The MAGA New Right

James Burnham

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James Burnham (1905–1987)

Princeton-educated philosopher and Trotskyist-turned-conservative; National Review senior editor (1955–1978); author of The Managerial Revolution (1941) and Suicide of the West (1964); the *NR* circle’s principal Cold War strategist; defender of European colonialism and Iberian authoritarianism in the postwar conservative movement; late-life Catholic convert; the figure George Orwell both attacked and was deeply influenced by.

Why He Matters Here

Burnham is one of the wiki’s most consequential previously-omitted nodes. Three reasons:

  1. The Managerial Revolution (1941) thesis. Burnham argued that capitalism and socialism were both being displaced by a new ruling order — “managerial” rather than capitalist or proletarian — concentrated in administrative bureaucracies. This is the direct ancestor of Curtis Yarvin’s “The Cathedral” and of contemporary New Right anti-administrative-state rhetoric. Christopher Caldwell’s *Age of Entitlement* is structurally Burnhamite. Sam Francis’s “Beautiful Losers” derives its core argument from Burnham. Deneen’s anti-elite framing in Regime Change is Burnham filtered through MacIntyre.
  2. Iberian admiration. Burnham was the most prolific and most unembarrassed NR defender of Franco, Salazar, and Portuguese colonialism. His 1975 obituary called Franco “our century’s most successful ruler.” The wiki’s Iberian Vistas-era reading of postwar Catholic conservatism is, in significant part, a Burnham-traced lineage.
  3. The Schmittian friend-enemy register, avant la lettre. Burnham’s Cold War strategic writing (The Struggle for the World, 1947; Containment or Liberation?, 1953; Suicide of the West, 1964) treats geopolitics in terms structurally identical to Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, without citing Schmitt. The contemporary New Right’s Schmittian register has a parallel American genealogy through Burnham.

Career

  • Born Chicago 1905; Princeton (BA), Balliol College Oxford (BA); NYU philosophy (1929–1953).
  • 1930s Trotskyist. Co-edited New International with Max Shachtman; broke with Trotsky in 1940 over the USSR’s character (Burnham argued the USSR was the prototype of his managerial society, not a workers’ state).
  • 1941: The Managerial Revolution. Bestseller. Predicted that the WWII outcome, regardless of victor, would consolidate the rule of “managers.” Profoundly influenced Orwell (who attacked the book in “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” 1946, but borrowed its tripolar geopolitics for Nineteen Eighty-Four).
  • 1947: The Struggle for the World. Cold War manifesto written before the term “Cold War” was canonical. Argued only American world-empire could prevent Soviet domination.
  • 1955: founding senior editor of *NR*. Buckley considered him the most important intellectual figure on the magazine. NR foreign-policy columnist 1955–1978; coined or popularized many NR-style phrases.
  • 1964: Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Defining late-period statement: liberalism is a death wish, the West’s “shrinkage” is a function of liberal guilt, the only solution is anti-Communist resolve.
  • Late life Catholic conversion. Per Zúquete & Hawley, Burnham (like Frank Meyer) converted at the end of his life — part of the postwar conservative movement’s striking Catholic gravitational pull.
  • 1983: Reagan awarded Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “He has profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world.”

Key Ideas

The Managerial Revolution

Burnham’s thesis: ownership of the means of production is being displaced by control of the means of production. The new ruling class is the cadre that runs corporations, government bureaucracies, and the military — not stockholders, not workers. The political form of managerial society is technocratic, transnational, anti-democratic.

The argument has two New Right afterlives:

  1. The Anti-Administrative-State right. Deneen, Vermeule (with Vermeule’s twist of capturing rather than dismantling the bureaucracy), Bannon’s “deconstruction of the administrative state,” Project 2025’s Schedule F all proceed from a Burnham-shaped diagnosis.
  2. The “ruling class” right. Angelo Codevilla’s 2010 American Spectator essay (foundation of Limbaugh’s vocabulary and Anton’s Flight 93) is structurally Burnham. So is Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral.” So is Sam Francis’s “managerial revolution from above” framing.

Suicide of the West

The wiki’s structural reading: Burnham’s 1964 book is the NR circle’s most ambitious diagnosis of liberalism as civilizational pathology — and it preceded Why Liberalism Failed by 54 years with substantially the same argument, but framed in Cold War rather than Catholic terms. Deneen does not cite Burnham; the resemblance is structural.

Iberian Admirations

Per Iberian Vistas:

  • Defended Franco at length in NR over decades. 1975 obituary: “Francisco Franco was our century’s most successful ruler.”
  • Wrote serial defenses of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique. 1961 on Angola: “The Portuguese have been in Angola for four hundred years. Before them, there was nothing, historically speaking… Take Portugal away, and a social chaos is left.”
  • Praised Salazar as a “faithful ally” who was unembarrassed about anti-Soviet conviction.
  • 1964: “Left-wing trade unionists and Marxian politicians massacred by Franco strike a liberal’s attention more forcibly than nuns, priests and tradition-minded peasants massacred by Franco’s opponents.”

The pattern is the wiki’s typifying case for postwar Catholic conservatism’s Iberian admiration: anti-communism plus Catholic civilization plus tactical authoritarianism.

Cross-References

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