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April 12, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
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James Burnham: Power and Prophecy
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Hey guys, Gregory Hood here.
I'm here with Chris Roberts and welcome to Left, Right & White.
Today we're going to be talking about the political thought of James Burnham.
But before we get into that, I wanted to talk a little bit more about what this podcast is really going to be about.
We're not here to just talk about here are some guys and these are some interesting abstractions and we're just going to listen to ourselves for an hour or so.
What we're trying to do here is get to grips with some of the ideas that we need to understand to build an ideological foundation for power and to understand how to pursue political power.
And that's why I wanted to start with Burnham, because more than anyone else, he was probably the figure in the conservative movement that talked the most about power, and the real nature of power, and how to get it.
And perhaps because of that reason, he's probably the most neglected.
I mean, this is a guy who was with National Review for a very long time.
Well, and in its heyday, too.
Yeah, and he also won the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Reagan.
Yeah, in 1983, that's right.
And yet, in terms of the conservative movement, he's had really no contemporary following as far as the established institutions are concerned.
Yeah, he's coming back a little bit on the fringes.
I know Roger Kimball is a big fan of his, and the new Trumpian journal, American Affairs, which I really recommend.
Their writers draw a lot on Burnham and his theory of the managerial revolution, which we'll get into here.
But aside from that, yeah.
He's never talked, nobody references Burnham in like National Review or like the Weekly Standard or anything like that.
I mean there were there were decades where he basically just sort of disappeared from the canon, which is sad to say the least.
And there's a reason for that because Burnham Basically took a sledgehammer to a lot of the comforting myths of the American conservative movement.
Ideas about American exceptionalism, ideas that conservatives are just destined to win no matter what, ideas about free markets and limited government and freedom, whatever the heck that is supposed to mean, being the cure-all to all our solutions.
Burnham instead had a pretty Well, I mean his word, Machiavellian sense of this is what power is, this is how it operates, this is how you have to understand it.
That's right.
And so what I'm going to do here is to save you guys all a lot of trouble if you really want to get to grips with who is this guy and why should we as white advocates and race realists care about what this guy had to say.
I'm going to recommend something that is still on Amazon Kindle.
We'll see for how long.
I'd love to see if I can get the rights to it.
It's a 99 cent little monograph from the late, great Samuel T. Francis, who of course was basically the philosopher king of our movement.
I certainly would not be where I am without having devoured his works at a relatively young age.
That makes two of us.
It's called The Other Side of Modernism.
And what he talks about in this little monograph, very brief, is he says, this is Francis, he says that the conservative movement really had two wings for most of its history.
There was the traditionalist wing, which I guess could best be exemplified by somebody like Russell Kirk.
I'm not going to get into that now, but short version traditionalism is you believe in Some sort of supernatural moral authority.
You believe in tradition for its own sake.
We need to look to our ancestors because if we go with modernity, then everything is permitted and things fall apart.
And then the other wing would be the libertarian wing, which is essentially free markets, capitalism, opposition to communism and socialism, and what we call fusionism, which is when you try to kind of mash these two random things together That's basically been the American conservative movement.
It's been a fusionist movement.
It's been those two wings.
Yeah, ever since the 1950s.
Right.
And Burnham does not fit into either one of those camps.
As Francis points out, Burnham is very much a modernist.
And what we mean by a modernist is he doesn't appeal to a supernatural authority Or some overarching moral order that we have to organize our lives around.
Yeah, he doesn't reflexively reference God or the abstract and ever-malleable concept of conservative values.
Right, right.
Because as we know from just looking at the conservative movement, those timeless truths and conservative values seem to change every five years or so.
A bit more rapidly these days, depending on whatever documentary David French happens to catch on Netflix.
Burnham was somebody who looked at the way power was built really from the bottom up.
There was not some supernatural moral order, but politics, as he put it, was the science of power.
And so when we talk about politics, we're not talking about how do we build a good society.
We're not talking about how do we fulfill God's ideal realm on earth or bring about human happiness.
What we're talking about is men have a limitless appetite for power.
They fight each other over it.
How do they get it?
How do they keep it?
What are they willing to do to each other?
That's what politics is all about.
And Burnham believed, and this is where you might get a little doubtful about it.
He believed that you could develop what he called the science of power.
Which basically that there were certain rules that you could Study and understand and then you could predict later political outcomes.
To be frank, that's probably the one thing where I disagree with him a bit because his own predictions weren't quite there.
But just about everything else in terms of analyzing what's going on, this is really where you should begin if you're trying to understand what we live under.
Well, and he's got this great quote on power, which is, No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of goodwill,
no religion will restrain power.
Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders nor businessmen,
neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of
power.
Absolutely.
And this includes no pieces of paper like the Constitution, for all the conservatives and libertarians out there who
think that some legal norm is going to stop your enemies from taking
your stuff.
It doesn't work that way.
Power checks power, and only power can check power.
And you have to begin with that if you want to start thinking about politics.
Now, like I think a lot of the more creative People on the American right.
He started off on the left very much.
He became a college Marxist.
That's right.
Like so many of the others.
And like also so many of the others, he was a Trotskyite.
His work had a big impact on guys like George Orwell.
One of the little known facts is that the three super states in 1984 Oceania, Eurasia, and East Asia, right?
They were based on what Burnham had described as the super states that were emerging in one of his more famous books.
This was somebody who Orwell actually had a lot of criticism of because he thought that Burnham essentially fetishized power and talked about it too much to the exclusion of all of the things.
Well, George Orwell was a dedicated democratic socialist, and... Yeah, he was not a man of the right, like so many conservatives like to pretend today.
And I think, in his heart of hearts, I think Orwell was really uncomfortable with the extent to which Burnham could kind of see through the fallacies of social democracy.
Yeah.
And Burnham was just too aware of power and how power is wielded to think that we were ever going to reach this So, post-scarcity utopia in which, you know, we have this benevolent government that, you know, provides all of these various social services.
And I mean, he, Burnham, to some extent, saw that as an insider.
He didn't quit.
He didn't really fully drop communism until 1940, so he was one of the people who really bought whole hog into the promises of the Soviet Union in his heady college days and realized that this just wasn't going anywhere, this wasn't creating utopia on Earth, and there were serious issues with this ideology.
He was kind of early On that, a lot of the intellectuals who kind of caught the first wave of Marxism being really in vogue in the 20s and 30s didn't drop it until the 50s or even the 1960s.
Right.
And I think his critiques were good enough that Orwell, that they just ate up Orwell.
I mean, yeah, I think he pretty much demolished the idea that power can ever be innocent or power can ever be Something that can be used for the general good.
I mean one of the premises of Burnham is essentially a ruling class will use power to protect itself.
Full stop.
Now maybe sometimes that'll be for your best interest too.
Maybe.
But they're always looking And he didn't say this, but this was something somebody once told me early on in my political career, and it's stuck with me ever since.
Every time you hear somebody talk, you have to ask yourself, how does this person benefit if I believe what they're saying?
And that should always be in your mind when you're discussing political ideas.
The great thing about Burnham is that he punctures through not just things like communism or utopia on earth, but even the claims of anti-racism, of equality, or maybe perhaps troublingly to American conservatives, just ideas about democracy or individualism or capitalism or freedom.
These to Burnham were so much, they were ghosts.
They weren't even real.
These are just words.
Ideology is the mask that power wears.
So, Sam Francis's The Other Side of Modernism, I think, is the best quick take on Burnham, but to get into more of what he said, I would say probably his best book, although not the most famous within the conservative movement, we'll get to that a bit later, but his best book and his most important book, I would say, is not even about the managerial estate, but it's probably the Machiavellians, because that talks the most about what power is, and he traces a whole tradition With Machiavelli, with Pareto, Mosca.
You don't need to go through all these guys individually, but the general takeaway is that ideas and the high rhetoric that people use to push people forward to do what they want, this is just a cover for pursuing concrete interests.
And so I want to read one quick thing about it.
Where he says, early on he dissects what would be considered, I guess, really the first political, one of the first political science books in the post-classical world which was Dante's De Monarchia.
And De Monarchia was a book about basically pleading for like the Holy Roman Emperor to come in and take over Florence.
But it was Dante, who of course you know is famous for his poetry, he writes this long theory about how the goal of government is like a world brotherhood of man and everybody for the Emperor to bring everybody to salvation and just all these extraordinary utopian goals.
And Burnham goes into it and breaks it all down and essentially says, wait a minute, what he's really talking about here was he had some narrow parochial interest, which is that he got kicked out of the city and he wanted some outsider to come in and boot out the people who were his enemies, so then he could take over himself.
And so I guess you could say Burnham teaches you to think that people are always operating in bad faith because he uses this example to differentiate between what he calls the formal argument and the real argument.
The formal meaning of the text and the real meaning of the text.
The formal meaning is what people say.
So the formal meaning is something like, we're pursuing a brotherhood of man.
We're pursuing an anti-racist society.
We're pursuing a fair economy.
The real meaning is something that says, we're trying to dismantle national sovereignty.
We're trying to make sure my ethnic group gets goods at the expense of your ethnic group.
We're trying to make sure that we can take your stuff.
And all political rhetoric, or the vast majority of political rhetoric, as Burnham sees it, is couched in this way.
You use very idealistic language.
You use goals that most people presume to be good.
You use cliches.
This is the formal meaning of the text.
But with work, you can penetrate the real meaning of the text and see what's the concrete thing that these people are trying to bring about.
This is what political rhetoric is.
And he says, this method, this is Burnham.
This method, whose intellectual consequence is merely to confuse and hide, can teach us nothing of the truth, can in no way help us to solve the problems of our political life.
In the hands of the powerful and their spokesmen, however, used by demagogues or hypocrites, or simply the self-deluded, and that's important, this method is well designed, and the best, to deceive us, and to lead us by easy routes to the sacrifice of our own interests and dignity, in the service of the mighty.
Now that point about self-delusion is critical because if you're looking at politics in this way all the time, you're sort of presupposing that these guys are cynical and smart manipulators who are pursuing something that they know what they're getting.
But that's not always true.
I mean, some of these people really do believe what they're saying.
But he's saying that even that doesn't matter.
It's all about the pursuit of concrete interests.
And in the Machiavellians, what he does, drawing on these other thinkers, is he talks about the impossibility of democracy and the impossibility of self-governance, really.
Because in any kind of society, in any social gathering, hierarchy is inevitable, elites are inevitable, and there exists what's called the iron law of oligarchy.
And so, I'm always reminded, I'm going to butcher his name, but Slavoj Zizek, you know, Slashov Zizek.
Thank you, you're better.
See, you get the pronunciation down better than I do, but I remember listening to one of these interviews, and of course he's wiping his nose and stuff, and he's talking about the stupidity of anarcho-collectivism, much to the chagrin of much of the audience, and he's saying, but I don't want to be sitting in some stupid meeting for six hours a day to talk about water.
I want to be alienated at some point and just have these things and water and medical care.
I immediately thought of Burnham because that is what it is.
If you've ever tried to be among people, if you've ever been in anarchist circles where they're trying to organize themselves, it's just forever committees and talking in circles and going around and around and eventually a hierarchy manifests because that's just how it is in every society.
And Burnham goes further and says that after every revolution, after every change in the elites, or what they call the circulation of the elites, in every one of these circumstances, you are going to have people who take over, who are pursuing their own self-interest, and they will give you arguments about why they should be in charge, but you have to be aware that these arguments are a rationalization for defending their position.
And you could say, well, that's cynical.
That's cold-hearted.
And, you know, you might even say Machiavellian.
And even, what, a hundred years after he had lived, Machiavelli was still a byword for murder and brutality and terror, essentially.
But Burnham is trying to rehabilitate him and saying, no, having a cynical outlook toward those in power is actually good.
Because that doesn't lead you to terror and murder and genocide.
It leads you to the skeptical outlook that the Founding Fathers had.
Which is that you should always be suspicious of those who claim to act in your self-interest.
Because ultimately only you can defend your own self-interest.
You should always be suspicious of those who use vast sweeping moral claims that don't really mean anything in the here and now because that's always some kind of a cover for pursuing what's often a very base and material motive.
When he takes down De Monarchia, he rather brutally says the entire text is completely worthless from the standpoint of actual, that's a quote, yeah, completely worthless from the standpoint of actual politics because These goals don't mean anything in real terms.
If I wrote a political track saying that our goal is to conquer the world, to make everyone happy, to develop everybody to their fullest potential, these are meaningless phrases.
There's no possible measure where you can say we've come this far and therefore we've done it.
Right, because they're subject to absolutely infinite interpretation.
Right.
One of the other examples that Burnham gives is Franklin Delano Roosevelt had this famous speech where he talked about things everybody should have, the four freedoms, and one of them was freedom from want.
And Burnham said, man is a wanting creature.
He always wants, and that quest only ceases in death.
So to say that you want people who are free from want, that doesn't mean anything.
That just means that you're committing your society to an impossible goal.
Now, obviously you white advocates out there need to be nodding along because what are we being told now?
What are we being told by the Biden administration?
What are we being told by academics?
We're being told that we have to pursue a society that is racially equitable.
We have to pursue justice.
We have to pursue fairness.
We have to pursue Something where every single person will have the same opportunity and everybody will have the same sense of belonging to something.
These are meaningless phrases.
They're impossible goals.
And they're not just impossible because we as Race Realists say, look race exists and therefore you're gonna have these differences and things will come about.
They're meaningless goals because there's no possible measure where you can say, that's it.
We've achieved this thing.
We're done.
For example, if we were to pay reparations for slavery, does anyone out there say, okay, the balance is settled, now we can all get along with our lives just as normal Americans?
No.
We all know it's just the setup to the next thing.
Yeah, it's just a treadmill.
Right.
And this is why it's important to understand Burnham, because the left is, frankly, better at the idea of using rhetoric to push people toward impossible goals.
And this skepticism toward power, in theory, is what the American conservative movement has within it.
You know, don't amenitize the eschaton.
This is this phrase, don't pursue utopia on earth.
But often what the conservative movement offers is just more meaningless phrases of our own about limited government, about the Constitution, about freedom.
I'm not interested in hearing those things.
What does that really mean?
What are the realistic goals that we're pursuing?
At what point can we say that a goal has been achieved?
Now, the book that was probably the most famous that Burnham wrote within the conservative movement was Suicide of the West, where he essentially portrayed liberalism, liberalism of the FDR variety, as essentially just a waypoint on the road to civilizational death.
Which, of course, is pretty controversial.
Right, by suicide of the West, what he was fundamentally getting at was that liberalism is the suicide of the West.
And with liberalism being the reigning ideology of the West, this will bring about the very end of the West itself.
Right.
And this is also something that a lot of so-called conservatives don't want to hear, because it points out that liberalism itself is the problem.
And this is the problem with the, you know, the intellectual dark web or any of those types of guys.
We're like, we need to save liberalism from itself.
It's like, no, this is where liberalism has to go.
It can only end this way.
And Burnham, at the beginning, has a very kind of blunt measure of the West's civilizational retreat.
And he admits it is.
He says, just look at a map and look at what was controlled by the West and say before the First World War and then look at it now.
And you see how our civilization is in retreat.
I would argue you could do the same thing now where there'd be entire pockets of what's still considered the United States of America that for all intents and purposes just aren't part of the country anymore and don't exist.
I think Jared Taylor even wrote something about that where he said, you know, there are moments of demographic change in cities where essentially they kind of like teeter off the edge of the cliff and then they're gone.
They're just not part of our country or our people or our nation anymore.
And, of course, Jonah Goldberg stole this title for his own book called The Suicide of the West, where he essentially stole the title and did it to try to defend liberalism, where basically conservatives are the real liberals.
And I find it very hard to believe that he didn't do this on purpose as almost a repudiation, maybe a way to make sure people don't find Burnham's work.
Because what Burnham is saying is far more subversive and far more important than just another thing of, we need to defend freedom, we need to defend liberals from themselves.
And this is critical for the American right because, and for white advocates, because too often we fall into this trap of, can you believe how crazy things are getting?
If only we could go back to the way things were five years ago, 10 years ago, 25 years ago.
But this journey only has one end.
And once you give in to certain ideas, once you say that this is the basis upon which we're going to found our society, it's going to ultimately culminate in liberalism and then suicide and self-destruction.
This is from one of the first pages of Suicide of the West.
James Burnham wrote, Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.
When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism, the beliefs, emotions, and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future, falls into place.
He talks a lot about how this manifests in everyday politics too.
Now, keep in mind, Burnham was writing very much from a Cold War perspective.
And insofar as some of his work is outdated, it would probably have a lot to do with that.
He considered communist civilization, if we can call it that, as almost the West's key existential enemy.
Now, at this point, for those of us who really came to political awareness after the Cold War, we don't fully grasp that.
To us, maybe Russia even seems like more authentic to its tradition and its identity than the so-called free world, but at least today.
But back then, he saw that the liberals were always reluctant to fight on behalf of the West.
It's not that they were communists, but they weren't anti-communists and they were far more suspicious of anti-communists than they were of actual communists.
They never got really worked up about fighting for America's best interests or national honor or opposing the Soviet Union, they were much more concerned
about making sure that the far right was kept down. And Burnham saw this as another sign of
liberalism's moral syphilis, where essentially it disarms you morally and intellectually because it tells
you you no longer have the right to act in your own self-interest or in defense of your own
civilization. And of course, that's the larger problem that whites have because fundamentally we're fed a
morality that says we are not allowed to take our own side.
And nobody comes along and ever asks, well, why do we have to accept that morality?
Furthermore, who is it that's pushing this?
And why would they be doing it?
I mean, the people who are telling us this, what do they get out of this if we believe what they're saying?
And getting whites to realize that no, this is how power works and rhetoric is always a cover for something else.
That's the first step to becoming morally rearmed and reasserting our identity and our race and our civilization.
Well, and in terms of actual literal communism, literal Marxism and contemporary liberalism, James Burnham, who always took the long view of things, like where is this headed, where is this going, where will this leave us, as opposed to the formal arguments of them, very much saw liberalism and communism as not totally interchangeable, but
In terms of just, like, threat assessment functionally similar, and he said that's why you started to see the two somewhat converge, which is an interesting argument coming from somebody who was really well-versed in Marxism.
Something he wrote on this is, quote, The ideological movement has gone both ways.
Just as liberalism shifted toward socialism in its doctrine of the state and its economics, so has the reformist or democratic wing of traditional socialism shifted toward liberalism.
The two have come close to meeting in the concept of what has come to be called the welfare state.
And there they meet up also with still other currents from radicalism, Christian socialism, and even modern, as it is sometimes designated, conservatism."
End quote.
Yeah.
And you definitely, it's, I mean, he was really onto something.
I mean, because he wrote, was writing that in like the 1960s.
This was before you really had these, um, this was before Scandinavia became like completely socially democratic.
And this was before the emergence, you know, Decades and decades before the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a serious contender for the Democrat nomination.
Or Eurocommunism, which is the model they tried to push in the 70s and 80s, which is, we're communists, but we're not necessarily aligned with the Soviet bloc.
Right, and his point was that, you know, for a leftist, you don't really need to be openly aligned with the USSR in order to, you know, disarm the populace, in order to do exactly what you were just talking about.
If you're trying to just keep people from taking their own side, it doesn't matter that much what your opinion of Brezhnev is, or whether you support this or that coup in the third world.
There's plenty of damage you can do at home, so long as you still have that kind of motivating That energizing anti-western impulse in you?
And this is also important when we look at conflicts now.
If we look at something like the Vietnam War now, for those of us who were young enough to, again, see everything from a post-Cold War thing, what's important about the Vietnam War and the New Left was not so much that the Communists won in Vietnam, because let's face it, the guys who run the show there I mean, they're communist in the same way the Chinese are communist, which is to say, not really.
Insofar as America has diplomatic allies in that region, Vietnam is actually one of them.
We have much better ties with Vietnam than we do with China.
What really mattered about Vietnam was it enabled the new left takeover here at home.
Right.
And I know for my European friends... Well, it was the Vietnam War that shifted Hillary Clinton, who had been a Barry Goldwater supporter, To a member of the left and a Democratic Party operative.
And writing on Saul Alinsky.
We'll get into him at some point too.
Not today, but definitely later on.
Somewhere out there is the American for Prosperity guy who used to pay me to go give speeches on Saul Alinsky.
The thing about the new left My European friends, my identitarian friends would call them, you know, the 68ers because what happened while the New Left was taking power here is you had the massive demonstration in France in May 68 that caused Charles de Gaulle to actually flee the country for a little while, go to a military base, make sure he still had the backing of the military before he came back and he then won a major election
Which, in the short term, seemed to empower conservatives.
But in the long term, he lost because the left took over all these institutions of cultural power.
That's the same thing that happened in the United States.
If you look at Richard Nixon, say, absolutely crushing electoral victories.
But at the end of the day, what came of it?
We got affirmative action.
We got the EPA.
We got The administrative state that really runs the show now, which gets us into what is probably Burnham's most influential in terms of even left-wing thinkers will address this, which is the idea of the managerial elite.
And here, he's taking on classical Marxism and saying there's another step, essentially, that Marx had missed.
Well, essentially, there was a class that Marx had missed.
Right, right.
Now, in the Soviet Union, it was actually quite easy to point out who this class was.
They called it the nomen kultura, right?
The new class.
These were basically the Soviet bureaucrats.
And these things were kind of passed down generationally.
I mean, they got their vacation, DACAs and whatever else.
You could tell who these people were.
But he was arguing these people existed in the West, too.
And essentially, what happened was You didn't go from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism to socialism.
Instead, bourgeois capitalism and those values have been replaced by what he called a managerial elite.
And these were the people who were good at managing production and output, but also in some sense managing the culture.
And managing the people.
That's right.
He was talking about technocrats, whether it be in... I mean, for the theory of the managerial class in the West, there's no difference between managers who work in government bureaucracies and private bureaucracies.
His big point was that as technology advanced and society and the economy became more complicated, literal landholders or just the CEOs of enormous companies stopped having This sort of cartoonish level of power that we associate the robber barons of the 1890s with.
As things became more complicated, it was the technocrats and the mid-level managers who really began running the show.
They didn't even really own their own companies, which was the big difference too.
That's right.
Marxists, and to some extent new leftists too, when they talk about bourgeois values, and you talk about things like thrift, or working hard, or patriotism, or Christianity, or whatever old-fashioned things, Burnham was saying these things were actually outdated not because the communists were right, but because this new managerial class had no use for these things.
Because bourgeois values are about building up wealth, about building a property, about having ties to family, about pursuing individual self-interest.
But the managerial class, your power lies in being able to manipulate social outcomes and economic outcomes.
It's about having power over groups.
And so anything that... A good contemporary example is people talked a lot about the deep state opposition to Donald Trump.
This is kind of a perfect dichotomy where Nominally, on paper, you would say, oh well, Trump is the
ultimate elite, he's president, nobody has more power than him.
And yet, there are all of these people throughout the federal government who essentially run
important offices, whether it be for something regarding the FBI or Section 8 housing.
or education or allocating funds and like they're really the untouchables
they're the ones who can actually control everything. Right and they're the
ones who ultimately push the button in terms of social outcomes. If somebody
locates I don't know section 8 housing in your neighborhood, somebody denies or
gives you a grant, if somebody says you can or cannot build something here
because of environmental laws that's some bureaucrat and you have no power to
vote that person in or out of office.
And no matter who you elect, as I think Republicans have learned after three decades of failing to stop the administrative state, those people are always going to be there.
They're the permanent class.
And what you brought up just now, Chris, is very important too, that Burnham didn't really see that hard distinction between the private sector and the public sector.
And I'd argue that's probably the biggest thing that's tripping up the American right now, where you see these abuses by big tech or the financial sector, and all they have is to fall back on these slogans of, well, it's a private company, they can do whatever they want.
You end up in this self-defeating position where you're actually defending the interests of people who openly proclaim themselves to be your enemy.
This is actually what's happening in Georgia right now, as we speak, where Delta, for some reason, Delta has to have an opinion on this, is condemning an election law in Georgia that would tighten up voting requirements.
And Delta is saying, we're going to do all these sanctions and we may not have our hub here in Atlanta anymore and this and the other thing.
Hollywood celebrities are saying we're not going to film things here.
There are calls for a boycott.
And you have to ask yourself, well, why are these things happening?
What interest is being pursued?
And I would argue now whether how much of it is belief or how much of it is self-interest or whether it's a mixture.
The managerial class benefits from a deracinated atomized society.
If you have a family, if you have a national identity, If you have a racial identity, if you have a religious identity, probably that last one may even be the most important in terms of what gets in the way.
If you have anything that gets in the way of being manipulated and managed from above, and if you have anything that gives you an identity other than consumer, that's a problem.
And it is in their institutional interest to break that down.
And Sam Francis taking this idea in Leviathan essentially said, and his other writings I should note, said that what the managerial elite does is it creates problems and then presents itself as the solution to those problems, which is why we have all these NGOs.
And government organizations and private sector organizations that are dedicated to vague things like achieving diversity, solving poverty, solving inequality, bringing about equity.
Things that really can't be solved, but provide a permanent justification.
For power.
Right.
Well, and for a particular type of power, I mean, it assigns, you know, trying to tackle these problems doesn't give a lot of power to people who own a lot of land or people who own an oil and gas company or, you know, people who own, you know, any kind of, you know, like... Real property, essentially.
Yeah, like a textile industry titan.
None of these things that are What we classically associate with the wealthiest people or the most powerful people in business, they don't really stand to gain from any of these types of manipulations.
It's really just those technocrats, or managers in Burnham's term, the people who get to decide what the rules and regulations in any given social situation is and how to enforce them.
Right.
And this is another problem that the American right, and I would include traditionalists here as well, when we think about power, the right is almost too honest about what power should be.
And I would say it's always been this way.
I don't know, honestly, I'd say almost naive.
Yeah, naive is probably the better term.
But I mean, even in terms of like what we would want if you get into the really reactionary circles, it's this, oh, there's a king and we know there's a king.
We have this government official and we know he's the one wielding sovereignty.
The left is better about disguising.
I mean, if you said who is sovereign in the United States, you'd have a very hard time giving a single answer.
But it's clearly not the President, because President Trump couldn't really do anything.
It's clearly not the people, because if you look on issue after issue, things that the vast majority of the American people want will never get acted on.
So somebody's sovereign.
Somebody is the person who decides the exception, as political theorist Carl Schmitt said.
But who is that person?
We don't know.
There's not really one person.
There's just kind of a class, and it's a very amorphous class.
Now, some conservatives have been catching on to this.
I believe it was Angelo Cotevilla, who was a conservative, you know, a more popular conservative writer.
And he had this idea of the ruling class versus the country class.
And when he talked about the ruling class, he talked about those generated by universities and the bureaucracy and things like that.
But he still didn't quite pinpoint it.
And I think that's because Conservatives are naive because they think that we still have this system that works and still functions in the way it's supposed to and it's just a question of, you know, turning the constitutional system in the right direction and we can get everything working.
And what Bernan and Francis would tell us is no.
Looking at government from the viewpoint of a constitution or certain values that it's supposed to represent perennially or even from whatever personality happens to be in charge is not the point.
What you really need to be looking at are social forces, classes, groups of people that have political power behind them and can push things in a certain direction.
What Sam Francis took from this, and Francis, unfortunately, he wrote quite a bit on Burnham, but Sam Francis never quite finished his masterpiece, I guess, lost masterpiece, which would have combined James Burnham's political thought with what's happening with race.
Francis saw the attack on the white race and on white racial identity as a way the managerial elite was expanding its own power.
Again, you're breaking down those things that lie in between the state and you, which are national identities, forms of morality, family attachments, all these things.
But even he couldn't quite complete it totally.
Francis would have had he not died before his time.
Leviathan is the closest we'll have, and Leviathan is probably one of the best introductions to How Burnham's thought relates to us.
But Francis also had an interesting critique of Burnham, which some of Burnham's contemporaries, National Review's Whitaker Chambers, who was another communist, famously wrote a book called Witness, and Whitaker Chambers became a Catholic convert.
And so he would be what we would call a traditionalist.
Whitaker Chambers, I should point out, also thought that the United States would lose the Cold War.
He basically, you know, we're going to lose because it's the right thing to do.
That's kind of the conservative mindset.
But he famously said to Burnham that Burnham was missing something very important when he just completely ignored the numinous, I guess you could say, the supernatural, the idealistic.
Just by focusing on power, you're missing something essential.
And this is important because in the Machiavellians, James Burnham references the thought of Georges Sorel, who was a communist, to be a bit simplistic.
Let's call him a leftist, anarchist, labor organizer type.
And he created this idea of the political myth.
For him, the political myth was the general strike.
All the workers of the world would have a general strike, and then we would be able to seize power.
And if you asked him, what would the general strike actually look like?
What does that mean?
How are you going to pull this off?
That's not really important.
The important thing is that it's a dream that inspires people to action in the here and now, and that's why this idea is important.
Burnham talks about this quite a bit in the Machiavellians, but at the same time he's also telling us we need to dismiss mere rhetoric and focus on the concrete actions being pursued and I'd argue there might be a bit of a problem with Burnham's thought here and Francis talks about this a little bit too where he said This is Sam Francis quoting Whitaker Chambers in his piece on Burnham.
Whitaker Chambers whose own mind reflected a tension between modernism and anti-modern elements ie traditionalism Christianity and and who expressed deep admiration for Burnham, nevertheless
criticized him for his, quote, prudent practical thinking, unquote. The firebird, wrote
Chambers, is glimpsed living or not at all.
In other words, realists have a way of missing truth, which is not invariably realistic.
So what he meant by that is if you are always analyzing political rhetoric from
the standpoint of what are the concrete interests being served here.
That makes you cynical not just of your opponent's political rhetoric, but arguably cynical about your own.
And especially if you're doing the kind of things we're doing.
I mean, you're not going to get... I don't expect to get political power in the next year or so working for American Renaissance.
I mean, maybe.
You're doing it because you have some higher vision.
You do it because you have some ideal you're serving, and you have to authentically believe in that, or else you're not going to put up with all the frustrations that come with it.
And I think Chambers had an excellent point here.
Saul Alinsky, who is a leftist organizer, who I'm sure I don't have to really introduce to many American Renaissance readers, but he famously talked about the idea that a leftist organizer has to have political doublethink.
Which is that you have to be cynical enough to always be thinking in terms that would be familiar to Burnham, what concrete interests am I trying to get?
What alliances can I form?
What am I willing to do to get these ends?
You have to be realistic and pragmatic in that sense, but you also have to have this kind of shining utopian vision, this myth I guess you could say, that keeps you going.
Right, well it's the myth that George Sorel was talking about.
Right.
And Burnham didn't neglect that.
But maybe it's hard for, maybe we can say they didn't fully come to terms with it.
Because you have to, if you're the right, especially if the whole conservative movement is telling you don't pursue utopia, don't work for some cause greater than your own self-interest as defined by, you know, capitalist materialism.
You're going to end up with what we have ended up with, which is a movement that is pretty useless as far as checking leftist power and produces a lot of people who are in it for themselves and in it for the money, in it for the grift.
Well, let's turn this on you.
I mean, how do you personally try and keep this balance between being, you know, Cynical or Machiavellian or simply practical, however you want to call it, about, you know, power and ideology being the mask power wears and striving for kind of concrete goals while also maintaining some level of
Well, the simplest answer is I'm just not a materialist.
or keeping your eye on the prize, or on some level working towards a very distant goal,
no matter how unreachable it seems now.
As a student of James Burnham, who also is at times very idealistic, how do you meld
the two?
Well, the simplest answer is I'm just not a materialist.
For me, communism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin.
I see Burnham as valuable, but I've always, like I've said, and this is where it might
get a little weird for some people, but I always see my intellectual challenges kind
of reconciling of the thought of Burnham with that of Julius Evola, who was a radical traditionalist
thinker.
And who's been pretty inspirational for me.
And it's funny because Evola actually, I was reading some of his stuff the other day, and he was actually citing Demonarchia as like an ideal that should be pursued.
Like, this is what we want!
And so, I mean, you have like two diametrically opposed guys, but they both are unquestionably of the right, and they're coming at problems from different ways.
And You know, the political double-think of a Saul Alinsky, you could do that, okay?
But the way I see it is, and this goes to all of you out there, not to be melodramatic, but we really do just have this one lifetime.
And at some point, you have to make a choice.
And the choice is going to be, will I spend my lifetime pursuing comfort or will I pursue something that is beyond myself with the time that I have?
Because if you decide you're going to pursue material comfort, it's always going to be the easy choice to sell out.
It's always going to be easier to go along with the power structure in the short term.
That's just how it is.
Machiavelli himself even said that a prince, no matter how capable, can't fight the times.
But if you're talking about standing up against the time, if you're talking about being men against time, so to speak, You have to have this vision of something greater that keeps you going and that outlasts you, that outlasts your life, that outlasts even your descendants lives and everything else.
That is something perfect and you live essentially your whole life as kind of a sacrifice to that ideal.
For me, I mean if you want to say like what do you want?
Like what is the endgame?
This idea of a civilization state has been getting a lot of currency in international relations circles lately.
China being the primary example.
Where you have a state that isn't just a representative of an ethnos, or just claim of territory, or even of a political ideology.
Because I think we all recognize that China may claim to be communist, but it's clearly not.
I mean, they name their overseas Like, propaganda bases where they teach classes and stuff, on universities, they call it the Confucius Institute.
Keep in mind, during the Cultural Revolution, they were, like, smashing everything that had to do with Confucius, and saying, like, all of Chinese history before us was evil and stupid and reactionary.
Now they're embracing that stuff, probably because they went through a Cultural Revolution and realized, like, wait a minute, this is a terrible idea!
I mean, what I would want, what I would consider my ultimate goal would basically be a Western civilization state, because I think that the West is at its best.
So like a Greco-Roman China?
I mean, I'd say we're bigger than Greco-Roman, but I think if you think Western civilization is a meaningful term and it's a real thing that exists, if you believe it's inextricably linked to the white race, which also is a thing that exists, it's not just a construct, it's a group, And that the West historically operates best in terms of unity, whether it's opposing an external foe from outside the European continent or even if you want to look at something religious like the Crusades where you had people from, I mean there weren't even nations then, but you had all different kinds of princes and counts and barons and whatever else putting everything aside to go for some greater good.
Those are the types of things I think are most inspirational in Western history and the things that are most important.
When we think of the way the Greeks defeated the Persians, when we think of the Siege of Vienna, when we think of the Crusades, when we think of even the Cold War to some extent, which Burnham was obviously writing about, he framed it in these terms of the free world versus an existential threat.
And say what you will about American policy during the Cold War, a lot of the things that we don't like about today, specifically in regards to racial policy, was done because they were trying to win third world allies.
Now it all backfired of course, that's a separate discussion, but leaving all that aside, and leaving aside American support for what you referred to earlier, Leftist movements that weren't pro-Soviet, but were still bad.
America played a big part in promoting a lot of that stuff.
Despite all of that, you still did have this vague sense of the free world, the West.
The West standing up against an external foe.
That conception is important.
I mean, that's why my big problem with the European Union is not that it's a European Union, it's that it's an anti-European Union.
So would you say that the West needs a new sort of existential threat to unify around?
Well, I think before we can even do that, I think the bigger problem now is just the loss of... there's no we in that sentence, you know?
That we can unify around.
Well, who's we?
And right now, I think America, specifically, and the West in general, is going through... America has an identity crisis, it seems, once every century or so.
At least.
Yeah.
What kind of a country are we supposed to be?
Who actually is American?
What is America all about?
You could argue that goes back to the founding and, you know, oh, it's a nation of ideas or something like that.
But now we're seeing this in Europe, too, where to be a citizen of Germany, of France, of England, It's no longer, oh, you've got to be German, you've got to be French, you've got to be English.
Now, even these states are defining themselves as, well, we're these, you know, democracies and these basically administrative units where you get these certain rights and you can kind of sit here and make a bunch of money, but it's not that important.
And that's not enough to really sustain something over the long term.
I think we ultimately need, not just to rediscover who we are, But we need, like, a great goal to say, like, this is who we are, this is who's in, this is who's out, and this is what we're going after.
And for me, like, for me it's like, who are we?
We are white people.
We created Western civilization.
It is ours.
We can discuss and debate whether this person or that person can be a part of it or can help or can be a citizen here.
I'm actually, you know, probably not that stringent on that.
Probably a lot less stringent than many of our listeners might be.
But I would say the idea that we need to operate as a civilization state, like that's my Sorellian myth.
That's the goal.
I mean, to me, I think a lot of Western history is just trying to get back to Rome, you know?
It's interesting because all of that that you're just outlining...
It's not necessarily CONTRA James Burnham's worldview, but definitely BEYOND it.
Burnham is really useful in analyzing class, Burnham is really useful in analyzing power, Burnham is also really good at just sort of, in Suicide of the West he writes a lot about liberalism and the liberal mindset, the importance of liberal guilt, and all of that is great.
You know, smarter for having read all of that stuff.
However, like you, you know, this, um, you know, this rant, this dream that you just outlined of creating, well, I thought it was a great, excuse me, monologue, monologue, this monologue you just outlined of this, um, just brutally undercut, of this white civilizational state.
It's worth noting that like, and I largely, largely agree with you of like, yeah, this is, this is, this is my dream too of like, that isn't something that Burnham can, Can really lead you to, on his own, at least.
No, but think of how he begins Suicide of the West.
I mean, it literally begins with him looking at a map and saying, these are the territories that the West once controlled.
Look at what we've lost, our civilization.
Sure, well, and Burnham was also a race realist, is what we'd call it.
Yeah, he was.
He talks about IQ and blackmail.
Was it Jeet Heer, the guy at the New Republic?
I mean, this is just kind of... Oh, was he not with the New Republic?
He's at The Nation now.
Oh, I see.
Um, he was talking about Burnham, I think, maybe a year or two ago on Twitter, talking about, like, the real threats that the left need to be worried about.
Like, who are the intellectuals who are truly dangerous?
And if I can close with what Sam Francis said about James Burnham and why it's important.
Like, we... Every single... To be personal for a moment here, every single one of us involved in this movement has paid a price.
Like if you're getting into this movement for money, like there is no money, and you're a fool for doing that.
That's not what this is about, and that's not what's going to keep you going.
You've got to have some kind of fire in you that's not going to go out no matter what they throw at you.
But, and you have to view your life as almost like a crusade, but you also can't just become Wrapped up in your own dream.
You have to have something that ties you back to this earth and you have to be willing to see the world as it is.
And this is especially true when you're talking about politics.
Politics is about power.
Politics is about concrete realities.
Politics is not just about, these are our dreams.
While it's important to have dreams, they're pretty useless unless you have any roadmap to realizing them.
So I want to close with what Sam Francis said about Burnham in his monograph, The Other Side of Modernism, James Burnham and His Legacy.
And I'd point out Francis, I think we'd all agree, was a very idealistic guy, but he was also a thoroughgoing modernist when all is said and done.
The American right for all its intellectual sophistication and political progress has yet to come to terms with or make use of the implications of Burnham's thought.
Libertarianism is a modernist ideology but it does not turn modernism away from the cultural values the left associates with modernism.
We certainly see that today.
Neoconservatism is also modern, but it too leaves unchallenged the status quo and indeed defends it through an eclectic assimilation of liberal, libertarian, and traditionalist ideas.
The neoconservatives seek only to achieve piecemeal or gradualist changes within a conventionally modernist framework.
I point out this was 1987 when neoconservatism was far more culturally conservative.
Harder, tougher on crime than today.
Back in 1987, neoconservatism did not mean invade the Middle East.
Neoconservatism meant checking the new left on race and things like that.
As a matter of fact, the neoconservatives of the 80s were far more race realist than hard right conservatives today.
To return to Francis, most of the journalism that is issued from the New Right and neoconservatives cannot be taken seriously as political and social thought.
I think we see that too.
Like, we're not going to get there based just on Fox News ads and weird Facebook theories.
Orthodox traditionalism rejects modernism, but does so in a manner that is largely alien and inexplicable to the modern mind and tends to degenerate into cultism.
And this is before Twitter and the Internet.
Among contemporary conservatives, only James Burnham offered a theoretical framework and a practical application of modernist political ideas that challenged the conventional modernist categories as defined by the left.
When the American right begins to understand and accept his legacy, it will begin to glimpse a more enduring victory in the protracted domestic and global conflict in which Burnham was enlisted.
I think that's where we'll close it.
I'm Gregory Hood.
Chris Roberts.
And that was Left Right and White.
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