Politics, wrote James Burnham in his book The Machiavellians (1943), is about the struggle for power among elites. Those political elites, Burnham contended in The Managerial Revolution (1941), are interested first and foremost in their own power and privileges. And those managerial elites, Burnham wrote in Suicide of the West (1964), influenced by the ideology of liberalism, are leading the United States and the West to civilizational suicide. Burnham foresaw America’s current predicament. (RELATED: Eugene Rostow’s A Breakfast for Bonaparte Resonates 30 Years Later)

James Burnham’s brilliance first manifested itself at Princeton, where he graduated first in his class. He flirted with Marxism (the Trotskyite sect) in the 1930s, but his devotion to truth and empiricism led to his break with the far left and his gradual shift to a conservatism grounded in geopolitical realities as totalitarianism threatened to engulf the world in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, where in the spring of 1944 he wrote a paper predicting a postwar clash between the United States and the Soviet Union. Burnham attempted to awaken America to the Soviet threat in a Cold War trilogy that combined Machiavellian insights and global geopolitics. His final break with liberalism resulted from a recognition that liberals were ideologically incapable of achieving victory over communism because liberals and communists shared so many of the same ideological beliefs. 

Liberal Acquiescence

Burnham watched as liberals refused to acknowledge the nature and extent of communist infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, a subject he wrote about in The Web of Subversion (1954). He watched as liberals refused to seek victory in Korea and Vietnam because of what he termed the self-imposed strategic prison of containment. And he watched as liberals surrendered control of America’s major institutions — schools, universities, media, cultural and political organizations — to a far-left elite whose alienation from their own country caused them to use the coercive powers of the state in an attempt to fundamentally transform America. 

Barack Obama — a far-left community organizer and Chicago-based Machiavellian politician who became President of the United States — was the culmination of these efforts. In 1972, when the far-left took over the Democratic Party, their presidential standard-bearer George McGovern was defeated by the hated Richard Nixon in one of history’s greatest political landslides. Yet two years later, the left’s control of political, cultural, and media institutions paved the way for Nixon’s ouster in the over-hyped Watergate “scandal” in which a rather ordinary case of political espionage was transformed into a constitutional crisis. And Watergate served as a template for the leftist elite to use their control of the institutions to reverse electoral defeats — they used Iran-Contra to try to unseat Reagan; they challenged the election of George W. Bush in 2000; and they used a bogus dossier to go after Donald Trump who stood in the way of completing the Obama revolution. 

Elites Seize Control

Burnham tried to warn us long ago that political elites used deception and propaganda to seize and maintain political power and societal privileges. He wrote that as society became more scientifically and technologically complex, the “managerial elite” would gain more influence and power — and so they have. As the recent pandemic showed us, the managerial elite assumed powers to shutdown businesses, impose draconian masking rules, and coerced individuals to take experimental “vaccines.” The pandemic showed how “totalitarian” democratic governments can become. It was a confirmation of President Eisenhower’s warning about the undue influence of the scientific-technological elites. The vast and unprecedented powers assumed by governors and unelected bureaucrats stagger the mind. The censorship of those who dared to disagree or who disapproved of the pandemic policies was Orwellian. The Founding Fathers — who Burnham  wrote so eloquently about in Congress and the American Tradition (1959) — would have been appalled. 

In Suicide of the West, Burnham dissected liberalism and its role in acclimating America and the West to its inevitable decline. Obama, you may recall, derided the notion of American exceptionalism, and his wife Michelle stated that it was only after her husband was elected president that she felt proud of her country. Obama looked down on those unwashed Americans who he saw clinging to their religion and guns. Progressives — the word the elites substituted for liberals — were smarter, more sophisticated, less parochial than people who voted for Trump. (RELATED: Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age 35 Years Later)

If Burnham has a successor today, it is probably Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution scholar, historian, essayist, and farmer, who has written compellingly about America’s decline at the hands of the far-left elite. Yet Hanson is unwelcome at Burnham’s old venue National Review, whose editors apparently believe there is still something left to “conserve.” Hanson understands — as Burnham the Trotskyite surely would have — that conservatives are now left with the stark choice of inevitable defeat or cultural and political counterrevolution.