IS THE "PROFESSIONAL MANAGERIAL CLASS" HURTING AMERICA?
INTRODUCTION - HISTORY OF THE "PMC" CONCEPT:
In this meetup, we'll look at a variety of recent criticisms of America's upper middle class, variously defined as people who fall into either the top 10% (over $200K in 2019) or top 20% (over $140K in 2019) in annual household income. Much of the upper middle class overlaps with what is known by sociologists as the "professional managerial class" (abbreviated as PMC) - i.e. a group of middle to upper-middle class professionals is distinguished from other social classes by their training & education, with occupations including academics, civil servants, engineers, managers, doctors, lawyers, and middle-level business executives & government administrators. Defined broadly, the PMC accounts for about a third of the American workforce, but we'll be focused on those with higher income and more political & cultural influence.
The history of the PMC concept dates back to James Burnham's 1941 book The Managerial Revolution which theorized about the future of world capitalism based upon its development in the interwar period. Analyzing the emerging forms of society around the world, Burnham saw certain commonalities between the economic formations of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and America under FDR's New Deal. He argued that a new society was emerging in which a class of "managers" had waged a drive for "the position of ruling class." He argued that whether ownership was corporate/private or statist/governmental, the essential spit between the ruling elite (executives and managers backed by bureaucrats and functionaries) and the mass of society was not ownership so much as control of the means of production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham#The_Managerial_Revolution
In his 1944 essay in "Second Thoughts on James Burnham", George Orwell's criticized some of the near-term predictions Burnham made about the course of WWII (e.g. German victory) and what he saw as Burnham's "power worship", but he accepted that Burnham might be right in identifying a general drift towards oligarchy with the concentration of industrial and financial power, and the development of the managerial/technical class. However, Orwell thought there was no way this managerial revolution could enable fascism or Soviet-style communism to last for long, arguing: "The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or if established, will not endure." As we'll see, Orwell's thoughts are typical of the opposition to the managerial class today among the anti-authoritarian left, particularly democratic socialists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Thoughts_on_James_Burnham
Orwell noted that the theme of a new technocratic type of society – neither capitalist nor socialist – was predicted in several works such as Hillaire Belloc's 1912 book The Servile State. Belloc was a Catholic conservative and felt that neither capitalism nor socialism was stable or just, but feared the third possibility of a highly unequal technocratic "Servile State" as well. Belloc advocated for "distributism" - i.e. distribution of the means of production to create a society marked by widespread property ownership. Later Catholic conservative thinkers, although less enthusiastic about distributism, have shared some of Belloc's concerns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Servile_State
Belloc's book was in turn an influence on Friedrich Hayek's 1944 Road to Serfdom, which led later generations of libertarians to fear the erosion of individual freedom entailed by creeping government control of economic decision-making. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom
Although Burnham was initially a Trotskyite, his political views shifted to the right after WWII and his 1964 book Suicide of the West became a classic text for the post-war conservative movement in American politics. Burnham defined liberalism as a "syndrome" afflicting liberals with guilt & hypocrisy. His works greatly influenced paleoconservative author Samuel T. Francis, who used Burnham's ideas to develop theories about the "managerial state", which he equated with the "welfare-warfare state" and "polite totalitarianism". Many of today's paleocon borrow from Francis's ideas when they rail against "globalism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerial_state
Taken together, we can get a sense of the various political factions that were aligning against the "managerial state" in the early-to-mid 20th century, and in this discussion we'll see how this is still going on today in terms of how many different groups on both sides of the political spectrum we see complaining about the "professional-managerial class".
RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:
Back in June of 2019, we had a meetup entitled "Are Coastal Elites Living in a 'Bubble'?" We talked about the residential segregation we'll discuss in Part 1 of this meetup, but we also talked about the economist Tyler Cowen & the sociologist Charles Murray's theories about how the cultural segregation of urban elites has negative social effects. We also looked at arguments related to an alleged ideological bubble around the coastal elites' narrower class of pundits, journalists & academics that creates blind spots in their political views. Specifically we analyzed Paul Krugman's critique of "Very Serious People" and Nicholas Nassim Taleb's critique of "Intellectuals Yet Idiots", as well as Daniel Drezner's critique of "thought leaders". https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/chrnnqyzhbjc/
