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This is from a long and interesting article in the latest Harper's. You
are entitled to read one free one per month and this one is an eye-opener:
The Dark Knight overflowed with antiquarian theories and gleanings. His
thoughts kept circling back to the midcentury right-winger James
Burnham, a hallowed figure among the NatCons. Burnham’s trajectory
perfectly matched the moment. He’d begun his career as a mild-mannered
professor of philosophy, a genteel Princetonian whom one student
described as having walked out of a T. S. Eliot poem, but some vision
amid the Great Depression had changed him. Though he was dazzled by his
Marxist colleague Sidney Hook, and by his encounter with Leon Trotsky’s
History of the Russian Revolution, which he interpreted as a coming
attraction for America, it still took a car ride through Detroit, the
epicenter of the Depression, to clinch Burnham’s conversion. “The class
struggle, the starvation and terror in act” that he witnessed among the
city’s autoworkers convinced him that capitalism was ruined forever; he
wanted to be a part of what came next.
At NYU, Burnham still lectured on Aquinas and Dante, but he was
increasingly occupied with drafting strategies for Communist Party
discipline. His attacks on Franklin Roosevelt, whom he accused of being
an incipient totalitarian, were even more vitriolic than the
conservative attacks on the New Deal. Trotsky, in exile on the island of
Büyükada off Istanbul, was so taken with Comrade Burnham’s agitprop that
he marked him as a protégé. Some organizers around Burnham were put off
by his tailored suits, his taste for champagne and baccarat, and his dry
patrician monotone, but this was also part of what made him useful; he
lent American Marxism a dignified patina. Burnham broke with the
Trotskyites over the question of whether the Soviet Union was in fact a
worker’s state. Trotsky thought it still qualified despite the
corruptions of Stalinism; Burnham thought it did not. From his reading
of New Deal critics of the modern corporation, such as Adolf Berle and
Gardiner Means, Burnham came to believe that the Soviet Union and the
United States were converging on a kind of managerialism: two only
marginally different planned economies, with little place for individual
freedom. He started drifting to the right, and eventually wound up as
the in-house guru of William F. Buckley’s National Review. But his
professional life did have some coherence over the decades. It was spent
taking up positions from various crumbling ideological ramparts to get a
better shot in at his lifelong enemy: the liberal elite. Burnham could
summon a good word for the Black Panthers, LSD, and Woodstock, which had
at least sent some shockwaves to Vital Center Command Control.
Refreshingly, the NatCons [the Nationalist Conservatives that includes
Trump, Tucker Carlson, et al] and the Dark Knight [the nickname the
author gave to an alt-right computer engineer named Curtis Yarvin, who
I had never heard of] were interested not in Burnham’s avowedly
right-wing phase—when brittle treatises such as The Suicide of the West
(1964) appeared—but in his earlier, more ambivalent wartime output, The
Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943), which were
written in an era when Burnham was still contending with “remnants of
Marxism.” These books, invoked by NatCons throughout my days in
Washington, worked like a back door through which they could smuggle
materialism into their program. Other phrases that I did not associate
with conservatives were brought out like worn old pieces of family
furniture, each brokered by trustworthy conservative middlemen. “The
ruling class” was often cited at the Ritz, or, just as commonly, “the
ruling class, as Angelo Codevilla calls it”—a reference to the
intelligence analyst, conservative professor, and writer for the
Claremont Review of Books.
Burnham’s chief idea—adopted by Yarvin—was that the American elite had
become a managerial class that acted as guardians over institutions, the
academy, and the professions. They were not aristocrats, nor were they
capitalist tycoons, but rather an office-bound species that merely
understood the techniques of governance and as a class no longer
bothered with questions of their own legitimacy. Burnham had counseled a
kind of equanimity in the face of this technocratic elite—the best you
could do was to pit elites against one another in order to create space
for concessionary freedoms. But Yarvin was more intent on destroying it.
He believed that the United States was simply a more advanced form of
