SOME DUMMY MISCONSTRUING POPULISM

A CRITICAL REVIEW OF AN OTHERWISE MUST READ BOOK

Alright, the last several posts have been pretty demanding theoretical exegeses. So, let’s do something a little more fun for this post.

Today I want to review a book by this guy…what’s his name? Hold on a second…Just let me check, here. McConkey. That’s it, Michael McConkey. Oh, wait, excuse me: Dr. Michael McConkey (pretentious twat). Anyway, the title of the book is The Managerial Class on Trial. And it’s okay. It does a pretty good job of explaining the origin, nature, and history of the managerial class. It concludes with a dramatic neo-reactionary flourish, suggesting that, given the rise of the managerial class on the theoretical foundation of the myth of popular sovereignty that a long term, stable, resolution of the world crises resulting from a hundred years of managerial class dominance, is some kind of federated neo-monarchy. And that’s an interesting idea. But my objective here is to respond to McConkey’s all too curt dismissal of populism as a potential response to managerial liberalism.

He correctly observes that for about a century and a half now, populism – when it isn’t ridiculously misrepresented as crypto-fascism – is regarded as a movement of democratic restoration. This is true. If you look at the history of populism over that time it has been associated with the reform of democratic institutions. Ideas of politician recall, popular initiation of legislation and referenda, and an emphasis upon the school of citizenship provided by grassroots, participatory processes have been standard fare among populist movements.

The reason that McConkey gives such short shrift to populism in his book is that he sees democracy as a captured institution and practice, a process he evokes with the idea of managerial class ventriloquism. Democracy simply becomes a veil for legitimizing managerial class rule under democracy, when people, believing themselves to be acting autonomously in their own interest, are really being guided to their democratic choices and actions through the impact of that ventriloquism: e.g., manipulated by the verbally dexterous class, through its reality-curating media and administrative state’s social engineering of acceptable culture. In this way, democracy is not merely a charade of popular sovereignty, but it actually empowers the very ruling class that its populist promotion presumes to replace.

And, you know, as far as it goes, I can’t argue with this analysis; it makes a lot of sense. However, it’s the “as far as it goes” bit that I find gets McConkey into trouble, here. An emphasis upon democratic restitution, renewal, or revitalization, has been the normal emphasis in political theory’s analysis of populism, and yes indeed, democracy has been a victim of the managerial class’s “revolution within the form” (see here), converted into an instrument of managerial class ventriloquist control. What McConkey entirely misses in his analysis in this book is that in the last several decades it has become increasingly clear that populism has taken on a new valence and significance.

In several past posts (see, here, here, and here), this substack, building off the insights of Paul Piccone, has argued that populism has entered center stage of contemporary political analysis. It has now entered into an existential conflict, a Schmittian friend-enemy contest, with the very logic and institutional power of the managerial class. The latter’s disposition toward technocratic control, exercised through the administrative state’s ethos of bureaucratic paternalism and social engineering, is intrinsically driven to relentlessly displace organic communities, with their “problematic” values and norms, with those of managerial liberalism and its constant self-legitimization (see here). The demands of populism today though are the demands to revive their organic communities, and protect the culture, values and norms that sustain such organic communities. As such, the new populism finds itself athwart history, suddenly face-to-face with a Schmittian enemy, locked in an existential, zero-sum contest. The extent to which the managerial class successfully advances its social engineering agenda is the extent to which organic communities, values and norms are displaced by managerial liberalism in the name of its bureaucratic paternalism. The extent to which populism today can successfully carve out space for the renaissance of organic community life in an ever technocratizing modern world, by necessity they must and will have reversed the assault of managerial liberalism’s insatiable appetite to colonize civil society.  

Now, it’s certainly arguable that in fact this has been the logic of populism going right back to its relatively recent emergence in North America, in the late 19th century, for, as McConkey acknowledges, this is also the period in which the managerial class began to consolidate power in the private sector. So as a matter of sociological logic, this conflict between managerial liberalism and populism was baked into the class conflict cake from the start. And, interestingly, McConkey wrote his doctoral thesis on the Canadian agrarian populist movement of the early 20th century. And, while he did title it “A Canadian Adventure in Democracy,” in his analysis he demonstrates that the populist vision went beyond just democracy reform – central as that was to the farmer movement he was describing. Rather, some of the key figures he analyzes provide what McConkey himself describes as the vision of a “moral community.” Additionally, in the book under review here – what’s it called again, oh yeah, The Managerial Class on Trial – he actually cites Piccone on numerous occasions. Though his treatment of Piccone emphasizes the latter’s focus on analysis of social engineering, bureaucratic paternalism, and particularly the vicissitudes of artificial negativity.

There’s certainly no denying that the rhetoric of populists over the last century or so have focused upon rebuking plutocracy and demanding vast reforming of democratic institutions. And, leaving aside earlier hints about what else may be implied in populism: the contemporary situation has brought the existential conflict between managerial liberalism and populism to a head. As the managerial class’s aspiration for total colonization of civil society has reached a fever pitch, the relevance of populism’s Schmittian challenge to that class and its ideology can no longer be ignored or divorced from a realpolitik analysis of what confronts us today. Whether or not populism itself is new in some way, an interesting question for another day, the heightened contradiction it experiences in relation to managerial liberalism, and the inescapable fact of that existential conflict makes it worth distinguishing the movement’s current manifestation as the new populism.

In his rush to get out the book (he wrote it and had it available on Amazon in like four months or something), given his concern over the extraordinary events unfolding in the summer of 2020, McConkey seems to have forgotten lessons he learned way back in the 90s. Undoubtedly, a rushed book is going to have its limitations, whatever the virtue in the tradeoff to try and get out an in-depth analysis of pressing current events. I’m betting he probably now wishes he’d had (or taken) more time to more thoroughly recollect the analytical traditions he was recalling from dusty memory, and hadn’t given populism quite so short shrift as he did. If true to his Burnhamian, Italian realist tradition, inclinations, he wouldn’t want to romanticize the new populism as some potential vehicle of transcendent political liberation. But insofar as a realist analysis understands that the most likely potential for alleviating prevailing human privation is some disruption of the rule of the prevailing elites, he probably would have wanted to give a deeper consideration to how the new populism, with its existential challenge to managerial liberalism, might have been able to contribute to disrupting the extant balance of power, creating an opening for a necessary circulation of elites.

Well, nobody’s perfect. Maybe he can set up a substack and provide some atonement. But, looking at the picture on the back cover, he’s such a handsome guy; I’m kind of shocked he didn’t do better than that.