Writing about politics these days is a challenge because things move nearly at the speed of social media. One day, the Trump administration announces some move that generates outrage on the left and cheers on the right, only for that decision to be reversed by tweet and then revived temporarily before it goes into cardiac arrest again for good. Max Weber called politics “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Today, it’s forceful and fast banging of one’s head against the timeline.

The rapidity with which things are flowing and shifting gives one the impression that whole bookcases of political science texts might soon be worth less than the paper they’re printed on. What good is James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution after managerialism, as we’re told is the case now, lies discredited and disemboweled in a pool of its own blood?

The answer is in the book’s subtitle: What is Happening in the World. In other words, the point of Burnham’s book was to describe the transition from one type of society to another, a process he characterized as a “social revolution,” which is by nature difficult to delineate and define, yet occurring regularly throughout history. “It is impossible to draw an exact temporal line dividing one type of society from another,” he wrote. “What is important is not so much the fact of change, which is always present in history, as the rate of change.”

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House appears to be part of a kind of social revolution—a transitional period. Transition to what is yet unclear. The right has mostly met the moment with applause, while the left has mainly reacted with concern. I think the latter’s response might be more appropriate at this point. But let’s step back into the last century for a moment.

Burnham’s view was derived from the elite theory he had gleaned from the neo-Machiavellian thinkers of the late 19th/early 20th centuries. The thematic insight of these thinkers is that intra-elite conflicts are the driving force of history; other explanations are only wishful thinking. 

Thus, the 20th century was about the gradual replacement of the old bourgeoisie elite by a new managerial class that emerged from the rubble of the Great Depression and two World Wars. In 1946, George Orwell summarized Burnham’s thesis in the following way:

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

Burnham got some specific predictions wrong, but he correctly identified the trends that would shape post-war geopolitics. He was right about mass organizations that drive economic and political life, requiring armies of specially trained and faceless bureaucrats. He was also right about how the managerial elite, unlike prior ruling classes, would be united by values and ideals rather than by economic class. Namely, they would be bound by a shared faith in mass organizations and administration. 

The managerial elite sought to make society efficient through what the sociologist William H. Whyte Jr. called “scientism,” or “the promise that with the same techniques that have worked in the physical sciences we can eventually create an exact science of man.” No one living amid the ruins of a post-pandemic world, defined by slogans like “trust the science,” can deny Burnham’s prescience now. 

Many on the right have interpreted Trump’s reelection as heralding both the end of the post-war world order and the decapitation of the managerial elite at the hands of “tech bros” like Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has torn through Washington. Musk himself feeds this perception, often invoking the phrase Vox Populi, Vox Dei in relation to his decision-making process. But the picture coming into view is more complicated than a rise of true populism. It is still hard to tell whether the system of the managerial elites is being kneecapped—or upgraded. 

Before now, the regime’s legitimacy was in full tumble. Many of its methods of manipulation and surveillance were found out. Even the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which had managed to evade scrutiny for so long as clandestine tendrils of the leviathan, was exposed as such. Though it may look like he is delivering a killing blow to this system, Trump’s return to the White House has in reality tossed it a lifeline. The fight over USAID is illustrative. 

Starting in January, Trump initiated what looked like an effort to liquidate the agency, which purports to be altruistic in funding aid and development work around the world. In reality, USAID is a key tool of U.S. soft power, an appendage of the empire. Instead of doing away with it altogether, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed in March that it would be reformed and placed under the control of the State Department, which means it will be more of an imperial instrument and even less transparent. 

As if to manage expectations, Mike Benz, a former State Department official turned MAGA influencer, told Tucker Carlson in an interview that dismantling this apparatus—which has been turned against Americans—would be a terrible mistake. The problem, Benz and Carlson agreed, is not with the system per se but with who holds the reins. 

Though Carlson disagreed with Benz about the value of regime-change operations USAID conducted, he didn’t disagree that deep-state organizations like USAID were necessary. “The purpose of the deep state is to provide continuity in a democracy in which leadership changes every four years,” Carlson said. 

It might be true that something like this is both necessary and inevitable. The problem is that so many people are misinterpreting the current moment as one in which the underlying power structures of “the swamp” are being torn down. They are not. If anything, they’re being renovated and updated, partly with help from people like Musk. 

In 2021, in the wake of the Jan. 6 riots, a poll by Tufts Public Opinion lab asked respondents if they’d support a new Patriot Act that “expands law enforcement abilities to surveil American citizen’s phone calls, text messages, and web searches to prevent further incitements and acts of violence on the US Capitol.” About 54 percent said no. But it looks like they might be getting these things anyway, just not how they would have expected. 

Last year, Reuters revealed that Musk’s SpaceX had inked a major contract with the National Reconnaissance Office, the eyes of the “big five” U.S. intelligence agencies. Its objective is to “create a powerful new spy system with hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits.” A spokesperson for the agency said that it will be “the most capable, diverse, and resilient space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance system the world has ever seen.”

As the construction of an all-seeing eye is underway, the State Department has also deployed artificial intelligence to scour social media under the pretext of combating terrorism. Formally, this is part of a collaboration with Homeland Security to implement a “whole of government and whole of authority approach” to ferret out Hamas supporters in the United States, particularly those residing in the country on student visas, and deport them. Of course, this was virtually the same rationale that was used to justify the construction of the post-9/11 surveillance state, at the center of which stood the Patriot Act. The idea that, this time, the eyes and ears of the regime will only be turned on foreign interlopers is just as naïve.

Meanwhile, little of what Trump campaigned on shows signs of becoming reality. The promise of the largest deportation operation ever undertaken seems more and more like a pipe dream. Fifty-six percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, according to a CNN/Ipsos poll published on March 12. And it seems to be slowly dawning on people that Trump’s newfound Silicon Valley allies are not, political rhetoric aside, so dissimilar in their outlook and affinities from the elites they are attempting to dislocate. Indeed, they intersect on many key points, as the line between managerial technocrats and technologists blurs and tends toward domination and centralization, whether by bureaucracy or AI. The social revolution they are overseeing now could be better positioned to realize Burnham’s vision of a techno-dystopian regime that inspired Orwell’s 1984. Certainly, both would have us tend in the direction of “an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.” ◆