The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism

A response to Nathan Pinkoski

First Things has just put out an essay by

Nathan Pinkoski

, titled “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” that I think is one of the most intellectually important pieces to be published in some time, and which I’ll go out of my way to recommend here.  

It is essentially a detailed account of how and why the United States government decided it needed to surveil and control the bank accounts and financial transactions of the entire world in the name of fighting terrorism — and then authoritarianism… and then the hazy universal evil of “hate.” More generally, it’s the story of how Western liberalism’s former separation of public and private spheres of life was torn down, thrusting us into our current hellscape of technocratic “global governance,” in which dissidents are liable to find themselves debanked from the financial system in the name of inclusion.

With this account Pinkoski fills in some important gaps in the record by identifying and documenting some of the key figures and decisions-points that led us to where we are now. In particular, he expertly reveals just how bipartisan the scheme to transform national “government” into global “governance” was, with the twin “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” sides of American politics working hand-in-hand to advance the same ambitious revolution after the end of the Cold War.

This includes uncovering some rather spectacular facts and quotes that I at least was unaware of, such as an open declaration by Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor that America’s post-Cold War strategy would be to “pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-governmental groups,” including “private firms” and “human rights groups,” in order to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” across the planet and isolate “backlash states” “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Which is exactly the foreign policy chimera we got and still labor under decades later.

Or the fact that it was not some shadowy cabal of Blackrock and the UN that first invented manipulative “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investing standards, but the George W. Bush administration’s national security staff, who noted that private finance “could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments” and predicted that “the banks will fall into line” once “our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

Or the timely reminder that in 1989 the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal declared its commitment to achieving the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.”

Hence why we ought not be surprised that in 2021 G.W. Bush would stand beside his erstwhile establishment-left opponents on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and declare that the real threat to America comes from “extremists at home,” from the populist Trump supporters who, “in their disdain for pluralism,” are “children of the same foul spirit” as foreign terrorists — and who therefore necessitate that the same regime of coordinated public and private coercive force be applied at home as abroad.

Overall, Pinkoski’s essay powerfully demonstrates just how dramatically different Western “liberal-democratic” countries are from a mere three decades ago. Its publication is also something I’ve been awaiting impatiently for half a year now, because this summer I was present at the romantically-clandestine underground meeting of dissident scholars (aka a First Things seminar) at which Pinkoski originally presented his argument, then in the form of a much longer academic paper.

I was asked to present my own response to Pinkoski’s paper at the gathering, which I did, and which I will publish here below in case it is of interest. (Note that many of the lines cited in my response will not match the shortened version published in First Things, but I’ve decided to leave them unaltered here anyway.) In it, I make two main arguments: that the revolution Pinkoski describes is best thought of as the expansionary process of totalitarian managerialism (as described in The China Convergence), and — more disagreeably — that what he describes as “postliberalism” is in fact the triumph of liberalism unbound.

Definitely read Pinkoski’s essay first though! I expect and very much hope that he will continue to expand on it in the future, and that it will become a much-cited work in the years ahead.

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Response to Nathan Pinkoski (N.S. Lyons, Palo Alto, June 2024)

Nathan Pinkoski has produced a bold, detailed, and compelling case study illuminating what is perhaps the signal phenomenon of our era: the abandonment of any meaningful distinction between state and society, between public and private power, and between public and private spheres writ large. In recent decades we have experienced the rapid rise of Western regimes that transcend any such distinction, and which thus — to cut to the point — grow increasingly totalitarian in aspect.

Pinkoski describes this as the collapse of 20th century liberal civilization and its replacement by something new. He has examined this rupture through the history of recent transformations in international monetary policy and finance. This includes the relentless expansion of the EU as a monetary union and then as a federalist empire, accompanied by the swift intrusion of the state into private finance in the name of maintaining stability and security — a trend also pioneered by the U.S. government’s expansive efforts after 9/11 to use state power to freeze first terrorist groups and then entire countries out of the putatively neutral global financial system. In doing so he traces a direct line of evolution from the neoliberal enthusiasms of the post-Cold War era to what he describes as the West’s “actually existing postliberal” present, in which “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics” means political dissidents and cultural thought criminals can now regularly find themselves de-banked by putatively private institutions in the name of “safety” and “reputational risk.”

With this history I can offer no significant disagreement. But it is only a case study of a larger pattern. And if I have any productive criticism to offer, it is that, in prudently limiting his scope to merely the realms of finance, monetary policy, and foreign affairs, Pinkoski has perhaps not been quite bold enough. Without a fuller picture of the leviathan that menaces us, we risk mistaking but one part of the beast for the whole, mere consequences for causes. In fact, let me posit that searching for the source of our era’s public-private collapse among the shadowy decisions of bankers and national security spooks — as noteworthy and telling as these decisions are — is to risk potentially getting causality backwards and understating larger forces at work.

After all, throughout his paper Pinkoski repeatedly notes that various policy decisions defy explanation in terms of pragmatic national interests. The architects of Clinton’s foreign policy are cited themselves describing taking actions they knew were unnecessary but felt to be of alluring “historical consequence.” The opening of borders to mass migration is described as a “quasi-theological event,” a “repudiation of a core culture or a fixed set of national values,” and “a response to Western guilt.” While in general after 1989, as Pinkoski puts it, “On both sides of the Atlantic, the spiritual principle became a resolve to construct a new national, social, and cultural identity.” From my point of view, such language hints that deeper forces were indeed at work. And it might be most profitable for us to try to more clearly uncover and connect at least some of these forces.

A year or so ago I wrote a long essay titled “The China Convergence,” which I bring up here because I think its main themes are quite relevant. Namely, that the same specific form of oligarchic technocratic governance, described by James Burnham and others as “managerialism,” has today successfully taken over almost the whole developed world, West and East alike.

Managerialism is, in short, the instantiated belief that everything can and should be deliberately engineered and managed from the top down, and that this necessitates an expert class of professional managers whose business it is to do so. Rooted in the techniques of bureaucratic organization and “scientific management” that sprang from the revolution of mass and scale brought on by the Industrial Revolution, managerialism took off with the early Progressive movements and flourished following the bureaucratic explosions produced by the two world wars.

Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power and resources for the managers as a group within the system; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucratic apparatus to take over an ever-larger range of functions; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be trained and educated, which requires more managers… and on and on. I call this expansionary dialectic the managerial doom loop.

But this process works just the same at the level of a country, or even an entire civilization, as it does for a company, non-profit, or government agency. The result, in the case of our societies, has been the exponential growth of a “professional managerial class,” with a permanent interest in seeing the continual expansion of managerial control into every area of state, economy, culture, and even international affairs. In this it has wildly succeeded, producing a new kind of regime — the managerial regime — staffed by a constituent managerial class and dominated by a distinct managerial elite. These elites all behave with flock-like similarity, no matter what institution or part of the world they are located in, because they all have the same basic managerial interests and personality.

To begin connecting this back to Pinkoski’s study, these managerial interests have over time in the West congealed ideologically into what we can describe as a managerial consensus: a unifying system of moral and philosophical beliefs that just so happen to not only rationalize the interests of managerial elites, but also to elevate them to a position of moral superiority, serving to legitimize their right to rule. This ideology consists of a number of core tenets, including technocratic scientism, utopian progressivism, a devotion to the “liberation” of individuals from all former norms and constraints (whether of nature or tradition), and an incentive to flatten any particularity of people, nation, or culture so as to produce more “free” individuals — in other words more predictable and easily interchangeable “undifferentiated human material,” as Renaud Camus has put it. R.R. Reno has similarly described the post-WWII ideological complex as the “open society consensus,” which I think is also accurate and an appropriate name for the same thing.

Now, I’ve rehashed these points from my own essay because I would propose that most of the events and decisions that Pinkoski observes in his history can actually be best explained as products of the sweeping advance of managerialism after achieving victory in the Cold War — or rather the victory of one particular form of managerialism: liberal managerialism.

We might divide the ongoing managerial revolution into roughly three eras, the first running from the French Revolution’s Cult of Pure Reason through to WWII; the second through the “post-war” era until 1989; and the third dawning with the end of the Cold War, alongside the concurrent emergence of the digital revolution. The end of the Cold War proved a transformative moment because, with the collapse of the Soviet Union — but before the rise of China — the Western liberal managerial regime appeared to have triumphed over its last remaining major competitor. The world had once contained not one but three rival ideological forms managerialism: liberalism, communism, and fascism. Fascism was crushed in WWII, but for decades Soviet communism still remained a competitor to liberalism. With its fall, however, liberal managerialism was effectively liberated from all restraint, the last dam was broken and the way opened for it to rush into the global power vacuum and seek complete domination.

Pinkoski argues that “1989 unleashed the revolutionary impulse in Western elites.” I concur completely. But what was the nature of this revolutionary impulse, exactly? He writes this in the context of resurgent appetite for both a new European monetary order and a new American security order. Which, true enough, are among the things that Western elites rushed to achieve. But I think these were only expressions of the full revolutionary impulse unleashed within the managerial elite: a giddy urge to fulfill their manifest destiny by expanding the mandate of their managerial apparatus to an unprecedented, truly global scope.

Whereas once these managers’ drive for technocratic control, social engineering, and cultural bulldozing had been largely restricted to the national level, these impulses could now be advanced to their maximum extent — i.e. to the whole world. And so we see the managerial elite almost immediately declare the nation-state obsolete once grander supranational opportunities beckon. The objects of managerial ambition become “global problems” necessitating “global solutions” and indeed “global governance.” Suddenly issues like the flow of “human capital” (aka mass migration) become complexities to be managed at the level of a global system, removing them from the legitimate concern of mere nations. This is the true meaning of the “globalism” which happened to appear at this moment in history: not free trade or anything so utilitarian, per se, but the conceptual expansion of the managerial elite’s eager, grasping reach to the entire planet.

In this context, the American managerial regime’s compulsion to begin attempting to surveil and manage the bank accounts of the whole world is wholly unsurprising — indeed it was essentially inevitable, as was the EU’s thirst for imposing monetary, regulatory, and ideological unity across the whole of Europe (and now beyond, as Elon Musk and others have discovered); as was the reckless expansion of NATO; as was the near-universal transformation of representative democracy into “managed democracy,” and so on. These things happened for exactly the same reason that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchiks invented themselves and burrowed into all our institutions, and why we now face the emergence of a transnational “censorship industrial complex” determined to minutely manage every word uttered on the internet: managerialism is a cancer, and cancers metastasize, it’s just what they do.

Before I conclude, however, let me address what I expect is one key difference in perspective between Pinkoski and myself: that is, the question of whether or not this managerial regime should be described as “liberal.” Pinkoski calls our actually existing regime “postliberal” on the view that “the cornerstone commitment of liberalism is to a meaningful distinction between society and the state.” But from my perspective that isn’t really a particularly liberal commitment at all; rather, liberalism has always been first and foremost about “liberation” (which is, after all, right there in the name).

Now, I’ve already described liberationism as a key part of managerial ideology, but this is perhaps to understate its centrality. For any managerial regime there is no more important task, no higher calling, than to relentlessly seek to crush the only real threat such a regime can face: any other social force able to compete for the loyalty and obligation of citizens. Any independent social sphere — any guild, association, church, tribe, or family, and any home town, region, or today even nation — is an obstacle to universal management (and to the universal proliferation of managers). For managerialism, all such communities and attachments represent competing power centers, and thus all barriers must urgently be dissolved, all bonds broken, all distinctions homogenized. All bottom-up functions once performed by other social spheres, from insurance against the risks of life to the achievement of personal fulfillment, must be replaced by top-down bureaucratic management. The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

Did liberalism ever really stand in opposition to this crusade for total liberation? I honestly can’t see a time that it ever did; in fact, it seems to have always served as precisely the universal acid employed to do the job. Dissolving traditional bonds and limits has always been the heart of the liberal project. Thus I’m not sure we can say that liberalism ever held back the invasion of the public into the private; the progressive collapse of that distinction was actually its inevitable outcome. And so I think it’s fair to argue that we don’t yet wander in a postliberal age, but at liberalism’s apogee.

If a new, truly alternative civilization is ever to arrive, it will only do so in the wake of liberal managerialism’s self-induced implosion, and will have to be deliberately constructed — or, rather, reconstructed — out of the very same kind of strong communal and spiritual ties and identities that liberal managerialism has always sought to tear apart and devour.