Right and Wrong
By Michael Lind
Whitehead Senior Fellow
The Boston Globe
January 13, 2003
If James Burnham had died in 1946, he might be remembered today as one of the major thinkers of the 20th century. The son of a railroad executive raised in an affluent Chicago suburb with an education from Princeton and Oxford, Burnham in the 1930s led the kind of life that left-wing intellectuals today fantasize about. While teaching at NYU, he worked as a top deputy of Leon Trotsky, wrote essays for Partisan Review, and acquired an enviable reputation during vacations as a chemin de fer player at casinos near Biarritz. After breaking with Trotsky in 1940, he wrote "The Managerial Revolution" (1941), a worldwide best-seller that Albert Speer at the Nuremberg trials cited as an explanation of contemporary history, and "The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom" (1943), an eloquent and controversial study of the nature of power. George Orwell denounced him and Ezra Pound corresponded with him. Burnham was often found on panels alongside the likes of Andr Malraux, Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. But unfortunately for his reputation, Burnham lived until 1987, to the age of 82 (he was disabled by a stroke in 1978).
In the late 1940s, the zealous anticommunism of Trotsky's former lieutenant led to his marginalization by the liberal intellectual establishment. Even the CIA, which employed Burnham briefly as a minor program consultant, found his views too extreme. Contrary to popular belief, the career officers at the CIA have often been political liberals.) Burnham, along with Willmoore Kendall, a crotchety populist who was paid by Yale to surrender his tenure rights and leave, and the self-described "Tory Bohemian" Russell Kirk, became one of the mentors of the young William F. Buckley Jr. Burnham worked at Buckley's National Review as an editor from its founding in 1955 until his effective retirement in the late 1970s. The largely unintellectual conservatives who preceded them before the 1950s, and succeeded them in the 1990s, have been surly, demagogic and wrong about everything; in contrast, the mid-century "movement" conservatives around Buckley were wrong about everything in a sprightly and erudite way. They were never for racism, only against desegregation; they did not support apartheid, they merely vilified its victims and critics; they were not in favor of dire poverty, they just objected to any and all government programs that might ameliorate it.
At least Burnham and his fellow conservatives were right about communism - or were they? In 1945, Burnham published an essay in Partisan Review entitled "Lenin's Heir," in which he argued that Stalinism was the necessary outgrowth of Leninism. The thesis, restated in our time by the historian Martin Malia, is correct, even if the truth is still resisted in some college faculties (few doubters can be found in former communist countries). But anticommunism was not a monopoly of the right; for half a century, anticommunist liberals and anticommunist social democrats played leading roles in the campaign by the United States and other liberal democracies to resist Soviet imperialism and communist subversion.
Beginning with the Truman administration, anticommunist liberals and conservative realists like George F. Kennan proposed to "contain" the Soviet empire, until it mellowed and perhaps broke up. Burnham and his conservative allies denounced containment as appeasement. In its place, they called for "rollback" - an offensive war of some sort against the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. Burnham promoted rollback in "Containment or Liberation?" (1952/53) and other polemics, but in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 he acknowledged that it was impractical. Still, his zeal remained. In "The Suicide of the West" (1964), he portrayed a West rotted by "the liberal syndrome" on the verge of annihilation not only by communism but by what, in an unsigned National Review editorial, he called the "pagan multitudes" of Africa and Asia. Burnham confused the end of the short-lived and parasitic European empires in the Third World - most of which had been founded only a few generations before - with the global collapse of western civilization, which Burnham, a lapsed Catholic, equated with white Christian ethnicity.
The bankruptcy and disintegration of the Soviet Union and the subsequent death of communism, outside of a few tyrannies like China, Vietnam, and Cuba, vindicated Cold War liberalism. The strategy of containment, which the Right said would fail, worked. The liberal democratic welfare-state, which many National Review conservatives had depicted as a doomed compromise between the alternatives of communism and Christian conservatism, was the alternative to which ex-communist nations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union gratefully turned. The profound religious revival in former communist countries that many conservatives predicted in the early 1990s never took place.
In 1983, when President Reagan awarded Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the mid-century conservative movement that Burnham helped to found looked more important than it does now. From today's vantage point, it is clear that the anticommunist and libertarian conservatism that Burnham and Buckley fashioned alongside Goldwater and Reagan was a sideshow. The real story of the American Right in the second half of the 20th century was the defection of Southern white conservatives from the Democratic Party and their capture, by the 1990s, of the Republican Party. The important episodes in this story are the revolt against Roosevelt by Southern Democrats, the walkout of the 1948 Democratic National Convention by segregationists, and the mass conversion of hundreds of white Democratic politicians in Southern states, many of them holding office, to the Republican Party following the GOP congressional sweep of 1994. In this story, Richard Nixon with his Southern strategy and George Wallace are more important than Barry Goldwater, and the fundamentalist theology of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had more effect than scholastic debates in the pages of National Review about "immanentizing the eschaton" (that is, the project attributed to liberals of achieving heaven on earth). Nor did the circle at National Review have any significant influence on the neoconservatives, the allies of the Southern fundamentalists in national politics and the dominant force today in American conservative publishing and propaganda. Although Burnham was a high-toned WASP, whereas the leading neoconservatives have been upwardly-mobile Jews and Catholics, his political trajectory in many ways resembled theirs. One might think that the neoconservatives - many of them former Trotskyists and New Yorkers by residence or birth - would identify with Burnham. But in working with neoconservatives in the 1980s, as an editor of The National Interest, I never met any under the age of 70 who had read Burnham's books or even knew who he was.
Until now, the only Burnham biography was a brief one by Samuel Francis, an intelligent but eccentric "paleoconservative" of the Patrick Buchanan school. In "James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life," released last year by the Intercollegiate Studies Association, Daniel Kelly provides a workaday biography with a few surprising new details. For example, in order to learn about Soviet espionage in the United States, in "1950 or early 1951" Burnham and fellow right-wingers Ralph de Toledano and Karl Hess devised a plan to kidnap American communists and pump them full of sodium pentothal (the so-called truth serum), with financial help from the New York gangster Frank Costello. The plan collapsed after the mobsters had a look at the eggheads.
The case for Burnham's significance, in the final analysis, must rest on his major books: "The Managerial Revolution," "The Machiavellians," and a neglected masterpiece, "Congress and the American Tradition" (1959). All three show the influence of the early-20th century "elitists": thinkers such as Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Georges Sorel. These "Machiavellians," like Burnham, are "defenders of freedom" because they unmask the attractive lies with which self-serving elites disguise their personal and factional ambitions. Nothing could be further in spirit from the optimistic faith in benevolent elites of today's Straussian neoconservatives, who learned from the mid-century German migr philosopher Leo Strauss to distinguish the "esoteric" truth, accessible only to "philosophers," from the deceptive "exoteric" version of reality that must be disseminated to the broader public by politicians, pundits, and preachers.
When allowances are made for Burnhams histrionic style and polemical purposes, these remain great books, whose themes are as valid today as they were when they were written. Burnham's argument in "The Managerial Revolution" that executives, not shareholders, really control corporations is confirmed by exposes of how CEOs of companies like Enron manipulate both their investors and their boards of directors. The idea of managerial capitalism was not new with Burnham-it was discussed by the economist Joseph Schumpeter, among others. But Burnham made it the basis of an interpretation of history that rejected both Marxism and the kind of conservatism that hopes for a revival of laissez-faire capitalism.
It is doubtful whether someone with Burnham's mature views would be a conservative at all in todays America. Instead of the American world empire based in the Middle East that today's neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Charles Krauthammer dream of, Burnham wanted a polycentric world governed by a balance of power. Burnham also believed that, to check an imperial presidency of the kind sought by neoconservatives (at least when a Republican is in the White House), the American republic needs a strong and confident Congress. "Congress and the American Tradition" is a brilliant defense of the importance of Congress against the majoritarian tyranny embodied in presidential "Caesarism," which the liberal left supported under FDR and his liberal successors and which the Right champions today. Burnham, who in "Congress and the American Tradition," defended habeas corpus as a cornerstone of Anglo-American liberty, probably would have been appalled at the Bush administration's claim that US citizens described as "enemy combatants" can be detained in military prisons indefinitely.
From his beginnings as a Marxist, Burnham worked his way back to something like the pessimistic liberalism of the American Founders, who emphasized checks and balances as restraints on the good no less than on the bad. As the writer John Chamberlain, who like Burnham had migrated from left to right, pointed out in his review of "The Machiavellians," Burnham "runs away to Renaissance Florence, but Thomas Jefferson is right behind him. He hides himself among French Syndicalists, but James Madison plucks him by the sleeve." Burnham's intellectual journey may have led him through Moscow, Mexico City and Central Europe, but he ended up in Philadelphia.
Copyright: 2003 The Boston Globe
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