The New-Neoconservatives and the Managerial Revolution

Left-wing expats have a long legacy of undermining a radical right-wing movement in America, to preserve their own place in the managerial class

Three neoconservatives, left to right: Douglas Murray, Irving Kristol, and Bari Weiss

A specter haunts the American Right. That specter is a collection of formerly left-wing and ‘classically liberal’ intellectuals who smear and gatekeep the Right. These intellectuals sprouted from the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” and became prominent on the Right for their opposition to the progressive hysteria commonly known as ‘woke’ or ‘wokeness.’ Now, figures like James Lindsay, Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss, and Douglas Murray have joined hands to pathologize and smear an increasingly anti-progressive, anti-managerial, and anti-interventionist right. Their journey and tactics echo the origins of neoconservatism, making them the latest generation of the ‘left-the-left’ phenomenon.

It is often quipped among many new conservatives that they did not leave the left but rather, “the Left left me.” This was the case with many second-generation neoconservatives. All neoconservatives have their roots in the Old Left, more so in the radical Old Left. James Burnham, the godfather of neoconservatism, and Sydney Hook were both Trotskyites before turning towards the Right. Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell both came from Marxist, specifically Trotskyite, roots, but would eventually drift to become more moderate as a New Deal Liberal. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Norman Podhoretz were also New Deal Liberals until foreign policy affairs pushed them to the Right.

Neoconservatism is an ideology of the bastards of the Left. They are former Leftists and Progressives who became disillusioned with the New Left. Moynihan, Kirkpatrick, and Nathan Glazer all observed from Ivy League positions as the students raised their ‘little red books’ and protests exploded across the country. Other Neoconservatives, which included Ivy League alumni, saw their alma maters dissolve into chaos.

Thus, Kristol’s famous quip that the neoconservatives were “Liberals who [had] been mugged by reality.”

These former Trotskyites had come to hate the descendants of Trotsky’s rivals most of all – namely, the Stalinists and Soviets. They were had been mugged too close to home. Their presuppositions changed little, despite how they were shaken by the emerging New Left that threatened their prestige and elite status. These original neoconservatives witnessed the rise of the New Left and what they would dub the ‘New Class’: a class of intellectuals and white collared students with explicitly anti-bourgeois rhetoric.

The Neoconservatives were never fundamentally opposed to bureaucrats and the managerial class. Being former New Deal and Great Society Liberals, they never found issue with the supposed reforms of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, or Johnson. Kristol’s eventual laments against the social engineers of the New Class were done more out of self-preservation of his elite status against a competitor rather than because of a principled objection. One can find this in his less-than-principal arguments about welfare. Kristol wrote in Reflections of a Neoconservative:

In economic and social policy, it [Neoconservatism] feels no lingering hostility to the welfare state, nor does it accept it resignedly, as a necessary evil. Instead, it seeks not to dismantle the welfare state in the name of free-market economics but rather to reshape it to attach to it the conservative predispositions of the people. This reshaping will presumably take the form of trying to rid the welfare state of its paternalistic orientation, imposed on it by Left-liberalism, and making it over into the kind of “social insurance state” that provides the social and economic security to modern citizenry while minimizing governmental intrusion into individual liberties.

As Sam Francis correctly pointed out in his article Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution that this style of argument requires little ideological commitment against welfarism and state bureaucracy. Their objections to the New Class were largely over control of the managerial apparatus for which they had once been cheerful advocates.

Today we have encountered a new band that rises with similar origins and similar behaviors.

The intellectual dark web was born out of a situation similar to that of the 60s and 70s campus protests. Most intellectual dark web members were former academics and social commentators: Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss, Brett Weinstein, Dave Rubin, Steven Pinker, and Douglas Murray. Almost all were political centrists or Left-wingers prior. Murray stands out as having called himself a Neoconservative. Similarly, Ben Shapiro identified as a conservative. Non-members who have thrown their weight around as new intellectuals of the right include James Lindsay and Abigail Shrier, both of whom identified as Liberals before their own ‘muggings by reality.’

When ‘wokeness’ (in the modern parlance) raged on college campuses, people such as Steven Pinker, Brett Weinstein, and Jordan Peterson, the scholars in their midst, rose to prominence rallying against ‘Cancel Culture’ and struggle sessions I imposed on society by Progressives. Dave Rubin, James Lindsay, and Abigail Shrier came to be known for their anti-woke activism and commentary. Lindsay famously conducted the Grievance Study Affairs to show the prevalence social progressivism in academic journal reviews. Shrier found herself pushed away from the Left because of her differing views on transgenderism and gender ideology indoctrinating the youth.

Bari Weiss resigned from working at The New York Times over her qualms with their speech policies and their embrace of left-wing activism. Douglas Murray, though already a Neoconservative became a prophet of the dangers of the mass migration into Europe and the rise of Islam in the United Kingdom.

These social issues pushed these thinkers into roles of prominence within the American Right. These figures became widely respected political and social commentators because of their opposition to ‘wokeness’ and a leftist orthodoxy in media, academia, and government. This leftist orthodoxy constituted a new ‘New Class’—not unlike that which the original Neoconservatives fought against.

These new Neoconservatives never had qualms with the original ‘New Class’, with the managerial elite that occupied academia from the 1930s until the new campus revolts. They were often members of this managerial class, whether they knew it or not. They were journalists, sociologists, and academics before becoming disillusioned with woke college students, administration, and staff. The tenacity and determination of these anti-social conservative students and scholars demanded the excising of the old managerial elite and their replacement.

Often these very people have socially progressive social attitudes, like Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray, and Bari Weiss, but the agitation in favor of transgenderism, racial identitarianism, and against the speech they were accustomed to using drove them away. They are the new generation of Neoconservatives. They are elite figures from managerial institutions, who have not shifted in their left-wing views, and now act as gatekeepers and intellectuals for the right.

Much like the original Neoconservatives, this new generation did not stay focused on social issues for long, issues for which they were notoriously moderate. Their focus quickly shifted to foreign policy and gatekeeping the right.

Chief of the gatekeepers is James Lindsay, a pseudo-intellectual and supposed expert on all things woke. Lindsay has made a crusade out of accusing key figures on the right, from JD Vance to Murray Rothbard, of being woke critical theorists. He has attacked popular commentators like Dave Smith, Tucker Carlson, and Auron MacIntyre as being woke. He accuses many of the people he dubs as ‘woke right’ of reading what he considers forbidden philosophers: Martin Heidegger, Antonio Gramsci, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt, and even James Burnham.

To Lindsay, it does not matter how you invoke these philosophers, no matter how value-free the analysis is, because to use them is a sin against his 1990s liberalism. Even more absurd is flouting James Burnham as a forbidden philosopher, when Burnham wrote for the flagship publication of the New Right and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Reagan. Lindsay is a former PhD Mathematician, a member of academia that Burnham identified as part of the managerial class. No wonder he attacks those who apply Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution to today.

Lindsay styles himself as a classical liberal; however, when confronted with classically liberal class theories and policies, he dubs them ‘woke right’. The odd common thread between those today whom Lindsay smears is a stance of noninterventionism and discontent with maintaining the New Deal-managerial apparatus.

Lindsay’s smears exist to cast these thinkers and their ideas as untouchable. It serves much the same role as Buckley-ite red-baiting, in fact, one might call it ‘woke-baiting.’ The goal is to cast the thinkers and commentators as being unrespectable, dubbing them as ‘anti-constitutional,’ ‘un-American,’ as woke, or as ‘antisemitic’ if they oppose supporting Israel.

In a similar vein is Douglas Murray, whose debate with Dave Smith over Israel and Ukraine blew up the internet. Setting aside the merits of the debate, the first hour was bogged down in Murray’s appeals to credentialism and expertise. Murray, a journalist, continually dismissed Smith’s argument with appeals to authority and claimed that because Smith did not belong to the credential managerial class he should be ignored. His argument necessitates an authoritative expert class; one found in the managerial class to which he belonged.

Bari Weiss has continually appealed to authorities who can justify the New Deal and Great Society, but not the current President’s actions. Any legal challenges that threaten the managerial class are heterodox and must be challenged by the group of experts. She also has continued to be hawkish on Iran and has advocated for continued foreign aid and institutional support of Israel.

Her cadre at The Free Press has positioned itself against an American First foreign policy, one that would demand more diplomacy, less hawkishness, and a repeal of empire. The publication has resorted to accusing figures like Donald Trump Jr and Tucker Carlson of being bankrolled and influenced by Qatar. Her wing of the commentariat has denounced Steve Witkoff’s negotiations with Iran and advocated for harsher action against the country.

There is a certain irony in Weiss naming her outlet the same name as a famously neoconservative publishing imprint.

A consistent thread is this band of formerly left-wing and centrist social scientists pivoting towards gatekeeping those who wish to turn back the clock on the 20^th century and end our expensive, unbeneficial empire. The original Neoconservatives became known as Scoop-Jackson Democrats, after Henry “Scoop” Jackson: a prominent Cold War liberal hawk. The original Neoconservatives jumped ship at the nomination of George McGovern into the Nixon camp, or the supposed failures of Carter’s foreign policy. Their defining issue for their party switch was foreign policy. It is no coincidence that the new Neoconservatives have made it their chief issue as the new administration begins.

They resort to smearing and psychoanalyzing their rivals. Jordan Peterson himself engaged in a rant on The Joe Rogan Experience, accusing members of Lindsay’s ‘woke right’ of possessing “dark tetrad” social traits. It is a tactic reminiscent of Daniel Bell’s The Radical Right, which sought to cast non-neoconservative conservatism and the ‘radical right’ as psychologically deficient and violent. It is a tactic he adopted from Theodore Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, which painted anyone opposed to progressivism as having fascist psychological tendencies. Peterson’s tactics are a time-honored tradition of psychoanalyzing the right to cast them as fascistic and psychologically disordered.

The new neoconservatives are not interested in fighting the managerial regime. The Old Right came about through its opposition to the rise of this regime. Garet Garrett and John T. Flynn especially warned of the bureaucratic expansion across all aspects of life. They saw it as the embrace of fascism in America. The John Birch Society saw it as the embrace of Communism and later as the New World Order. Burnham identified the trend of industry falling under the control of a new class of managers. It was all the same phenomenon. The Old Left occupied this managerial regime. It was from them that the original Neoconservatives emerged.

Similarly, the new neoconservatives emerged from the managerial system of today, as those struggling with the emergence of a ‘New Class’ that could disrupt the managerial system’s mirage of legitimacy. There is no philosophical objection to the underpinning of the managerial system from these neoconservatives, only practical objections over how it markets itself and objections over who should control it. They are not allies in dismantling this system but rather conservers of the status quo.

Left-wing expatriates should not be welcomed as thought leaders for any serious right-wing movement. The right should be focused on dismantling the managerial state, not a simple regime change. It should not accept the preservation of the managerial institutions and those who have occupied them. The new neoconservatives seek to preserve their roles against an increasingly radical right, one that seems ready and poised to reject them and their hawkishness.