Posted on 07/10/2020 5:19:06 PM PDT by Pelham
The ideological trajectory followed by the first generation of neoconservatives, from their early fascination with Marxism during the Great Depression to their embrace of Cold War anti-communism and subsequent takeover of the Conservative movement, is by now a well-known chapter in American political history. The life and career of James Burnham followed a similar trajectory, provoking British academic Binoy Kampmark to label Burnham as “the first neoconservative.”
Burnham, however, was a thinker who bore only an incidental resemblance to the neoconservatives. Indeed, Burnham was something of an enigmatic figure within the wider spectrum of the American Right. Most importantly, it is from Burnham that we acquired an understanding of what he termed the “managerial revolution,” a concept that continues to shed a penetrating light on our social and political life today.
A Chicago native, Burnham was born in 1905 to a Catholic family. His father was a railroad executive and immigrant from England. He attended Princeton and Oxford (where he studied under J.R.R. Tolkien), and soon began teaching philosophy at New York University. During the 1930s, Burnham was associated with prominent left-wing figures such as A. J. Muste and Sidney Hook, and became both a proponent of Trotskyism and Leon Trotsky’s personal friend and correspondent.
However, Burnham would eventually break with Trotskyism over the question of the Soviet Union. Trotsky and his leading American followers such as James P. Cannon contended that the USSR under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was a “degenerated workers’ state” that should nevertheless be defended against imperialism. However, Burnham regarded the Soviet Union as a new form of class society with imperialist ambitions of its own, particularly after the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and Soviet incursions into Eastern Europe during the period prior to World War II...
(Excerpt) Read more at chroniclesmagazine.org ...
James Burnham ping
“... provoking British academic Binoy Kampmark to label Burnham as “the first neoconservative.”
A technicality. Burnham made the journey, but he was by no means “neocon”. He was often right, occasionally wrong, and always challenging. He provided the framework for people like Joe Sobran, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, and others who ended up being right about pretty much everything.
He would not be welcome at National Review in the Current Year. That goes for much of the conservative movement until about 1995.
I guess we could regard the “Deep State” as the government portion of Burnham’s managerial elite.
I imagine that he would have admired Trump as someone striking a blow against the managerial revolution; to me that’s why Trump is so hated by such a wide assortment of entrenched and privileged elites; Republicans, Democrats, media, big tech.
He would probably not be surprised by how things have turned out. Certainly Sam Francis wouldn’t be.
Multiculturalism led to the Managerial (Deep) State which has led to Anarcho-Tyranny. Sam and Paul Gottfried saw it all coming based on the groundwork of James Burnham and others. Leviathan and Its Enemies is a masterpiece.
Read his book “Suicide of the West” written in 1964, with the subtitle “ the definitive analysis of the pathology of liberalism”. The writing was on the wall then, he saw it and put it in a book. Prophetic.
Burnham was one of the most interesting thinkers of the 20th Century Right. Even when I disagreed with him, he was always interesting and thought-provoking. His “Suicide of the West”, which defined Western leftism as the ideology of self-destruction, was prophetic and is more relevant today than it was 50 years ago.
I think that the term “neoconservative” was being used here to mean a former leftist turned conservative, as opposed to adherence to the sort of ideology that we associate with neoconservatism today.
I think so, too. He was a former commie who made the journey to be on the Right, much like Whittaker Chambers and Malcolm Muggeridge did. What we know as neocons began in a somewhat similar place, but they ended up elsewhere, really not all that far from where they started as it turns out.
That’s why so many neoconservatives (in the contemporary sense) jumped ship when Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016. They were closer to Clinton-style Democrats than they were to Trump’s brand of nationalism.
Very true. They are social liberals, very far to the left on those issues. Basically, they want lower tax tranny reading hour. Oh, and they want to go to war in the Middle East at all times and forever. Throw in an open border and a bunch of fetishism over economics, and there you have it.
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