CHAPTER 6Samuel Francis, George Orwell, the Bureaucratic Elite, and Power

The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians promote a worldview that distrusts the bureaucracy, government, and the ruling elite. The Managerial Revolution predicts a future ruled by a managerial and bureaucratic elite. The Machiavellians insists that the elites only work to perpetuate their power and privilege, making them the enemies of democracy. Burnham further popularized the disproportionate (some would say excessive) power of the bureaucracy in a 1959 piece for Human Events (the conservative magazine that was one of Ronald Reagan's favorites). In a piece titled “The Bureaucracy: The Fourth Branch of Government,” Burnham argues that the bureaucracy is an independent force that wields its own power and even usurps other branches of government: “In a process well known to modern Washington, the official, who may be the Secretary or Assistant Secretary of one of the major departments becomes the dupe or tool or front of the permanent civil servants whom he is assigned to direct.”¹ Burnham provides the example of the faceless “permanent officers” of the Public Health Services.² These people advocated for the expansion of government health-care services to promote their own power and special interests. They may not be ideological socialists, but they usually vote liberal. And it is not just health care in which nonelected officials wield power. Agriculture, education, social insurance, housing, and even the military have members whose entire livelihood is invested in the state.³ The distrustful Machiavellian maintains that they naturally oppose any policy that shrinks the state because that would mean cutting their own throat.

Burnham contends that the bureaucracy does not just shape domestic policy. Through groups like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the bureaucracy even directs foreign policy. The State Department and the Foreign Service are loaded with people whose “independent power” is so great, they are designated “Indians” because they exist outside the bounds of any federal oversight. Burnham insists that even some foreign policy decisions were made by the “permanent bureaucracy rather than the President and his supposedly policy-making appointees.”⁴ The military bureaucracy in particular has expanded in power and influence because of the large sums of money invested in the institution. For support, Burnham cites C. Wright Mills's work The Power Elite (Mills drew from The Managerial Revolution).

Burnham, of course, did not invent the idea of a powerful and privileged bureaucracy. As already noted, the ex-Marxist was influenced by Trotsky. Before him, Max Weber highlighted the importance of the bureaucracy, particularly describing its impersonal features. What Burnham did do for his American audience—particularly conservatives—in The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, and subsequent writings was to conceive of managerialism and bureaucracy as powerful political forces, ones that needed to be thwarted to reclaim democracy. They were the enemies of the people who needed to be resisted.

This philosophy has shaped a certain part of the American electorate. For them, this fight is against “the deep state,” an unelected group of clandestine bureaucrats that exercise too much power. In his book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (2016), the former Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren echoes Burnham by describing a powerful and subtle second level of government: “Yes, there is another government concealed beneath the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country … only intermittently controlled by the visible state whose leaders we nominally choose.”⁵ It is not a conspiracy theory, Lofgren insists, because it is all based on experience.⁶ He writes that “invisible threads of money” connect the Deep State to areas outside of Washington, DC, like Wall Street and Silicon Valley.⁷ Lofgren compares these people to Milovan Djilas's “new class,” a group that the Yugoslavian dissident claimed had hijacked communist regimes and were concerned only with perpetuating their status; they were a privileged bureaucracy.⁸ What Lofgren does not mention is that Djilas borrowed from Burnham and Trotsky.⁹

Samuel Francis used Burnham's ideas to express a related worldview three decades ago. Considering himself Burnham's heir, Francis extolled Burnham's analysis of the managerial elite and provided a conduit between Burnham and parts of the American right.¹⁰ He advised Pat Buchanan, who contended that the paleoconservative Francis actually surpassed Burnham as a theoretician of power.¹¹ Francis wrote a syndicated column for the Washington Times for several years in the early 1990s until his dismissal for making racist comments. He maintained that there were “natural differences between the races,” although he denied that this makes one race superior to another.¹² Francis went on to write for a host of conservative journals and magazines. This does not mean that Francis (again like the registered Independent Burnham and to some degree Trump) supported the Republican Party; he chided Republicans who—despite their words—did little to reduce abortion, curb illegal immigration, or shrink the size of government. In essence, Ronald Reagan was an insufficient conservative Republican for Burnham's leading disciple who was not persuaded by the Great Communicator's words.

Insight from The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians pervades Francis's writings. For example, when analyzing American culture, he describes an underlying power struggle: “Culture … necessarily concerns power, and the conflicts of the last several years over the National Endowment for the Arts, rap music, obscenity, and multiculturalism are really a struggle for cultural power. The issue is simple: Who gets to define the norms by which the American people will live?”¹³ Francis uses figures like Robert Mapplethorpe, Sista Souljah, and movie mogul Lew Wasserman to show how liberal elites exercise cultural power. He suggests that the conservative “religious Right” offered pathetic resistance by resorting to feeble doctrines such as “family values.” Francis pessimistically asserts that a cultural war rages and insists that conservatives are losing because they did not understand the nature of power.

Burnham's expositor Francis declares that contemporary American politics is really the struggle for power between two classes: the elites and the nonelite masses, or between the dominant “exploiters” and “Middle Americans.” He argues that transnational elites promote hypertaxation and globalization to crush Middle Americans and their values. Their locus of power can be found in the bureaucracy that “oversees the formulation and execution of foreign policy.”¹⁴ They collaborate with democratically elected politicians across the political spectrum to advance their interests. Francis demands war against “the establishment” in the name of democracy.¹⁵

Francis advocates for “Eurocentric cultural order.”¹⁶ Influenced by Burnham, Francis saw the United States as part of a broader European or Western civilization. He believed that its traditions should be defended and continued. Proclaiming concerns that President Trump would advance two decades later, Francis lambasts both Democratic and Republican “establishment” politicians, such as Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole for their collaboration with globalist elites. Francis deplored the tendency of many elites to diminish the significance of nations and civilizations. He interpreted wars in Iraq as attempts to establish a new global world order, one that worked against the interests of the United States.

Like his mentor Burnham, the paleoconservative Francis uses concepts advanced by Marx's disciples in his effort to understand the world. In a section of his writings titled “The Cultural Hegemony of the Managerial Regime,” Francis quotes the Marxist power-theorist Antonio Gramsci who used “cultural hegemony” to explain how the ruling classes exercise power.¹⁷ Whereas Gramsci argued that the bourgeoisie use the media, intelligentsia, educational institutions, and religion to promote their interests, Francis argues that the elite managerial class—with the help of modern technology—uses the same means to wrest control from the bourgeoisie. Francis contends that “cultural hegemony allows the managerial elite to manipulate ‘consent’ on a mass level.”¹⁸ This group also uses the bureaucracy to protect and promote their interests through the “managerial bureaucracy.”¹⁹

Parts of Francis's worldview—like Burnham's—were influenced by Marxism. It is just bereft of economic reductionism. Early in The Communist Manifesto, Marx proclaims: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight.”²⁰ For Marx, all subgroups were joining one of the two competing economic classes, and this dualist interpretation of society—with two groups vying for power and supremacy—characterizes Francis's social analysis. In “From Household to Nation,” Francis insists: “The significant polarization within American society is between the elites increasingly unified as a ruling class that relies on the national state as its principal instrument of power, and Middle America itself, which lacks the technocratic and managerial skills that yield control of the machinery of power.”²¹ Other subgroups like the religious and the secular, White and Black, and national and global were falling into one of the two opposing camps.²² Consistent with Marx and Burnham in The Managerial Revolution, Francis argues that the state is merely a tool for the powerful to exercise power and advance their interests.

George Orwell is another elite and power theorist inspired by Burnham who has influenced contemporary conservatives. According to William Steinhoff, a biographer, “His [Orwell's] reaction to Burnham's arguments was intense; it is marked by the paradox of love and hate, acceptance and rejection.”²³ Orwell first mentioned Burnham publicly in a January 1944 article titled “As I Please” for Tribune newspaper. Writing that he had read a friendly review of Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, Orwell agreed with Burnham that the world was dividing into power blocs, and collectivism was not necessarily any more democratic than any other system of government. For Orwell, Burnham failed by believing that Nazi Germany was invincible. Burnham naively assumed that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union could not fight each other because they were essentially the same. Orwell attributed Burnham's errors to “wish-thinking”: “Hating both Britain and the U.S.S.R., Burnham (and many other American intellectuals of similar outlook) wanted to see both of these countries conquered, and was also unable to admit that there was an essential difference between Russia and Germany. But the basic error of this school of thought is its contempt for the common man.”²⁴ On this point, Orwell misunderstood the arguments in The Managerial Revolution. Although Burnham did question in 1940 whether Britain could survive a Nazi onslaught, he was merely trying to describe what was happening in the world and to predict where it was going.

Burnham replied to Orwell's criticisms by stating that it was clear that Orwell had never read The Managerial Revolution.²⁵ Acknowledging that he had not foreseen the war between the Soviet Union and Germany, Burnham claimed he never said that either side was invincible. Nor did he write that totalitarianism was “unavoidable.”²⁶ Rather, its advent was just “probable.”²⁷ Sensitive to references to his failed predictions, Burnham criticized the democratic-socialist Orwell for not recognizing the difference between the two concepts. Regarding his “hating” of Britain and the USSR, Burnham replied that he hated no one. And if he did, he would not waste a powerful emotion on an “abstraction,” such as a nation.²⁸ The author of The Managerial Revolution said he just had “convinced opinions” about the Stalinist regime, especially its lack of regard for the most noble human ideals, such as truth and freedom.²⁹

Orwell's regard for Burnham seems to have risen shortly after this exchange. In an “As I Please” article published in February 1945, Orwell predicted that the war against Germany would end soon. Japan would follow because it could not withstand the combined might of the United States and Britain. The world was “splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham's Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see more or less what areas they will comprise.”³⁰ Orwell predicted that the remaining super-states would become entrenched in permanent war. Psychological and economic clashes would characterize this war, not bombs and violence.³¹

Orwell reviewed The Managerial Society and The Machiavellians in 1946 for a periodical called Polemic. His “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” describes Burnham's philosophy as follows: “Every great social movement, every war, every revolution, every political programme, however edifying and Utopian, really has behind it the ambitions of some sectional group which is out to grab power for itself. Power can never be restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power.”³² The future author of 1984 contends that Burnham was intoxicated with power and worshipped those who had power. This led the power-worshipper to misinterpret reality: “Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia forever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on.”³³ Orwell asserts that this explained why Burnham could not imagine a world without Hitler or Stalin in power, a world without collectivism. As a new ruling elite emerged, the Machiavellian could find little fault with it. This power-worshipping was actually a “mental disease,” Orwell suggests.³⁴ He correctly identifies themes that permeated Burnham's writings his entire life: apocalyptic visions, nations clashing against nations, and social classes rising and falling; everything occurs in a “melodramatic way.”³⁵

Despite these criticisms, Orwell still drew from Burnham in 1984. John Atkins, a biographer, maintained that “Orwell discovered this conception of the political future in James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution. Although he was as critical of much in this book he found it the most fruitful of all modern books of political speculation.”³⁶ Like Burnham, Orwell presented a dystopian vision for the future. In 1984, he describes a postindustrial collectivist society that is neither capitalist nor socialist. The society is run by bland managers who delude the people. Orwell immortalized Burnham's distinction between “formal” words and their real meaning when he wrote: “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”³⁷ In their desire to maintain power, the sly rulers manipulate the masses with words.

Who would these new rulers be? As Orwell predicts in 1984, “The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.”³⁸ Although less greedy than preceding ruling classes, they would be hungrier for power.³⁹ It was assumed, Orwell suggests, that if the capitalists were expropriated, socialism would follow.⁴⁰ And the capitalists had been eliminated; private property had vanished.⁴¹ Everything was collectivized, but economic inequality and hierarchy remained.⁴² Further revealing Burnham's influence, 1984's tripartite division of the world centered around postindustrial regions representing the United States and Britain; Continental Europe and Russia; and China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

Arguably, the climax of 1984 comes when O’Brien reveals the “truth” to Winston: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.”⁴³ The Machiavellians impressed upon Orwell the ruling elite's intoxication with power, for power's sake.⁴⁴