I have an opinion essay out in the New York Times today, in which I try to gently explain to the Times’ liberal readers what the managerial regime is and why we hate it.
I think this was a mistake for the Times. Allowing this level of dispassionate analysis to reach their readership is dangerous. This will inevitably result in the red pilling of some small number of managerial bureaucrats, and engender passive obstruction if nothing else. Can't let that ennui spread in the borg. Must have rabid, self serving fanaticism to procreate and expand the project.
My goodness, the comments over there. ARE YOU SAYING THAT NO ONE SHOULD HAVE ANY EDUCATION OR BE IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING!?!?!? It's like speaking to a different species.
Read the comments to the article to understand how so many coastal and big city liberal progressives, regardless of if a member of the elite managerial class or more likely looting from the directed confiscation of the working-class's money, are so committed to the defense of the elite managerial class.
I think the people have ignored the progression of managerial class power until the global pandemic demonstrated how much authoritarian power these cretins had accumulated. I have several very left friends that got red-pilled from that experience.
As the problematic, designated Jew hating, xenophobic, racist, sexist, fascist, homophobic, prejudiced, heteronormative chauvinist I am: Thank you Mr. Lyons.
Happy to know your name, but you are still the good ole NS Lyons. Remember how so many folks published under pseudonyms in the past. It is a great tradition and one worth preserving. Everyone knew it was a pseudonym, but didn't care. Some could find out. It allowed women particularly to have a voice. Of course, you had to during the Reign of Covid. The NYT probably has a policy, but in the old days all major outlets accepted pen names. It serves purpose and a good one.
That is a great article. It's amazing the NYT 'printed' it. The comments are what you would expect from NYT readers. Obtuse and ignorant. They have little understanding about what you are saying, just, "I ain't rich, what are you talking about?"
A return to relevance outside a certain bubble for the NYT? Let's hope so. It'd be nice if more conversations could transcend the bounds of partisan politics. There are a great many issues worthy of discussion that should, managerialism is but one example.
Doxxing yourself certainly is the way to go, it's about time, eh? Must be liberating, at least to some extent.
I describe the managerial class as "elite adjacent". Deeply invested wannabes. Not that they can't enrich themselves tremendously, but they didn't earn it or inherit it as private property.
I don't subscribe to the NYT anymore, but it might be really interesting to see what kind of comments this inspires from her readers. Will it twinkle any reflections of insight and understanding as to what's really going on? Or enrage and incite. As a reader of The Upheaval since the Canadian truckers protest, I can confirm you have done a very nice job de-inflaming your statements. Let's see if you censored yourself enough!
As I dig deeper and deeper into our current pile of political, social and civil conflict, I keep coming back to this primary body of work by N.S. calling out the elite Professional Managerial Class (PMC) as a key to diagnosing and understanding almost everything. The only missing piece is the voter demographic that is not really in that elite camp (attended lesser universities or not at all, and just not of that upper income class) but that support the PMC regime with gusto even to the point of violence.
Trump won specifically because more of those non-elite supporters had jumped from the PMC ship... I think in large part because they witnessed so much human harm caused by the PMC during the global pandemic. However, isn't it fascinating how many will burn a Tesla dealership in support of their PMC masters?
This is the only remaining piece of the puzzle that still puzzles me. My half-baked conclusion is that the PMC has infiltrated the education system and the media and has successfully assimilated these supporters into their collective. But my business brain keeps asking "Why do these people support the elite PMC regime with so much evidence that the PMC regime means them harm?"
The only answer I can come up with is that they are ignorant... don't really understand what the PMC regime is, and how they are captured by a false ideology that is frankly a path to more personal misery.
And if that is the case, then this N.S. piece in the Times is high value.
Not going to comment in the Times...but I will tell you here that your article was insightful to a fault; I hope it provides some level of comprehension (but I doubt it) to the average Times reader who not only does not get it, but does not want to. Bravo.
I think I was an lone conservative voice not celebrating when the Supreme Court ended Chevron Deference. It seemed to me that this was a substitution of judicial tyranny for bureaucratic tyranny. While there are a lot more bureaucrats and they have more resources to do stuff, judges have huge liabilities attached. First, they are, on average, not as smart as bureaucrats. Second, they are ignorant compared to a bureaucrat operating in his sphere. Third, their unit of analysis is the case and not the system, leading to some truly bizarre outcomes. Fourth and worst, even compared to bureaucrats, they are completely unaccountable and arrogant about it. This is typified by the famous bon mot by Potter Stewart about how he couldn't define pornography but he knew it when he saw it. This is the classic case of rule by man rather than law. Law requires a definition-the elements of the crime. Yet he was widely celebrated for this when he should have been impeached. Hopefully, his special place in Hell includes a 24/7 PornHub feed.
Having worked inside the United States Treasury Department many decades ago, and then subsequently as a prosecutor in so-called "state government service," I will advise that there is actually no effective distinction between the managerial dictatorship and the courts.
The courts are simply one line of defense on behalf of the managerial dictatorship against enemies outside it.
They wield an imaginary scaffolding commonly called "the rule of law" as both a sword and a shield, completely in service to the managerial dictatorship, of which they are in fact nothing more than one facet.
Any system which contains any concept of "discretion" is, necessarily and inherently, absolutely arbitrary -- and our legal system is founded, in whole and in all parts, upon interlocking concepts of institutional discretion, prosecutorial, judicial, and otherwise, which allows the managerial elite to prosecute whomever it feels like and overturn even jury verdicts on a whim.
As we see now, the federal District Courts are in effect serving as the dictatorship's front line of defense against the current efforts of the executive branch.
If these courts are allowed to succeed in their efforts, the managerial dictatorship will emerge essentially unscathed.
S.C. Cox said "Any system which contains any concept of "discretion" is, necessarily and inherently, absolutely arbitrary"
I accept the rest of your comment, but a problem arises here. Any legal system requires a degree of discretionary leeway, otherwise injustice will often result. This is simply because no framing of laws will cover every eventuality. Take the following real-life case (I've deliberately selected one with no political dimension):
A woman stopped at traffic lights found that a fire engine, with siren on, was speeding towards her from behind. Although the lights were still at red, she knew she had to remove her car from the path of the fire engine (the adjacent lane was too congested, while hers was the only car in the lane for turning). So she drove slowly round the corner, and did not endanger any pedestrians. She was taken to court, and the judge acknowledged her situation, but saying that "the law is the law", he imposed a heavy fine (it was a lower, non-jury court outside of the US).
The judge, here, was acting as a "legal positivist", i.e. as one subscribing to the view that the law should work like a mere algorithm that can generate verdicts and sentences. On this view, there would be no need for judges if the process could reliably be automated, say, by AI.
Legal positivism, however, is the primary bureaucratic deformation and dehumanization of law. Judicial activism has certainly become an acute problem, but legal positivism cannot be the answer.
Somewhat different experience. State level education finance guy in both HE and K12. Spent a whole career at it including 20 years in C suite. Lots of interaction with regular judges, ALJs, AG office and internal counsel on a wide range of issues. Also experienced conflicts between the education branch of the Deep State (me) and the state government branch. The is just a different mindset between legal and financial . Finance is obliged to look at the organization as a whole (though not other organizations) while legal operates on a case basis. Leads to conflict.
You're quite correct, it is the substitution of one tyranny for another. And yes, judicial tyranny is probably less effective than managerial tyranny for the reasons you lay out. That's the point! The only way to emasculate the managerial state is to make it less coherent and effective. You need a stable balance of infighting tyrannies to allow the average Joe some level of freedom to wander through life. The lust for power is the driving force in human nature. The point of structure is to blunt that drive to some small extent.
The Founders did not intend for either form of tyranny to take root. Their scheme was tension between the executive and legislative branch with the judiciary as being insignificant. See Hamilton for a description. The other tension they built into the system was state-Federal. Lincoln wrecked that after Marshall had usurped power for the judiciary. Then it remained for Wilson to empower the bureaucracy and here we are. Perhaps your idea that the tension between the judiciary and bureaucracy is the best we can do has merit but it is not a republic.
Humans will create tyranny out of whatever bureaucracy and structure they have to work with, at whatever scale we can manage. I guess the goal is to create a structure that is effective enough to retain the confidence of the people, while perfectly balancing the inevitable tyrannies (not to be confused with trannies).
Once upon a time, the American legal system was divided into "courts of law" and "courts of equity." The "courts of equity" were allowed to use discretion; the "courts of law" were not.
One of the great reforms that attended the rise of the managerial state was the amalgamation of the two systems into one that supposedly possessed the power and authority of both. (Greater efficiency, and all other such considerations being better served thereby, supposedly.)
The courts retained the title "courts of law," in order to disguise what was actually taking place -- namely, the expansion of allowed discretion so that it became all-encompassing.
"Equity" was, in appearance, reduced to being supposedly only a title for certain legal doctrines -- this change also, in actual purpose, serving as a disguise for the evolution actually taking place, in which discretion (simply an authoritative sounding name for the ability of an individual to choose a course of action in a fundamentally idiosyncratic fashion) was expanded to an extent which was in actual practice limited only by ill-defined and mostly imaginary boundaries.
The recent controversy over "deference," in which courts were freed from a requirement that they bend the knee to bureaucratic determinations, is in actuality nothing more than a realignment of the terms governing who gets to exercise "discretion" and under what circumstances.
It is a demonstration that the real coin of the realm is the power to make unfettered decisions.
The fundamental philosophical issue that you reference -- how to humanize what can otherwise easily amount to an inhumane system -- has never effectively been solved.
In truth, it never will be, because human decision-making is based (as every experienced trial lawyer learns) more on emotion than upon reason.
That notwithstanding, concerns about "discretion" have, in reality, nothing to do with humanizing a system, and everything to do with delineating exactly who wields how much power and authority.
Lyons: “Here is what I believe, why I believe it, with reference to important texts in the history of political theory and sociology, and which explain the growing ideological consensus on the New Right.”
Times readers: “Liar! I know better than you what you actually believe, and in fact what you believe is a lazy and intellectually dishonest caricature of what I think all conservatives believe! You’re just pretending to have beliefs!”
I always appreciate your insightful comments on the managerial regime, but I do wish you would write a future article on how you envision addressing the problem in concrete terms.
Wow..Huge moment for the NYT!
I think this was a mistake for the Times. Allowing this level of dispassionate analysis to reach their readership is dangerous. This will inevitably result in the red pilling of some small number of managerial bureaucrats, and engender passive obstruction if nothing else. Can't let that ennui spread in the borg. Must have rabid, self serving fanaticism to procreate and expand the project.
My goodness, the comments over there. ARE YOU SAYING THAT NO ONE SHOULD HAVE ANY EDUCATION OR BE IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING!?!?!? It's like speaking to a different species.
It really is, a separate nation of people.
Yes, having just read many of the comments in the Times, I felt that too.
Most of them have zero internal monologue
Bravo. Well done.
Read the comments to the article to understand how so many coastal and big city liberal progressives, regardless of if a member of the elite managerial class or more likely looting from the directed confiscation of the working-class's money, are so committed to the defense of the elite managerial class.
I think the people have ignored the progression of managerial class power until the global pandemic demonstrated how much authoritarian power these cretins had accumulated. I have several very left friends that got red-pilled from that experience.
Alright, now it is known, Nathan Levine. You got the aleph beth, you got the 國字, you got the managerial regime in your sights. They should quake.
(Borrowing your "reply box" Eric. Thank you!!)
As the problematic, designated Jew hating, xenophobic, racist, sexist, fascist, homophobic, prejudiced, heteronormative chauvinist I am: Thank you Mr. Lyons.
Happy to know your name, but you are still the good ole NS Lyons. Remember how so many folks published under pseudonyms in the past. It is a great tradition and one worth preserving. Everyone knew it was a pseudonym, but didn't care. Some could find out. It allowed women particularly to have a voice. Of course, you had to during the Reign of Covid. The NYT probably has a policy, but in the old days all major outlets accepted pen names. It serves purpose and a good one.
Nathan, you are much younger than I would have guessed. Must be an old soul, so to speak. Nice work on everything so far, thank you!
That is a great article. It's amazing the NYT 'printed' it. The comments are what you would expect from NYT readers. Obtuse and ignorant. They have little understanding about what you are saying, just, "I ain't rich, what are you talking about?"
A return to relevance outside a certain bubble for the NYT? Let's hope so. It'd be nice if more conversations could transcend the bounds of partisan politics. There are a great many issues worthy of discussion that should, managerialism is but one example.
Doxxing yourself certainly is the way to go, it's about time, eh? Must be liberating, at least to some extent.
I describe the managerial class as "elite adjacent". Deeply invested wannabes. Not that they can't enrich themselves tremendously, but they didn't earn it or inherit it as private property.
I don't subscribe to the NYT anymore, but it might be really interesting to see what kind of comments this inspires from her readers. Will it twinkle any reflections of insight and understanding as to what's really going on? Or enrage and incite. As a reader of The Upheaval since the Canadian truckers protest, I can confirm you have done a very nice job de-inflaming your statements. Let's see if you censored yourself enough!
I always knew in my bones that you were a fellow Orthodox Christian. Well done. The writing is good, too.
As I dig deeper and deeper into our current pile of political, social and civil conflict, I keep coming back to this primary body of work by N.S. calling out the elite Professional Managerial Class (PMC) as a key to diagnosing and understanding almost everything. The only missing piece is the voter demographic that is not really in that elite camp (attended lesser universities or not at all, and just not of that upper income class) but that support the PMC regime with gusto even to the point of violence.
Trump won specifically because more of those non-elite supporters had jumped from the PMC ship... I think in large part because they witnessed so much human harm caused by the PMC during the global pandemic. However, isn't it fascinating how many will burn a Tesla dealership in support of their PMC masters?
This is the only remaining piece of the puzzle that still puzzles me. My half-baked conclusion is that the PMC has infiltrated the education system and the media and has successfully assimilated these supporters into their collective. But my business brain keeps asking "Why do these people support the elite PMC regime with so much evidence that the PMC regime means them harm?"
The only answer I can come up with is that they are ignorant... don't really understand what the PMC regime is, and how they are captured by a false ideology that is frankly a path to more personal misery.
And if that is the case, then this N.S. piece in the Times is high value.
Not going to comment in the Times...but I will tell you here that your article was insightful to a fault; I hope it provides some level of comprehension (but I doubt it) to the average Times reader who not only does not get it, but does not want to. Bravo.
Excellent essay! Thank you for publishing it.
I think I was an lone conservative voice not celebrating when the Supreme Court ended Chevron Deference. It seemed to me that this was a substitution of judicial tyranny for bureaucratic tyranny. While there are a lot more bureaucrats and they have more resources to do stuff, judges have huge liabilities attached. First, they are, on average, not as smart as bureaucrats. Second, they are ignorant compared to a bureaucrat operating in his sphere. Third, their unit of analysis is the case and not the system, leading to some truly bizarre outcomes. Fourth and worst, even compared to bureaucrats, they are completely unaccountable and arrogant about it. This is typified by the famous bon mot by Potter Stewart about how he couldn't define pornography but he knew it when he saw it. This is the classic case of rule by man rather than law. Law requires a definition-the elements of the crime. Yet he was widely celebrated for this when he should have been impeached. Hopefully, his special place in Hell includes a 24/7 PornHub feed.
Having worked inside the United States Treasury Department many decades ago, and then subsequently as a prosecutor in so-called "state government service," I will advise that there is actually no effective distinction between the managerial dictatorship and the courts.
The courts are simply one line of defense on behalf of the managerial dictatorship against enemies outside it.
They wield an imaginary scaffolding commonly called "the rule of law" as both a sword and a shield, completely in service to the managerial dictatorship, of which they are in fact nothing more than one facet.
Any system which contains any concept of "discretion" is, necessarily and inherently, absolutely arbitrary -- and our legal system is founded, in whole and in all parts, upon interlocking concepts of institutional discretion, prosecutorial, judicial, and otherwise, which allows the managerial elite to prosecute whomever it feels like and overturn even jury verdicts on a whim.
As we see now, the federal District Courts are in effect serving as the dictatorship's front line of defense against the current efforts of the executive branch.
If these courts are allowed to succeed in their efforts, the managerial dictatorship will emerge essentially unscathed.
S.C. Cox said "Any system which contains any concept of "discretion" is, necessarily and inherently, absolutely arbitrary"
I accept the rest of your comment, but a problem arises here. Any legal system requires a degree of discretionary leeway, otherwise injustice will often result. This is simply because no framing of laws will cover every eventuality. Take the following real-life case (I've deliberately selected one with no political dimension):
A woman stopped at traffic lights found that a fire engine, with siren on, was speeding towards her from behind. Although the lights were still at red, she knew she had to remove her car from the path of the fire engine (the adjacent lane was too congested, while hers was the only car in the lane for turning). So she drove slowly round the corner, and did not endanger any pedestrians. She was taken to court, and the judge acknowledged her situation, but saying that "the law is the law", he imposed a heavy fine (it was a lower, non-jury court outside of the US).
The judge, here, was acting as a "legal positivist", i.e. as one subscribing to the view that the law should work like a mere algorithm that can generate verdicts and sentences. On this view, there would be no need for judges if the process could reliably be automated, say, by AI.
Legal positivism, however, is the primary bureaucratic deformation and dehumanization of law. Judicial activism has certainly become an acute problem, but legal positivism cannot be the answer.
Somewhat different experience. State level education finance guy in both HE and K12. Spent a whole career at it including 20 years in C suite. Lots of interaction with regular judges, ALJs, AG office and internal counsel on a wide range of issues. Also experienced conflicts between the education branch of the Deep State (me) and the state government branch. The is just a different mindset between legal and financial . Finance is obliged to look at the organization as a whole (though not other organizations) while legal operates on a case basis. Leads to conflict.
You're quite correct, it is the substitution of one tyranny for another. And yes, judicial tyranny is probably less effective than managerial tyranny for the reasons you lay out. That's the point! The only way to emasculate the managerial state is to make it less coherent and effective. You need a stable balance of infighting tyrannies to allow the average Joe some level of freedom to wander through life. The lust for power is the driving force in human nature. The point of structure is to blunt that drive to some small extent.
The Founders did not intend for either form of tyranny to take root. Their scheme was tension between the executive and legislative branch with the judiciary as being insignificant. See Hamilton for a description. The other tension they built into the system was state-Federal. Lincoln wrecked that after Marshall had usurped power for the judiciary. Then it remained for Wilson to empower the bureaucracy and here we are. Perhaps your idea that the tension between the judiciary and bureaucracy is the best we can do has merit but it is not a republic.
Humans will create tyranny out of whatever bureaucracy and structure they have to work with, at whatever scale we can manage. I guess the goal is to create a structure that is effective enough to retain the confidence of the people, while perfectly balancing the inevitable tyrannies (not to be confused with trannies).
One small quibble: the managerial state is not masculine, but feminine. It's The Longhouse.
Right you are Hector. My bad.
Once upon a time, the American legal system was divided into "courts of law" and "courts of equity." The "courts of equity" were allowed to use discretion; the "courts of law" were not.
One of the great reforms that attended the rise of the managerial state was the amalgamation of the two systems into one that supposedly possessed the power and authority of both. (Greater efficiency, and all other such considerations being better served thereby, supposedly.)
The courts retained the title "courts of law," in order to disguise what was actually taking place -- namely, the expansion of allowed discretion so that it became all-encompassing.
"Equity" was, in appearance, reduced to being supposedly only a title for certain legal doctrines -- this change also, in actual purpose, serving as a disguise for the evolution actually taking place, in which discretion (simply an authoritative sounding name for the ability of an individual to choose a course of action in a fundamentally idiosyncratic fashion) was expanded to an extent which was in actual practice limited only by ill-defined and mostly imaginary boundaries.
The recent controversy over "deference," in which courts were freed from a requirement that they bend the knee to bureaucratic determinations, is in actuality nothing more than a realignment of the terms governing who gets to exercise "discretion" and under what circumstances.
It is a demonstration that the real coin of the realm is the power to make unfettered decisions.
The fundamental philosophical issue that you reference -- how to humanize what can otherwise easily amount to an inhumane system -- has never effectively been solved.
In truth, it never will be, because human decision-making is based (as every experienced trial lawyer learns) more on emotion than upon reason.
That notwithstanding, concerns about "discretion" have, in reality, nothing to do with humanizing a system, and everything to do with delineating exactly who wields how much power and authority.
Great piece.
The comments on it are the funniest thing.
Lyons: “Here is what I believe, why I believe it, with reference to important texts in the history of political theory and sociology, and which explain the growing ideological consensus on the New Right.”
Times readers: “Liar! I know better than you what you actually believe, and in fact what you believe is a lazy and intellectually dishonest caricature of what I think all conservatives believe! You’re just pretending to have beliefs!”
I always appreciate your insightful comments on the managerial regime, but I do wish you would write a future article on how you envision addressing the problem in concrete terms.