It’s déjà vu all over again as so-called ‘dissidents’ twist themselves into knots to claim a conservative legend for their own.
It’s déjà vu all over again as so-called ‘dissidents’ twist themselves into knots to claim a conservative legend for their own.
J ames Burnham is having a moment — but if the man William F. Buckley once called National Review’s “No. 1 intellectual influence” could see who was mainstreaming him, he might stand athwart them, yelling Stop.
A motley crew of intellectuals — from influential bloggers to edgy podcasters all the way up to mainstream policy wonks and think-tankers — have suddenly discovered Burnham’s genius. The strangest part: These factions don’t have much in common. The “monarchist” Substack writer Curtis Yarvin (far-right by most standards), the hosts of the Red Scare podcast (recovering progressives), and an assemblage of booster publications for what is now called the “New Right” (a hazily defined offshoot of conservatism looking to capture leftover populism from the Trump years) all have Burnham on the brain.
The question remains whether these groups can assemble a coherent political philosophy, as they aren’t even interested in Burnham for coherent reasons. Burnham wanted to empower America’s political culture with robust, patriotic institutions. The jury is out on whether the current crop of irony-poisoned, cynical intellectuals have ever grasped this fundamental component of his work.
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Burnham’s political development was messy, to say the least. Like many on the National Review A-team, Burnham (one of NR’s founding editors) not only used to be a communist, but a pretty important one. Burnham was foundational in establishing many leftist organizations and political parties at a time when international communism punched above its weight in the U.S.
Burnham’s unlikely journey from Marxist to arch-conservative begins with 1930s Trotskyism. As Yarvin (a popular thinker among modern right-wingers who dissent from mainstream conservatism) has said, “in the 30s, basically anyone who was smart or cool was a communist.” There is truth here — American communists constructed a hyper-exclusive, salon-style elite culture. And Burnham was certainly smart (he literally wrote the book on undergraduate philosophy) and cool (reputed biographer Sam Tanenhaus suggests that Burnham and Buckley once tripped out together at an arthouse movie theater).
So smart and cool was Burnham that he saw cracks in the edifice of 20th-century communism before any of his comrades. Not only did he explicate fundamental philosophical disagreements with Marxism bred over his time in the Workers Parties, but he also harshly critiqued Trotsky, his friend and mentor.
In Science and Style, Burnham called out Trotsky’s support for the USSR as facile, now that the West grasped the depths of its brutality. Cutting deeper, Burnham dissected Trotsky’s personal hostility to criticism. Burnham saw it as evidence that Trotsky was a political loser, clinging to his remaining supporters inside the very regime that exiled him, all while Stalin’s goons continually hunted Trotsky down as a hated dissident. Burnham’s analysis was prophetic. Six months later in Mexico City, Trotsky was killed by an ice-axe blow to the skull, delivered by a Soviet assassin in Stalin’s employ.
Such grisliness left Burnham with a distaste for this elite Western ideology, and in the following years he shed more Marxism as he moved rightward. However, Burnham’s intellectual development remained unorthodox even at conservatism’s flagship publication. Such unconventionality is where his brilliance lies, even as New Right commentators swoop in to say that Burnham simply and neatly fits into a little box called “neoreaction.” This shiny bit of terminology is vague; what it signifies depends on who’s talking. Supposed “neoreactionaries” stretch from Yarvin himself, to French anti-Jacobin Joseph de Maistre, to Thomas Hobbes. But Burnham’s views don’t even gel with Hobbes, much less obscure pet intellectuals.
In reality, Burnham’s moderate rightward shift occurred because he witnessed a massive disconnect between political rhetoric and reality. That led him to Niccolò Machiavelli and the later “Italian School.” This remains the only real shared interest between Burnham and Yarvin.
Burnham’s pivot from leftism to Machiavelli’s pragmatism occurs in his first two books, The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. Burnham confessed he retained “remnants of Marxism” during the writing process.
The Marxism is more obvious in The Managerial Revolution given Burnham’s general cynicism about the post-war global order. He retained the fundamental Marxist view that capitalism would pass into history due to its internal contradictions (a critique inherited from Vladimir Lenin). However, Burnham’s disenchantment with Trotsky forced him to revisit this orthodoxy: Maybe capitalism couldn’t win out, but neither could the socialist utopia, with its infighting and often-lethal bickering. Instead, the system that seemed ascendant in both right- and left-wing totalitarian states was a boring, stable bureaucracy of middle managers. He anticipated the new managerial elite as so politically solid that it could slowly displace all political alternatives.
Burnham’s follow-up, The Machiavellians, states that the true guardians of rights and liberties are not public-facing politicians. In fact, the freedom fighters are deeply practical, behind-the-scenes no-names, speaking plain truths about gritty political realities. The high-minded rhetoric of human-rights-based Western politics stretching back to Dante Alighieri may even propagandize politicians and the demos into unjust, tyrannical deeds; the rhetoric makes evil appear virtuous.
From these premises, it’s clear that Burnham was no typical American conservative. His analysis was intentionally amoral and descriptive — resembling Machiavelli’s own work. He still had pretensions to “scientific” political analysis, excised of all bias. Karl Marx claimed that his philosophy abided by a set of “scientific procedures,” and even Burnham’s fight with Trotsky was about which had a more “scientific” description of the USSR.
Burnham was in a nebulous ideological space, caught between Marx and Machiavelli. This may be why so many fresh-faced “dissidents” fall in love with Burnham’s early books; they see their own intellectual ambiguity mirrored. Yarvin, a walking ideological contradiction (a “recovering libertarian”-turned-monarchist), makes better friends with Red Scare’s left-ish iconoclasts, Anna and Dasha, than with straight-ahead conservatives.
In real-time, one can see these supposedly edgy thinkers converge on a milquetoast middle; Red Scare, the podcast of two rehabilitated progressives, hosts Yarvin and a panoply of obscure alt-right Twitter posters. A Red Scare host in turn speaks at an event for Compact magazine, a publication associated with the revanchist New Right. Sohrab Ahmari, a Compact co-founder, vacillates between using his brainchild’s pages either to endorse Donald Trump for 2024 or publish defenses of critical theory alongside old-school Marxist Slavoj Žižek. Having diverse influences as an intellectual is often good, but these publications, with these intellectuals? They’re simply blending all the most fringe, garbled, esoteric ideas from the radical left and right into a slurry, shouting “dissent!”
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Since this dissident coalition couldn’t get any looser, its Burnham-convergence seems arbitrary. The man co-founded a magazine to which they’re, at best, indifferent, and he’s obscure within modern academic circles. The dissidents’ appreciation is also incurious and limited, as they never read past The Machiavellians.
For the transgressive personalities of Red Scare, the explanation is pretty straightforward: They never claim to be anything besides hot-take merchants. Even when they discuss Burnham, it becomes irreverent, as they laugh at the idea that any intelligent person needs Machiavelli to mansplain that politicians are evil. Their attachment to Burnham is emotional or aesthetic. They feel a kinship with Burnham, who described The Machiavellians as his recovery “after seven Trotskyist years.” The duo are, after all, former Bernie Sanders supporters who underwent that “mugging by reality” which makes many intellectuals — Burnham, Kristol, etc. — into conservatives.
Yarvin’s attachment also may be sentimental. Both he and Burnham both appreciate Machiavelli, and he views himself, like Burnham, as a fellow-traveler among left-wing elites. (He frequently refers to his exotic, far-flung upbringing as a “Foreign Service brat.”)
But Yarvin’s New Right acolytes (whether blogging, think-tanking, or running for Senate in Arizona) misunderstand Burnham more deeply. The pull to his early books indicates that the stodgy, serious side of this movement wants an excuse to smuggle Marxism’s amoral, ruthless side into conservatism. Stopping at The Machiavellians allows the New Right to conveniently negate Burnham’s later revisions.
Burnham’s early attachment to the “scientific” model of politics meant that his Machiavellian analysis was descriptive (what is) rather than prescriptive (what should be). Since Burnham arrives at his early conclusions without reference to better moral alternatives, New Right-ers fill the vacuum with their own pet theories. New Right–adjacent institutions such as the Claremont Institute’s various outlets and publications, among them the American Conservative, rush in; nowadays, Burnham’s Machiavellians comprise a grand “cathedral” (Yarvin’s word) — a sinister alliance of the government, media, and academia in a distributed, intangible, power-sharing conspiracy.
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The New Right has copped lefty tactics rather well, as it imagines the “cathedral’s” destruction in a way that echoes the Marxist “war of position.” The war of position posits that the slow takeover of elite institutions is preferable to outright revolution in states with strong democratic or civic culture. Antonio Gramsci took the “war of position” terminology, which formerly applied in limited-use cases to Italian history, and made it applicable across Western politics by fusing it with the idea of “passive revolution.”
Gramsci believed that militant “domination” was only one aspect of power politics. He said another factor was required. He wrote in his Prison Notebooks that “a social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power)” (see p. 57 here). Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Noelle Smith, Gramsci’s English translators, tell us (p. 207 in the same source) that he views the West as unique in this way, compared to its eastern or communist opponents: “Gramsci suggests that in the west civil society resists, i.e. must be conquered, before the frontal assault on the State.”
The key to slowly wearing down civil society is gradually, persistently scouting out well-credentialed, dependable ideologues, and staffing them in all the powerful positions — the so-called “long march through the institutions” (though this was not, in fact, Gramsci’s phrase for it). And Burnham’s New Right fans think he gives them the tool set to do it.
Jeremy Carl at the American Conservative invokes The Managerial Revolution to explain that, to win, the post-Trump GOP must “reach out to a portion of the hated elites” not served by the current regime (so, right-wing) as a means to displace other elites. This premise veers into bizarre territory, as Carl assumes that such a cohort would be composed of “white-male leaders” who will “advance the legitimate interests of white voters.”
Burnham’s own conclusions never resemble such mustache-twirling villainy. His views matured as he shed the Marxist desire for “scientific” political theory. As he became deeply patriotic, his thinking took on a moral dimension. His books from the late 1940s onward spoke with great clarity about America’s virtues in direct contrast with the Soviet Union.
Burnham wasn’t an isolationist. Nor was he a moderate. He was a second-to-none hawk, even offering up his services to the CIA’s predecessor to develop anti-Soviet psychological warfare.
The Cold War example is telling, because foreign policy functions as a microcosm of the differences between Burnham and the New Right. This new cohort hosts the National Conservatism Conference with panel groups like “Woke World Order,” giving isolationism a fresh coat of culture-war paint. So what does the New Right perspective here share with that of Burnham, the author of a decades-spanning, definitive foreign-policy column for National Review titled “The Third World War”?
Burnham sought to strengthen Western institutions — to invigorate them by abolishing the inefficiencies that hamper large agencies. Containment or Liberation? contextualized this view of the intelligence agencies’ role in Soviet disintegration. It is a 254-page-long attempt at a one-word answer: “liberation.” This liberation would come primarily through two elite institutions that fall into Yarvin’s definition of oligarchy: the top military brass and the intelligence agencies. If American institutions — from entrenched foreign-policy elites to the administrative state — are an oligarchy, Burnham wanted to grow and feed the oligarchy, not subvert or strangle it. “The reality is that the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire which will be, if not literally world-wide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control,” Burnham wrote. “The United States cannot help building an Empire.”
“Fortress America” was the reigning leftist view through much of Burnham’s life — from the Wilson administration’s reluctance to getting involved in World War I all the way to the instinctual isolationism of the hippies regarding Vietnam — with the exception of the paleoconservative fringe. When it came from liberals, Burnham leveled a devastating critique of Fortress America (an ideology “Flight 93 Election” author and New Right Claremonster Michael Anton used to mock supporters of Ukraine, as early as four days into the conflict, for daring to believe that “American power” could do any good). It’s a placebo, an excuse for defeatism. Describing the West’s early defeats in the Cold War, Burnham wrote in his 1964 work Suicide of the West:
What does liberalism do about these terrible, soul-shattering losses, defeats and withdrawals? . . . Liberalism does not and cannot stop them, much less win back what has been lost; indeed in many instances it has, rather, helped them along. But what liberalism can and does do, what it is marvelously and specifically equipped to do, is to comfort us in our afflictions; and then, by a wondrous alchemy, to transmute the dark defeats, withdrawals and catastrophes into their bright opposites: into gains, victories, advances.
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Burnham’s trust in American power, regardless of its form, is what made him a more genuine radical than anyone in the New Right. Burnham appears to the right of Joseph de Maistre (to modify a saying) when defending the institutions that Yarvin dismisses. Congress and the American Tradition explains our mysterious institutions in positively blood-and-throne traditionalist terms: “The theory and practice of government are incomplete without the introduction of a non-rational element. Without some allowance for magic, luck or divine favor, we cannot give convincing explanations [for why a government succeeds or fails].”
This little-read but tremendous work shows how a group of 535 parliamentary oligarchs are the core of American political life. Of course, Congress combines the two forms of government that aren’t monarchic. Yarvin isn’t hot on Congress because it’s an oligarchic sector of the “cathedral” charged with blocking the president’s unilateral control. This diagnosis gets it backwards: Burnham shows the American system to be centered on Congress. Not only is it an oligarchic institution, but it also functions as a holding tank for the successful candidates of democratized, recurring elections.
Burnham was even acerbic toward ideological allies when they remained unrealistic or too ideological regarding American power — e.g., his amusing habit of placing “libertarian” in scare quotes, or standing athwart Barry Goldwater. Burnham broke from his National Review colleagues in finding Goldwater too divisive to become president (vindicated again).
The New Right also borrows Burnham-adjacent terminology, like the American “regime,” now conceptualized as the domestic branch of the “Woke World Order.” This usage has crept into 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’s language critiquing our activist FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago. Burnham understood such power-politics-oriented terminology, but defined it differently. A regime was simply a government, “strong enough to defend the nation,” including from internal threats. And Burnham desired the American regime’s unmitigated success.
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This burgeoning New Right claims an intellectual inheritance in Burnham’s early years — his most ruthless and leftist period. But investigating his full political development reveals that Burnham had second thoughts on Machiavelli, and abandoned the leftist attachments the New Right seems to envy so much. Burnham exchanged them for (still practical and grounded) patriotism and conservative morality.
Buckley once called Burnham a “strategic prophet” — an honorific referencing his Cold War stance. But Burnham also strategized prophetically about many political truths.
Burnham divined that Americans would see their daily lives bureaucratized through their employers and status-anxiety-plagued middle managers. He divined a hidden Machiavellian design behind humanitarianism, originating in Dante, evolving into the 20th century’s twin heresies of fascism and communism. He divined the spiritual crisis of the modern liberal — committed to peace, rights, and freedom, yet rabidly against using force to safeguard such virtues — but not before divining the mystical purpose of American ideals, and the coming defeat of the communist world order.
For a thinker who divined so much, the least his attempted protégés could do is figure out that the least important part of Burnham’s legacy — and the worst part for the right to imitate — is his long-discarded Marxism.