institute, post-liberals who argue that the liberal ideal of "freedom leads to deracination, depredation, disintegration, and despotism," and are willing to deploy state power to enforce reactionary social values. JD Vance is included although most of the time he appears to me to me just a clown. It's the antithesis of "conservative" in that it's anti-American. Isolationist, nativist, white, and misogynistic. Most of the adherents hold advanced degrees, JDs and PhDs (discouraging to say the least and hardly evidence of a great liberal educational conspiracy.) Field's book book is described as a meticulous, nuanced, and unsettling revelation of a right-wing plan for a "new old-fashioned world," tracing the descent of a significant portion of the conservative intellectual community into anti-American authoritarianism.
Stephen Miller, Trump's new hatchet man (or controller, it's hard to tell which) , has but a BA from Duke in either political science or philosophy, but he manages to provide us with the scariest vision of all in the eulogy to Charlie Kirk:
"We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion...You have no idea the dragon you have awakened. You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization. To save the West, to save this republic." (2)
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Managerial_Revolution. Burnham argued that that capitalism is in decline and is not being replaced by socialism (as Marxists predicted), but by a new form of society he calls "managerialism," ruled by a new elite: the managerial class. This managerial class consists of the people responsible for the technical direction and coordination of production, including business executives, administrators, technocrats, and bureaucrats. Burnham argues that the resulting society, managerialism, is a new form of exploitative society, not the classless, democratic ideal of socialism. He considered the Soviet Union's state-controlled economy and, to a lesser extent, Fascist Germany and the American New Deal, as early, distinct forms of this new managerial society, where property is owned by the state or diffused among corporations but effectively controlled by the managerial elite.
(1) Society
. 2021 Jan 6;57(6):657–661. doi: 10.1007/s12115-020-00544-w
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MLRcf3diso
(3)Francis had a book published posthumously (he died in 2005) in which he expanded on these concepts. Francis, “The New American Revolution,” 1994; “Leviathan and Its Enemies,” posthumously published 2016.
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