The Crisis of the Managerial State
The limits of this approach to government are becoming more evident.
In his 1941 classic of political science, The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham claimed that the need for managerial skill and technological competence had made the inherited forms of capitalism and democracy utterly unsuited to the challenges of his time. Ruling would belong not to capitalist entrepreneurs or elected politicians but to skilled managers. For only the managers had the sufficient training—that is, the training necessary to produce, mobilize, and deploy human and nonhuman resources to achieve victory in war and prosperity in peace.
Events and ideas since Burnham have made much of his book appear dated. The owner-entrepreneur has returned: just as Henry Ford took the automobile to mass production, Elon Musk has done the same for space rockets, while at the same time revolutionizing the electric car and social media. Moreover, thanks to the work of Friedrich Hayek and our experience of Communism, nobody today has the faith that managers have the ability to plan the nation’s or the world’s economy, or even conduct a business efficiently, without being subject to prices that float more or less freely according to supply and demand.
Nonetheless, the managers are still with us, and returning to Burnham can help us understand their aspirations and limitations. Returning to Burnham will also help us understand the present form of political conflict that is occurring in almost every democracy, between one faction that represents the credentialed professional-managerial class and the other that seeks to constrain, chasten, or, even in its more delusional moments, dissolve that class.
Thinking through—and beyond—Burnham will help us understand that the parties that represent the aspirations of managers are headed, but not led, by slogan-chanting female or effeminate shallowpates. Meanwhile articulations of the comprehensive interests of the nation and the world can be found only, however fumbling or mistaken, in the mouths and propaganda of their overwhelmingly male populist rivals.
Management control is management by indicator. Managers substitute numerical proxies for results that are difficult or impossible to quantify or simply beyond their control. Sales managers cannot force sales, but they can force sales calls. The coffee shop manager cannot make sure customers come to get coffee, but she can make sure that the staff is on hand to serve them if the customers do come.
Consider the relation between workplace safety rules and workplace safety: the rules are intended to reduce accidents and the consequences of negligence. Their success or failure, however, depends not only on whether those rules are enforced and complied with, something managers can supposedly measure here and now, but on whether the rate of accidents is actually reduced, something which managers cannot measure in advance.
Even in the best case, when proxies appear correlated to the supposed ends of policy, managers will go astray unless they are perpetually yanked back by leadership that understands that correlation is never equivalence. Witness the perplexing and complex relationship between COVID vaccination and COVID prevalence: the managers misled us all that widespread vaccination would “stop the spread,” but hundreds of millions of us got COVID only after we were vaccinated.
Often, indicators have no, or even a negative, relationship to the supposed ends of the organization. A higher percentage of staff who have undergone Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training has made no business more profitable and no military unit more deadly. DEI training cannot even be shown to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion in organizations that mandate it, and it makes those subject to it more racist in their reactions and beliefs.
In any case, whether proxy indicators are correlated or uncorrelated with the ends of an organization, management by indicator is a matter of compliance with rules rather than success at meeting overall objectives. Our public schools are no better than they were 40 years ago, but they have a lot more administrators, have much longer handbooks, and send far more “Dear Colleague” letters.
The managers base their claim to control policy on their technical specialization. Those who are scientifically trained “are the science,” as Dr. Fauci said of himself. But there are two failings of this kind of control, one obvious and one subtle.
The obvious failing is that any specialization is based on training in the use and relevance of special indicators, while discounting or ignoring matters those indicators do not even aspire to measure and that specialists ignore because they are not trained to weigh them. For example, closing schools during the COVID pandemic did great, and in some ways irreparable, harm to the education of students who should have been in school—harms that many observers at the time thought were outweighed by the supposed mortality and morbidity benefits of the closures.
The more subtle failing is that because managers use indicators instead of goals and deploy their credentials as a defense against accountability, the managers are not even especially good at their jobs. Jurisdictions that closed schools did not in fact have lower excess deaths or even lower COVID-19 mortality.
The managers of 2024, it turns out, cannot take a comprehensive view of their stations and their duties. And they are not educated to see the limits of their specializations. This applies in grand matters as much as in small: all the climate change controls, no matter how costly, are never proposed or assessed in terms of total costs and total benefits.
But even though these managers do not understand what their true goals or purposes are, they find it easy to extend their reach globally. Every international organization as I have argued elsewhere, is a sorority of like-minded, like-credentialed expert managers who coordinate on the management of their peculiar indicators against the efforts of rival specialists and interference of meddling politicians and aggrieved citizens.
Compliance, as generations of librarians, schoolmarms, and HR ladies demonstrate, is a peculiarly female occupation and preoccupation. Alaska fishermen are still overwhelmingly male. The government inspectors who ensure that their boats are OSHA compliant and don’t overfish are much more likely to be female.
The growth of the state in the form of regulation has made every workplace more oriented around females. This has empowered women professionally, economically, and politically, creating a coalition (women are now a majority of the voting-age population) that stands athwart any political check on the managers.
Marriage and childrearing within marriage create a common interest of husband and wife in the prosperity of their family, the flourishing of their offspring, and, to some degree, a common perspective on those interests. Even if women have greater difficulty putting aside rules and indicators for ends and goals, a married woman at least has the benefit of her husband’s vision, as he has the benefit of her nagging him into compliance.
In polities where marriage rates are low, divorce and cohabitation high, and childbearing is delayed—that is to say, almost every developed polity except Israel—a large marriage gap has opened. There are those who vote for the managers’ parties and those who vote for the parties that would check the managers’ aspirations to max out on their special indicators. The managers view the absence of an overall political vision as better than the threat posed by any vision to management by indicators. The managers’ parties’ appeal is not based on a comprehensive vision but on “resistance” to the comprehensive visions of their rivals.
The Democrats offer a checklist of indicators to inspire their opposition to the relatively unarticulated (because in important respects inarticulable) slogan of their populist opponents: “Make America Great Again.” “‘Great Again’ how?” is a question every behatted Trump supporter has heard from his more civil opponents.
The managers’ parties need placeholders, not leaders. Witness the victory of a senile Joe Biden in 2020 and the victories of the pretty but vacuous Justin Trudeau in Canada.
The most important thing that Burnham missed, looking back to the challenges of 1941, is that war requires a comprehensive view of challenges and resources. Management by indicators, unless the managers are subordinate and responsible to statesmen and publics, cannot in fact successfully mobilize and deploy a society for war. The managers can manage, even from afar. This can be seen in Ukraine’s war against Russia, and also in America’s wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The managers, however, cannot inspire men to fight those wars or lead them to victory. In diplomacy, as in war, there is no substitute for leadership and vision: Washington’s credentialed management of the Middle East and the Ukraine crisis has brought violence without end to Europe, Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. And if we take at face value the atomic scientists’ storied indicator “The Doomsday Clock,” the managers have brought the world as a whole closer than ever to nuclear holocaust.
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This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.
