The Man Who Identified the Deep State
James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography
by David T. Byrne
Northern Illinois University Press
256 pp., $33.95
In 1987, Samuel Francis argued that “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 [James] Burnham’s thought.”
Since then, events have forced the right to rediscover Burnham. Since the first Trump presidency, American political commentary has focused on the power of globalist elites, the deep state, and bureaucratic tyranny. Burnham was one of the earliest analysts of these realities. Although his political sentiments shifted within a couple of decades from Marxism all the way to conservatism, Burnham retained his steely-eyed understanding of power, free of moralizing judgment and ideological pretension.
As David T. Byrne shows in this new, very readable biography, it is little wonder that Burnham’s works continue to influence and inspire political factions on the right. In fact, it is high time that a new study of Burnham came to the fore, given the fact that the last biography—Daniel Kelly’s James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life—appeared in 2002. As Byrne explains, “Much has changed in the United States since 2002, such as the war in Iraq, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of a political figure who promised to make America great again by limiting the power of the elites.”
Byrne demonstrates the enduring relevance of Burnham’s analyses by focusing on the “two Burnhams”—the optimist who predicted the triumph of democracy over its totalitarian rivals, and the pessimist who was convinced that elites would always control the masses in any regime, democracy included. Both tendencies were present throughout his life, even if one competed with the other for mastery of Burnham’s soul.
As the son of a railroad executive, Burnham was no stranger to the trappings of power in industrial America. His study of logic, rhetoric, and debate at Princeton and Oxford in the 1920s probably contributed to his coldly analytical and empirical accounts of elite power. Still, it does not explain why the young scion, who was not personally affected by the Great Depression, embraced Marxism. Byrne suggests that a failed engagement with a “vivacious young woman named Martha Dodd” (who would become a left-wing journalist and Soviet spy) may have pushed his psyche towards this apocalyptic leftism.
Whatever the reasons for his turn towards Marxism, Burnham exhibited his most optimistic traits during this period of political activism. Having secured a teaching position in the philosophy department of New York University in the early 1930s, the young bourgeois professor fell under the influence of his colleague Sidney Hook, a Marxist who insisted that “the conquest of political power” was more important to the proletariat than the establishment of socialism. By the mid-1930s, Burnham was convinced that the communist revolution was just around the corner in America, a conviction that led him to join the American Workers Party and write articles attacking President Roosevelt as a mere shill for a dying capitalist order.
But Burnham became disillusioned as Stalin tightened his totalitarian grip on the Soviet Union. The last straw was in 1939, when the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. By 1940, Burnham had abandoned his rosy predictions about the future promise of socialism, demonstrating, in Byrne’s judgment, that he had been a “Marxist in mind only; his heart was never in it.”
Burnham’s rejection of Marxism did not alter his lifelong preoccupation with making sense of elite power structures. Burnham is still unique among thinkers on the right for defending the Machiavellian approach to politics. One of the most important lessons he articulated in his 1943 book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom is that only power restrains power. Unchecked power is tyranny, a brute fact that Burnham emphasized in his studies of bureaucratic authority at home and Soviet expansionism abroad.
In his earlier work, The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham declared the end of capitalism and the rise of a technocratic elite that would replace the bourgeoisie. These new managers use their technical skills to control corporations without actually owning or investing in the assets. Because they are not owners, they lack the incentive to protect corporate autonomy from statist intrusions. Despite this anti-Marxian assessment of the separation of ownership and control, Burnham’s prose is replete with references to Marxian concepts such as the “ruling class” and “ideology.”
Byrne correctly contends that Burnham predicted the demise of classical liberalism, a philosophy that opposed the vast centralization of statist power that began with the New Deal. However, he could have devoted more discussion to the inaccuracy of Burnham’s prophecy that capitalism was on its last legs. Burnham arguably overstated the importance of the distinction between management and ownership. As Murray Rothbard once observed in a humorous vein, to claim that “transient managers” run corporations is like visiting the grounds of the Kykuit Mansion and concluding that the head gardener had seized power from the Rockefeller family.
Even Francis, who generally sympathized with Burnham’s analyses, faulted him in his Leviathan and Its Enemies (2016) for insufficiently appreciating how the technical skills of managers “would remain necessary for the corporation in an economy of mass production and mass consumption.” In short, capitalism benefited from managerialism. Burnham himself seemed to change his mind about the extinction of capitalism when he complained in The Struggle for the World (1947) about Americans’ “contempt for ideas and tradition and history, a complacency with the trifles of merely material triumph.” As Byrne shows, Burnham accused American businessmen of offering “little for the struggle against communism because they were too ignorant, greedy, and cowardly.”
Despite the inaccuracy of Burnham’s onetime expectation that capitalism would vanish, a few of his later predictions turned out to be accurate. Byrne gives Burnham full credit for anticipating, in his work as a CIA analyst, the collapse of the USSR. His 1950 book, The Coming Defeat of Communism, pointed to how a divided Soviet leadership, the anti-communism of the Catholic Church, and the American use of hard and soft power would fatally weaken the regime. That confident prediction inspired President Ronald Reagan, who agreed with Burnham that the containment strategy advised by George Kennan would do little to undermine Soviet Communism. The military buildup of the Reagan era bankrupted the Soviet economy and collapsed its political order.
Burnham also correctly predicted that the post-World War II decolonization of Africa would come too rapidly, leading to the instability and bloodshed that continues to wrack the continent to this day. In Suicide of the West (1964), he attacked liberal elites for naively and passively accepting these developments in the name of “progress,” thereby undermining Western hegemony.
On the domestic front, his underappreciated book, Congress and the American Tradition (1959), was one of the first analyses from the right to warn of the tendency of government bureaucracies to subvert the power of elected officials in Congress. As Byrne correctly notes, his critique inspired the ongoing fight against the “deep state” in our time.
Burnham’s love of empire may turn out to be the least admirable feature of his legacy. Byrne briefly alludes to his involvement, as a CIA operative, in the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, an ill-conceived intervention that provoked the rise of a totalitarian Islamic regime in Tehran just a quarter century later. To be sure, Byrne persuasively shows that neoconservative admirers of Burnham have distorted his tendencies towards imperialism by ignoring the Cold War context in which he pushed for an “American empire.” Only a global imperium in American hands, Burnham contended, could prevent communist expansion. None of this, however, aligns with the neoconservative “prescription to improve the future world,” Byrne writes.
Although this distinction between Burnham and neoconservatives is correct as far as it goes, it is not obvious that he would have given up on empire-building after the Cold War ended. Towards the end of his study, Byrne speculates that Burnham
probably would have questioned a foreign policy in which the United States did not take a leadership role: he preached internationalism. Like it or not, according to Burnham, “America is a hegemony, and the hegemon has imperial responsibilities.”
Burnham’s confident view, as described by Byrne, that empires “do not have to be totalitarian; they can be compatible with democracy” is hard to reconcile with his astute warnings about the overreach of bureaucratic elites, whose power is so often enhanced by adventures abroad.
Byrne quotes Francis’s lament that Burnham “wasted much of his later career in what turned out to be rather ephemeral anticommunist polemics that had little impact on actual policy after the early 1950s.” Some of these Cold War polemics included imprudent teachings about the desirability of empire, which Americans who long for republican government should not heed. Nevertheless, Byrne’s admirable study brings out the enduring strengths of Burnham’s worthy analyses of centralized, unelected power within the American regime.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/the-man-who-identified-the-deep-state