The political philosopher James Burnham is usually credited with coining the phrase managerial state. In his seminal work, The Managerial Revolution, he theorized about the future of world capitalism. He was a former communist, like a lot of intellectuals of the period, so he thought about social organization from that perspective. He was mostly wrong about the evolution of capitalism, but he did describe an emerging phenomenon that is with us today. That is the semi-permanent managerial class that runs American society.

Paleocons would later pick up on the phrase and the concept to critique both the conventional Right, as well as Progressives. Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, Paul Gottfried, and others would describe the managerial elite as an amorphous collection of bureaucrats, politicians and academics that occupies the important institutions. This class maintains power by not only controlling the institutions, but also public morality. Gottfried described it as a theocratic religion, that uses accusations of impiety as a shield against challenges.

Like most theorists of his age, Burnham understood capitalism shaped by the materialist philosophy of Marx. Therefore, he could not conceive of an economic model evolving as a weapon used by a new class that formed out of the bourgeoisie. The paleocons understood this as they lived it. Their friends and family were often members of this new class. Paul Gottfried was a college professor, for example. They could see how a hybrid form of capitalism was used by this new class to maintain power in America.

Even the paleocons missed an important aspect of this new class. It is something rooted in man and that is the extreme provincialism in the managerial elites. Despite their claims to worldliness and cosmopolitan affectations, these are people with the worldview of burghers. They may pronounce foreign words with a foreign accent, but their knowledge of anything outside their tiny bureaucratic universe is limited. With few exceptions, theirs is a world of small cliques conspiring against others for bits of turf.

We see this in the unfolding conspiracy within the FBI and the DOJ to subvert the last election. Taken in total, the FBI portion of the conspiracy looks like something you would see in high school, where the nerds plotted some caper against the jocks. Like teenagers, they did most of their plotting via text message. This is not the work of sophisticated actors operating on the world stage. This is the work of a small collection of clerks and functionaries. Its petty provincialism directed at an outsider viewed as a threat.

This last week, this pettiness was underscored by the revelation that Rod Rosenstein was plotting against Trump. It could be a caper run by the neocon loons that are now infiltrating the New York Times and Washington Post. More likely, given the source is FBI memos about meetings with Rosenstein, this is the small group of FBI plotters stabbing at a former ally for personal reasons. Andrew McCabe was more concerned with someone he viewed as a rival in his little world, than he was with the overall plot to subvert Trump.

This is the nature of the managerial revolt we see going on, as well as the resistance to the Trump agenda within Washington. It is not a collection of policy professionals with deep philosophical differences with the White House. It is pods of overgrown college students throwing tantrums about petty turf disputes and hurt feelings. Look at the nature of the push back against declassifying documents. It is cliques of coevals operating from purely personal motives. For most of these people, this is just another playground dispute.

That is the nature of the managerial class now. When you start to look at the people in these various cliques, you see that they often share more than just a cultural and class background. They grew up with one another, went to the same prep schools and worked with one another for years. Once one member of the clique lands an important position in the bureaucracy, he sets about recruiting his friends, classmates, and neighbors to join his team. It turns out that the Dunbar number applies to the managerial class too.

The crisis we see in Western liberal democracy may be rooted in this feature of the managerial class. The bureaucratic government of Diocletian was like a super tanker plodding along through the sea. It was hard to steer, but even harder to stop. Its strength was in the sheer force of its size. The modern bureaucracy has evolved not to defend the secular leadership through sheer force. Rather, it has evolved to serve the narrow interests of the bourgeoisie class who populate it, to defend their interests.

Like all things that evolve within a democratic framework, the time preference of this class is very high. The plotters within the FBI, for example, were more concerned about jostling for status within their clique, than what could happen after the election. Judging by the text exchanges between Strzok and Page, it appears these two had the time preference of the typical ghetto dweller. None of these people thought much about what would come next or what could happen if their emotional needs were not properly satisfied.

Since the dawn of human settlement, the point of the state has been to maintain the power and position of the people in charge by protecting the interests of the people. The king gets to be king, and all that comes with it, by defending his people from threats. This requires a low time preference as the king expects to be king tomorrow and maybe even have his heirs sit on the throne when he is gone. Even a republican form of governance is designed to serve the interests of the property holders, who obviously have long term interests.

The managerial class that has subsumed western public institutions, exists to expand and protect the interest of these petty cliques, at the expense of the public. It is not just parasitic, in terms of undermining the middle and working classes. It is parasitic within its own institutions. Since what matters is status within the clique, which has a transactional relationship within the institution it occupies. No one within the clique can think long term about the good of the institution. All they can do is borrow the language of the institution.

The original sin of modern conservatism is that it never came to terms with the reality of the Left’s race delusions. Last century, Progressives concluded that the obvious racial disparities in the world were solely due to racism, specifically the racism of whites toward the world’s non-whites. Everything that defines the American Left now is based on this assumption. This a lie, not a sin. The sin was that the American Right, or at least those who came to define the Right, never honestly challenged this claim.

Instead, Buckley-style conservatives accepted this two-part assumption about the world and tried to fit their ideas within it. This was mostly expedience. By going along with the Left’s egalitarianism, they could have a place at the table. With the Civil Rights Movement, the Left claimed the moral high ground on the matter of race. Confronting them on the reality of race would have required courage the conservatives did not possess, so they chose to make an accommodation with the Left. Cowardice became a feature of the Right.

This mistake has haunted Buckleyites for fifty years, because there is no way to fit conservative ideas about society and culture with what amounts to race delusion. The fact that race is real, ethnicity is real and human diversity is immutable, means differences between the races are eternal. Worse yet, by casting the issue in moral terms, opposition to the Progressive race program was by definition immoral. After all, if racial differences can only be due to white racism, any white resistance to reform must be racism.

There was always another problem with Progressive race delusion. Eventually, the Left would run out of ways to address the immutable racial differences. That means they would run out of possible explanations, leaving them with just one conclusion. That is, racism is what defines white people, so the only way to achieve social equality is to get rid of white people entirely. This is why the media is full of over-the-top anti-white rhetoric. The Left is now entirely defined by a visceral hatred of white people.

This leaves conventional conservatism with nowhere to run. When the Left howls about white privilege, the white guys of Conservative Inc. have no response, since they cannot get away from the fact that most of them are white. Then they have the neocons, the shape-shifters of American politics, who will be white and non-white depending upon how they want to play an issue. The result is that any resistance of the Left is automatically a white guy thing and therefore immoral. The prevailing morality is now explicitly anti-white.

As their ranks dwindle, the Buckleyites seem to have some sense they are now in a blind alley, but they are baffled as to why. Super-cuck David French thinks conservatives should try to out-hustle the race hustlers. Roger Clegg would like to hide under his bed until the issue goes away. That is the default position of conservatives on most things now. The swarthy cohort  of the Buckleyites thinks the way forward is to bore everyone to death on the issue and this guy has decided to hold his breath or something.

The conservative position on the Left’s anti-white turn is a combination of pleading, groveling and wishful thinking. The reason is they cannot do anything else as long as they accept the Left’s egalitarianism and blank slate assumptions. If all the problems of the world are due to white racism, and all other efforts failed, it is only logical and moral to get rid of white people, or at least make them sub-citizens. If the problems persist, then killing off the whites is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing that can be done.

Buckley conservatives have written often about the original sin of race, but the real original sin was their unwillingness to confront Progressives on their racial delusions. Whatever American Progressivism was in another age, in this age, for more than half a century, it has been a cult based on the belief that whites are the root of all evil. It is a toxic religion that makes Bolshevism look optimistic by comparison. There was never any reason to accommodate it, other than expediency and greed. Now it is the ruling ethos of our age.

The opposite of race delusion is not a different form of race delusion. That is the problem with colorblind society argument. There can be no such thing as a colorblind society as long as humans populate society. Man is tribal and hierarchical. These are defining features of our species. To think otherwise is at odds with biological reality. The dream of the colorblind society we hear from civic nationalists is just as nutty as the Left’s delusions about racial justice. Egalitarianism is not simply wrong, but it is also toxic and perverse.

The foundation stone of western conservatism is the unblinking acceptance of the human condition, without reservation. The point of society was to mitigate those aspects of the human condition that interfere with a peaceful and prosperous existence. The original sin of the Buckleyites is they agreed to abandon that core understanding. The result is a movement composed of hollow men, inexorably shuffling toward their demise, as they plead for a second chance. Sin pays its wages in death, but reality is eternal.

A regular feature of the news, going back decades, is how the military is struggling to meet its enlistment goals. One reason for this is the Left’s antiwar past, which is a big part of their origin myth. The geezers in the cult still continue about how they protested the war in college. There is also the fact that the Left needs to believe the tide is turning their way and the people are rushing to their banner. That means the sort of white men who join the service are in decline. The result is regular stories about the lack of recruits.

The thing is though, volunteer armies do not have a great history. In the French Revolution, there were lots of people ready to fight for the revolution, but nowhere near enough to man the massive armies required to fight the rest of Europe. Wide-scale conscription was necessary to meet demand. The same was true during the Napoleonic Wars. In the 20th century, both world wars were fought with conscripts. For example, 70% of the US soldiers were drafted, despite massive public relations efforts to get men to enlist.

America has been running the world with a volunteer army for about fifty years now, but the cost has been enormous. Official spending numbers put the defense budget at about $600 billion per year, but lots of stuff is off-budget. The microprocessor has also been the great force multiplier. The United States has the most technologically advanced war machine in history and a fighting ethos to go with it. That just raises the cost of operations, relative to the overall fighting strength, in terms of manpower and material.

As a result, there is a general consensus that the current US military configuration is inadequate to continue ruling the world. This is a big part of Trump’s push to delegate some of the tasks to Europe and Asia. There really is no reason why the EU countries need any support from the US to police the Continent. The Russians have nukes, but the bear is poor, and the people are in no condition to fight a war. In Asia, the Japanese and South Koreans could do much more to help deal with Chinese aggression.

There is another problem though, one that the Europeans have, but are not willing to acknowledge. That is the lack of men willing and able to fight. This is problem American warmongers are beginning to notice in America. Right-wing Progressives are noticing that the struggle to meet enlistment goals are not just rhetorical. The military is struggling to find young men willing and able to do the work of a modern soldier. Those with the talent are wising up to the reality of this age and the rest simply have the wrong stuff.

For starters, the sorts of men excited about taking orders from a girl are not the sorts of men you want fighting your wars. That only works in Hollywood propaganda. That propaganda, however, has had an impact on the culture. As a result, a decreasing number of men are physically able to meet the minimum requirements. A boy who spent his formative years playing video games and being asked if he would prefer to wear a dress, is unlikely to have the ability to make it through basic, much less be a good soldier.

Then you have the fact that white guys are starting to figure out that the government is their enemy, so signing up to fight for the government is not in their interests. Part of it is the fact that the public has figured out that the neocon response to 9/11 was a scam. They did not care about keeping the country safe from Islam. They only cared about keeping Israel safe from Islam. Importing millions of Muslims after 9/11 did not go unnoticed. A volunteer army relies on patriotism to fill the ranks. Fighting for strangers does not cut it.

There is also the fact that whites are getting wise to what’s happening and public trust is plummeting. A volunteer army not only relies on patriotism, but it relies on civic duty. It is why we still call military service a duty. Some still call politics “public service” even though no one is so naive these days. The point is, like patriotism, civic nationalism is a social contract. Both parties have to uphold their end of the deal in order for it to work. It is why blacks lack patriotism, and they have never been willing to join the military.

The black issue is one to understand. We are constantly bombarded with propaganda about the heroic blacks in the military, but blacks have always been underrepresented in the services. Blacks, of course, are leading the charge against the national anthem. It is not just a stunt by coddled athletes. Blacks in America have never felt a sense of duty to the country, which makes perfect sense, given the nature of black identity. If you see society as dominated by the people you hate, why would you feel loyalty to society?

Then you have the much-celebrated browning of America. As of the last census, the majority of people under-18 are non-white. By the next census, it will be distinctly non-white. War fighting is a young man’s game. A military built to run on smart white guys with a sense of duty is not going to function when it has to rely on non-whites, who despise their host population. Inevitably, the military is going to start looking like a Chicano version of Stripes. No one says it, but everyone in charge sees the problem.

The response will be a greater reliance on high technology, but the cost of the robot warrior goes up faster than his effectiveness. No one bothers to notice that the space age war machine of the Unites States has been fought to a standstill by cave dwelling archaics in Afghanistan. Trillions have been spent trying to outsmart the locals and the graveyard of empires is going to win anyway. In the end, there is no replacement for human capital and there is no way to replace the premier human capital with cheap knockoffs from overseas.

For a long time, Bull Connor was the symbol of southern racism, because he famously used fire hoses and dogs on civil rights agitators in Birmingham Alabama. Like most white people in the 60’s, he opposed the idea of racial integration, but it was his way of doing it that got him labeled as the ultimate racist. It was one thing to believe that integration was a terrible idea. It was another to take pleasure in a hatred of blacks for no other reason than their race. Hatred, even of that which should be hated, always has an ugliness to it.

Today, the ugly face of racial hatred is directed at whites and worn by social justice warriors, claiming to be fighting white supremacy. In reality they are just anti-white bigots who compete with one another over how much they hate white people. One difference between the anti-white bigots of today and guys like Bull Connor is he was happy to live his life in obscurity. He never set out to be a famous racist. Today’s social justice warriors see racial hatred as a path to fame and glory. It is the easy way into the high culture.

An example of this is Brandeis associate professor Dorothy Kim. She is someone passing herself off as a medievalist. In reality, she is a white-hating bigot and a social justice warrior, who lives to harass white people. Her current crusade is an attack on Rachel Fulton Brown, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. Kim’s reason for attacking Dr. Brown is that she is a conservative white woman, who does real scholarship, rather than agitate for nutty causes. Kim thinks she can get ahead by hating the white woman.

Rachel Fulton Brown is a serious scholar who has written award winning books on arcane medieval topics. She has written this book and this book. Even if you are a fan of medieval European history, these are esoteric subjects, but that is how the stock of knowledge is developed and expanded. Dorothy Kim is a ridiculous person who writes nonsense like this. The only people talking about white supremacy are liars and lunatics. It does not matter which applies here, either should be disqualifying for an academic in civil society.

Dorothy Kim is not just focusing her attention on Rachel Brown. Kim is an all-purpose white-hater who whores herself out to the daffy girls of Progressive media, hired to popularize academic racism. Not content with attacking white people in real-time, the social justice warriors are now determined to rewrite history to make Henry VIII into soul brother number one. In that Daily Beast post, Mx. Kim goes out of her way to fall for the Cheddar Man hoax, suggesting she is dumber than her sparse work product suggests.

That is just the thing about the people like Mx. Kim. They are not just content to publicly attack white people for being white. There is a suicidal nihilism to the modern racist. Their project is as much about decreasing the stock of human knowledge as it is chasing white people from the white societies that welcomed them. What is offensive about Mx. Kim is not that she does not know things, it is that she knows wrong things and demands that the rest of us, as a matter of social justice, accept falsehoods as fact, fiction as truth.

That is another thing you see with the social justice warriors. They seek to replace accomplishment with moral fanaticism. Rachel Brown has reached her status by a long career of being good at her specialty. Mx. Kim is just not bright enough or willing to do the work, so she is attacking white people, in order to establish her bona fides as a culture warrior. Everything about Mx. Kim’s career to this point is a claim that she is a victim, by virtue of her DNA, and therefore must get free stuff from white people or else racism.

That is why these people are so vicious. Being a virtue signaling loon is a highly competitive racket. There is always someone out there preparing a nuttier claim than the nuttiest claim of the moment. Because the ideology of the social justice warrior is completely empty, a pure negative ideology, the result is a version of the mob screaming “Goldstein” in 1984. It is not enough to hate white people. What matters is that you are seen hating whitey and doing so with an enthusiasm that is without rival.

That is the ugliness that Mx. Kim shares with classic racists like Bull Connor from half a century ago. It was not that he opposed integration that made him ugly. It was that he was willing to abandon decency and order in his opposition to it. The willingness to sacrifice everything for a principle is fanaticism and it is just as much an enemy of civil society as the barbarian. That is what you see with people like Mx. Kim. She is a fanatic, ready to burn it all down in the name of social justice. There is nothing uglier than a fanatic.

Addendum: A commenter asked how people like Mx. Kim gets into the academy. The reason the social justice warrior has success is that Progressives are always fighting themselves. By that, I mean they are always at war with that which they fear about themselves or that which they are currently doing. The Left’s rage against Russian meddling corresponds with their own collaboration with Russian oligarchs in an effort to rig recent elections. Google the phrase “Opposite Rule of Liberalism.”

In the case of the academy, the people hooting about racism and white supremacy are relying on the innate racism of the modern academy. “Oh look! We have an Asian applicant in medieval European studies!” The white liberals in the field are so desperate for multicultural status points, they fall all over themselves to find and embrace non-whites, purely on racial grounds. They embrace anti-racism, because they hate their own racism, and the result is more of the self-loathing that drives the Progressive.

Multiculturalism has created a vast market for dull-witted grifters like Mx. Kim. She gets the attention that women naturally crave, but she gets to make a career out of it, thus making herself both a hero of feminism and multiculturalism. Her choice was working in a cubicle somewhere as a clerk or going into the promising world of social justice. it is not hard to see why she chose to be an SJW. It is also easy to see why she is so bitter and nasty. At some level, she knows she is a fraud, and she hates herself even more.