Free Republic

The 80-year-old book that explains Elon Musk and tech’s new right-wing tiltThe long shadow of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. Since the launch of the so-called “Twitter Files” — Elon Musk’s self-styled exposé of the alleged excesses of the “woke” managers of Twitter before he bought it — there’s been a lively debate over what exactly Musk is trying to accomplish. His statements clearly indicate that he sees himself as being engaged in some kind of culture war — “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” as he tweeted on Monday morning. But what does the...

The first sentence of my intellectual biography of National Review’s co-founder read: “James Burnham began his intellectual career in the 1930s as one of Leon Trotsky’s leading American exponents and ended it as a senior editor for America’s preeminent conservative magazine, National Review.” At least it did until an editor changed “American exponents” to “U.S. exponents.” The clearest explanation for the change comes from an Atlantic journalist who decries using the term “America” as a synonym for the United States of America. Her article declares, “America is a region, not a country.” It even notes that people from Latin America...

James Burnham began his intellectual odyssey as a disciple of Leon Trotsky, but he became disillusioned with Marxism in the late 1930s. The Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 especially drew Burnham’s ire. Trotsky rationalized the invasion using Marxist ideology: Soviet socialism was spreading; therefore, it must be good. Burnham disagreed, arguing that the invasion was simply Soviet imperialism — a confiscation of land by Stalin. After seven years as one of its leading American thinkers, Burnham left the Marxist movement. Burnham’s experiences with Marxism scarred him. He began to recognize that “only by renouncing all ideology can we begin...

How can one write history so that it seems like a thriller? How does one write a biography without making the subject the centerpiece of the narrative? I have no idea if David Pietrusza asked himself these questions — or this one: How can history be written as a newspaper headline? Call this a biography by indirection. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defined by competing individuals and movements: Huey Long, Father Coughlan, Al Smith, the Liberty League, Earl Browder and the Communist Party, Dr. Francis Townsend and the Townsend Plan, Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party. They threatened FDR’s majority in...

In a 2021 interview with the Stanford Review, Blake Masters was asked for a historical figure he admired. He chose two. The first was George Washington, possibly the best-known military general, slave owner, and president in American history. “I don’t think people realize how much of a boss this guy was,” Masters explained. The second was Lee Kuan Yew. LKY, as he’s often called, was Singapore’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and oversaw its economic miracle. He turned the former British colony into a go-go free market paradise. As it grew, Singapore instituted a far-ranging welfare state. The government...

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within...

Peter Drucker wrote the first version of this book during Hitler's rise to power. Most explanations for the rise of fascism focused on political reasons or economic ones, while Drucker explains the social movements that made leaders like Mussolini and Hitler possible. It also explains what is (and isn't) fascism, how they hobble their own economies, and the social warpage they create. Peter Drucker updated "The End of Economic Man" in the 1960s, seeing horrifying parallels between the 1960s activism and the 1930s. And while history does not repeat, it rhymes - and this book explains the social trends that...