The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, by Auron MacIntyre (Regnery, 208 pp., $29.99)
It’s been a confusing summer for those who still believe nothing is amiss about the American republic. One moment the sitting president was, according to the near-universal insistence of mainstream media, sharp as a tack—all evidence to the contrary declared disinformation. The next he was suddenly agreed to be non compos mentis, unceremoniously ousted from the ballot for reelection, and replaced through the backroom machinations of unelected insiders. Overnight, the same media then converged aggressively to manufacture a simulacrum of sweeping grassroots enthusiasm for that replacement, the historically unpopular Kamala Harris. To call this a palace coup via the New York Times would not seem to stray too far from observable events.
What, some may wonder, just happened to our supposedly sacred democracy? A growing group of dissident right-wingers has sought to supply an explanation. United around the premise that the governance of the United States doesn’t function as we’re told it does, this group believes that the country has not operated as a constitutional republic for some time; it is only the façade of one, effectively controlled by a cadre of plutocratic elites, party insiders, unelected bureaucrats, and subservient media apparatchiks—in short, an unaccountable oligarchy.
Among the sharpest recent guides to this argument is a slim new book by the columnist and influential young New Right thinker Auron MacIntyre, titled The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. MacIntyre provides a dispassionate dissection of how, without any cabal or specific conspiracy, an elite class captured our major public and private institutions, hollowed them out, set them marching in lockstep against the American middle class, and made a mockery of constitutional “checks and balances.” The resulting “total state” now operates in increasingly flagrant contradiction to the broader interests of the American people and democratic government, while “wearing the old regime like a skinsuit.”
Essential to understanding this total state is the concept of managerialism, an idea first pioneered by an older generation of political thinkers, like National Review’s James Burnham, recovered from relative obscurity and re-employed by this emerging New Right. In this framing, America is today effectively run by a managerial elite, which presides over a broader professional managerial class—think college administrators, corporate HR managers, and nonprofit activists. Fundamentally, the business of such people is not producing or building anything, providing any essential service, or even making critical leadership decisions, but the manipulation and management—that is, surveillance and control—of people, information, money, and ideas. The story of the fall of the American republic, on this view, is the story of the managers’ rise to power everywhere.
In part, the managers’ triumph was the inevitable outcome of technological and economic changes following the Industrial Revolution, which made it necessary to expand the ranks of people schooled in running large, complex organizations. But, as MacIntyre demonstrates, it was also the result of a misguided urge, pioneered by early progressives, to de-risk and “depoliticize” politics by handing over decision-making to technocratic “experts.” The hope was that these individuals could rationally and neutrally administer government and society from the top down, through the same principles and processes of “scientific management” first applied to the assembly line.
That hope proved disastrous.
The first big problem with managers, it turns out, is that they multiply. Managers inside an organization—or a government—have a strong incentive to ensure that the organization keeps growing larger, more complex, and less efficient, because that means more managers must be hired to wrestle with it. Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. And as new managers get hired, the relative institutional power of all managers increases: eventually it is they, not the titular leadership, who effectively control the organization.
The process doesn’t end there. Always and everywhere, managerial power seeks to expand and to centralize without limit. After managerialism conquers one organization or sector, new ground must be found and seized. If no supply of new managerial jobs exists, they can be created through social engineering—the top-down reordering of existing social, moral, and economic structures. Every time something that was once the business of family, church, or local community is “problematized,” “deconstructed,” and turned over to “expert professionals” to be “improved,” a new member of the professional managerial class gets his or her wings—and a taxpayer-funded salary.
Naturally, managers have a material incentive to make alleging the virtues of control and top-down social engineering the locus of their moral and ideological beliefs. Hence the progressive craze for micromanaging behavior and language, the restructuring of social norms, and the redistribution of wealth, power, and positions. On this account, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs—indeed, the whole ideology commonly known as “wokeness”—function as a massive jobs program for the expanding managerial class.
A managerial regime is politically and culturally destructive, homogenizing, and totalizing by nature. From its perspective, as MacIntyre observes, any independent institution, community, or association inherently “hinders the uniform application of managerial techniques” from above. Thick bonds of place and community, religious traditions, parental rights, unregulated markets, national borders—all must be dissolved and replaced with bureaucratic mechanisms, until nothing is left between isolated, atomized individuals and the managerial state.
The second big problem with managerial elites is that they end up thinking exactly alike. As we’ve seen, they are united by the same basic incentive—to expand the centrality and status of managers. But they also tend to have the same formational background, passing through the same educational institutions that have become the credentialing mechanism for the managerial class, regardless of profession. There, they are enculturated with the same language, cultural sensibilities, and ideological prejudices as their peers.
Further, the skills and talents required to succeed in any managerial organization are basically identical. Whether one is a McKinsey consultant, a university vice president, or a Defense Department official, the same basic lingo and PowerPoint proficiency will do. These skills are easily transferable, which means, as MacIntyre explains, that “managerial class easily crosses the public/private barrier that has been so effectively constructed in the American psyche.” In fact, he continues, the “ability of managers to move from public government postings to private corporate positions while using the exact same language and skill set is key to the unification of the state and economy” that we now see in managerial America.
Critically, this unification means that competence in a given organization is of less importance to one’s career than an ability to demonstrate loyalty and acceptance within the managerial class. Refuse to hold the correct opinions and your professional future across the managerial world—now global—is permanently tarnished. No one is more hated than a class traitor. In America, MacIntyre writes, “the dream of social mobility through independence was replaced by a social mobility . . . entirely dependent on utility to an interconnected network of mass organization.” If you want to rise to the top in America, then your “cultural fit”—your ideological reliability—is your most important asset.
Together, these factors have produced a vast, self-reinforcing managerial apparatus—a regime—of public institutions, private corporations, and non-governmental organizations that moves together like a flock of birds. On the New Right, it’s dubbed “the Cathedral,” in which everyone in power—from Harvard to the press to the White House—sings from the same hymn sheet. But whereas the twentieth century’s totalitarian governments needed a dedicated propaganda ministry and secret police to impose the coordination of society, we’ve managed to achieve a softer version of it through the invisible hand of managerial status-seeking.
Faced with the need to maintain a façade of democratic legitimacy, the managerial regime’s solution has been, naturally, to seek to manage the will of the people. “The ruling class thus became deeply involved in controlling the information the public receives and the narrative that information shapes,” MacIntyre explains. Hence the belief in the need to tell “noble lies” to the peasantry; hence the constant media gaslighting; hence the vast, “whole-of-society” censorship-industrial complex established to manipulate the public’s “cognitive infrastructure”—in other words, our perception of reality. What we have now is most easily described as “managed democracy.”
This regime wields powers of control undreamed of by the most absolute of feudal monarchs, but it obscures that power by draping it in empty rituals and diffusing it across faceless bureaucracies and nameless processes. This makes holding it accountable for its actions exceedingly difficult. In the end, President Biden proved little more than a figurehead for real power, pushed aside despite being, on paper, the world’s most powerful individual.
President Donald Trump fared little better when he struggled in vain to get even his own administrative agencies to follow orders on, say, border enforcement or foreign policy. His diplomats and generals, for instance, later admitted to “playing shell games” to keep the titular commander-in-chief from knowing where American troops were deployed and in what numbers. Time and again, the unelected managerial “deep state” steamed ahead as it pleased. Putting an end to this status quo is the essential project of the New Right.
Which brings us to J. D. Vance. Openly familiar and conversant with the ideas and intellectual figures of the New Right, including MacIntyre, Vance represents a potential shift in the overall approach of his party. As Vance has put it, if a would-be political opposition hopes to achieve any real change at all, it must become “something that can genuinely overthrow the modern ruling class” by striving to “seize the institutions” from them. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice,” Vance said in 2021, would be to “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people.” Only through such a decisive blow could the unity and control of the managerial state be undermined.
Here, an underappreciated potential divide has become visible between Vance and Trump, and between the New Right and what could be described as the “orthodox MAGA” wing of the party. New Right thinkers like MacIntyre are pessimistic that anything can be accomplished without a focused, disciplined, and sustained assault on the strongholds of the managerial regime—not only the administrative state but also the universities, the philanthropic-NGO-industrial complex, and also woke financial giants like BlackRock. Meantime, the more orthodox MAGA faithful remain optimistic that Trump himself can fix things, ushering in meaningful political change by traditional means and his force of personality. Many on the New Right would call this naïve.
Consider the recent squabbles over Project 2025. The nearly 1,000-page document, compiled by the Heritage Foundation, offers a blizzard of policy proposals. Describing a number of these ideas as extremist, Democrats, including Harris, have made tying the project to Trump a centerpiece of their campaign messaging. Trump, reportedly affronted by the project’s place in the limelight, has in turn vocally disavowed it—his campaign even declaring that its “demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Its actual demise, should that happen, would represent a significant problem for the Right. Some of Project 2025’s grab bag of wishful policy proposals may be more radical than others, but its specific policy ideas were never the main point; the real purpose of Project 2025 is to solve the problem that, in our managerial system, “personnel is policy,” as they say in Washington. The core of the project has always been a plan for rapid reclassification of tens of thousands of un-fireable, unaccountable, and decidedly un-neutral “civil servants” as political appointees, so that they can be replaced with pre-vetted new hires. In this way, we might at least begin to bring our hostile bureaucratic leviathans to heel.
Without the disciplined implementation of such a plan, nothing is likely to change significantly in Washington, even if Trump returns to the White House. Just as in his first term, managerial institutions would continue to operate in their own self-interest, without accountability and unified in their bureaucratic “resistance” to the elected president.
Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 thus signals that the New Right’s continued rise within his party, as represented by Vance, is no sure thing. Should Trump prove too hesitant to execute such a deliberately disruptive maneuver, or should he seek to ingratiate himself with managerial elites, rather than replace them—as some of his comments, such as on potentially hiring financial establishment giant Jamie Dimon to his Cabinet, suggest—then the status quo is likely to continue, unchecked.
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