Auron MacIntyre's The Total State

And further reflections on the New Right

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I recently reviewed Auron MacIntyre’s The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies for Tom Klingenstein’s newsletter:

America is not governed the way you think it is. That, in a phrase, is Auron MacIntyre’s message.

A popular political commentator in New Right circles, MacIntyre combines a capacious political imagination with lucid explanations of heterodox thinkers. The Total State: How Liberal Democracies become Tyrannies is a smart polemic, excoriating movement conservatism for its failure to understand our regime’s degeneration. But if the book is meant to demonstrate the proposals of the New Right for reversing this, a careful reading yields a surprising conclusion: these are liberal-conservative proposals, very much in the mainstream of the American political tradition.

Read the rest over there.

It’s short review of a short book. But MacIntyre’s The Total State is worth a closer look, especially in light of Noah Smith’s recent critique of the New Right for The Free Press.

Smith has two core claims. The first is that the New Right represents a revival of paleoconservatism, so it isn’t a novel force.

The New Right is new, but it has its roots in older movements. In fact, in many ways it’s older and more deeply rooted than the Reaganite conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, it’s pretty similar to something we used to call “paleoconservatism.”

This kind of movement, Smith argues, has always been important in American politics; he scandalizes those looking for free-market and neoconservative purity in the Reagan coalition by pointing out the role that paleoconservatives played therein.

So what distinguishes the New Right from the old paleoconservatives? Is the “New Right” just a new garment for Russell Kirk?

Smith’s second core claim is that the key difference between the paleocons and the New Right lies in the consequences of technological upheaval. The New Right is what Katherine Dee calls “online fandom;” it is a product of the new media landscape. Its animating spirit is delocalized and online. It’s a movement made by the internet, for the internet, loosened from the particularities of the American context. It’s concerned about the future of Western civilization, although it has an oddly abstract account of that civilization:

There is no perimeter and there is no interior: immigrant crime in Sweden matters far more than whatever is happening next door in your actual physical town.

Arguing that the New Right is a “fundamentally online movement.” Smith may stress that point too strongly. Is there any fundamentally offline political movement in existence today? All movements seem to travel between both online and offline activity, building their constituency, identity, and ethos based off the interaction between the two. (Then again, I may be telling on myself. I recently met an elder millennial, well plugged into politics, but who had no idea what Substack was. It took me a few minutes to get my jaw off the floor.)

Smith repeats some conventional criticisms of MAGA, based on defenses of free trade and liberal internationalism. His more interesting point is what he thinks the New Right represents:

an initial, instinctive reaction to that wrenching technological change—people seeking solace in the online maelstrom by clutching at the dream of a kind of localized, rooted civilization that increasingly exists only in the past.

Smith’s account could easily be transferred to other moments of Western history--the shock of enclosure, the Industrial Revolution, or even de-industrialization in the 1970s. Perhaps that’s the point: this is a new version of “reactionary” politics, another example of those who rail against the times. But he’s onto something significant, which brings us back to MacIntyre’s book.

If you listen to critics of US foreign policy, you’ll quickly find that some of the most vocal are veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq. If you listen to critics of the Old Right, you’ll quickly find that some of the most vocal (who aren’t the aforementioned veterans) get their energy from a particular version of “wrenching technological change,” as manifested in the year of our Lord 2020. For MacIntyre, the pandemic threw him into an existential crisis.

The experts who had locked down the entire country were drunk on the incredible power they had amassed in the space of only a few months and had no interest in letting it go. Many state and local governments worked in concert with federal agencies to treat those who opposed the lockdowns as the equivalent of public-health terrorists. Business owners who attempted to open shop were fined millions of dollars, parents who took their children to the park were threatened, and pastors who attempted to hold church services were arrested…I was absolutely blown away by what had unfolded before me. The U.S. Constitution was the bedrock of my American identity…Yet freedom of assembly and worship had been summarily abolished and very few people seemed to care. Obviously the politicians had buckled under but even those around me who I’d known for decades and who largely shared my political views were happy to go along. Conservatives and libertarians who had spent their whole lives railing against government tyranny found ways to excuse and deflect. When tyranny came, nothing happened.

MacIntyre is doing more than just complaining about yellow-livered politicians and judges enraptured by the consensus. Like another canonical conservative figure, he’s pointing out the terrifying reality of a new kind of power, “made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science:”

Technology not only allows these essential classes to remain propagandized and locked down for an extended period of time, it facilitates the large-scale management of dissent. Social media can identify medical experts willing to speak out against the narrative, censor them, and mark them for exile by the relevant professional organizations. The threat of constant video surveillance via the camera present in the pocket of almost every human in the developed world assures large-scale compliance with requirements like mask mandates. A skeptic might find the need to wear a mask outside ridiculous, but footage of him having an argument with an aggressive pro-mask stranger could ensure he’s fired from his job the next day. In Australia, regional governments created smartphone apps requiring anyone under quarantine to regularly take pictures of themselves and confirm their location to prove compliance. When truck drivers in Canada protested vaccine mandates by peacefully shutting down their nation’s capital and a few border crossings, the government seized money that had been donated to fund their demonstration and froze the bank accounts of those who had contributed.

MacIntyre hints at a second identity crisis. If you grew up in the 21st century, you saw that the digital medium went from being celebrated as an unalloyed positive good for social and political progress to something neutral, which we believed could be controlled and managed by the right people and institutions. But by 2020, you discovered that the tools of the digital age were a hostile force. They were extensions of both government control and social control, in what looked like a common collaboration of the powerful aligned against our very humanity.

Post-2020, “wrenching technological change” is a way of remembering the wrenching surveillance and control technologies coupled with a zeitgeist (15 days weeks months to stop the spread) that subjugated our real embodied needs as human beings to a hideous abstraction of the common good. The technological perversions that took place in 2020 and afterwards revealed a deeper, long-simmering problem. Our antibodies to tyranny had long vanished. Western states, societies — Western civilization itself — changed:

The COVID-19 pandemic is an instructive example of this. The entire ordeal perfectly demonstrates how quickly the illusion of individual rights and limited government that modern liberal democracies have constructed, can be handwaved away when the total state identifies an opportunity to expand its power. With no intermediate spheres of social influence competing for allegiance, the total state can use emergencies to swiftly rationalize exceptions to individual liberty and seize power with little to no resistance.

For a younger generation of right-wingers, 2020 has the same world-historic significance as May 1968. The difference is that, unlike in May ‘68, we have chattering classes that will do anything to avoid talking about what really happened in 2020. But if you’ve noticed, then your reading habits have almost certainly changed as you tried to understand what happened. Your friends nudged you toward paragraphs such as these, and suddenly everything made sense:

The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state-as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains—religion, culture, education, the economy—then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics. As a polemical concept against such neutralizations and depoliticalizations of important domains appears the total state, which potentially embraces every domain. This results in the identity of state and society. In such a state, therefore, everything is at least potentially political, and in referring to the state it is no longer possible to assert for it a specifically political characteristic.

The second aspect of “wrenching technological change” that Smith overlooks is the 21st century experience of managerialism. By 2000, we were way past the managerial revolution outlined in James Burnham’s mid-20th century work. The norms of managerialism are no longer attenuated bourgeois values. Instead, managerialism comes with two features. In the first place, it reinvents our communities. Communities are no longer tied to particular localities. Social bonds and ties are reestablished between members of the managerial elite, who share the same degrees rather than the same birthplace, and easily move between the world’s major cities without stepping in fly-over countries. Smith picks up on the political side of the managerialized, de-localized “post-place culture”, seeing the New Right as a response to it. But he misses one of its chief characteristics. The new managerialism has replaced bourgeois values with multicultural values. Managerialism now means asymmetrical multiculturalism: a cultural, political, and legal framework where ethnic minorities are encouraged to embrace and preserve their distinct cultural identities, while white ethnic majorities are urged to refrain from asserting their own cultural or ethnic heritage.

This kind of managerialism-cum-multiculturalism took off in the 1980s and has only gotten stronger since. Big corporations stymied Reagan’s forays to curtail affirmative action in 1985 (a survey of Fortune 500 companies in the mid-1980s found 88% would keep their affirmative-action hiring regime even if no longer legally compelled to do so.) In 1996, Ralph Nader helped organize a survey of the 100 largest U.S. corporations, asking them why their CEOs declined to begin shareholder meetings with the pledge of allegiance. The common response was that it “might offend foreign nationals who might be on their boards of Directors.” In the early 2000s, the Bush administration worked closely with banks and real estate developers to subsidize home-ownership for minorities, offering different lending standards. In 2008, Citigroup provided the Obama administration with a list of political appointments they should hire to promote diversity. A few years after that, asymmetrical multiculturalism took the form of DEI measures, which we know well.

I leave it to others to dispute the genealogy of this collusion between large corporations, the state, and the accredited classes who move between the two. Perhaps it is ultimately at the service of a particular set of material interests, or all downstream from a pernicious set of German ideas. The point is that if you grew up in the 21st century and worked in any major managerial outfit—which includes anything from academia to office work— you have experienced managerialism as asymmetrical multiculturalism. The two are indistinguishable. Peak 21st century is the HR department.

There is, of course, a double standard. Those who worked in this system witnessed and experienced how a society that is ostensibly committed to liberal principles habitually breaks them to benefit members of minority groups. The issue is not whether you noticed the double standard; everyone under the age of 50 who was trying to ascend through the managerial system did. The issue is whether you think it’s legitimate.

This is why books such as Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement struck such a nerve. Caldwell grapples directly with the way we experience double standards. He draws the audacious (but, if you believe law shapes the regime, straightforward) conclusion: in application and in effect, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been a catastrophe.

Prima facie, double standards are illegitimate because they contradict liberal vocabulary. Managerialism-multiculturalism revealed the paradigm crisis of the late 20th century that has become too obvious to ignore. Race-based preferential treatment meant “liberal” (color-blind equal treatment) had ceased to be an operative concept. It doesn’t describe our regime. Those who object to this managerial paradigm are primed to do because they take liberal concepts and norms seriously. Never mind the pearl-clutching about reactionaries attacking civil rights; Caldwell’s book is focused on freedom of association; according to at least one smart critique, it’s a lib, almost libertarian book.

Post-2016, the energy of the New Right movement comes from attacking the world of double standards and exposing the injustices of DEI; these are the institutions that their Old Right counterparts shielded. No account of the New Right is complete without seeing that it is a revolt against asymmetrical multiculturalism, which extends in the boldest circles to an assault against managerialism itself.

But this battle against asymmetrical multiculturalism has baked liberal concerns into the New Right, which the online rightist communities of the 2010s (the so-called “Alt-Right”) just did not have. So it’s no surprise that like much older liberals, New Right pundits follow Caldwell’s lead and philosophize about freedom of association. They invoke the importance of local associations, communities, and bonds as a bastion against disruptive social change, against a global business world devoid of real purpose—as well as against the tyranny of the total state.

These ideas inevitably draw from liberal predecessors. Take these two passages:

At the individual level, this means forming strong families, taking on the responsibility of caring for our loved ones, and sacrificing some degree of leisure for the duties that come with dependence. Churches will need to return to their status as central community institutions responsible for the charitable functions that have been assumed by the state. Communities will need to take on responsibilities that their regional governments may not have the resources to tackle. Cities and towns will need to take on the character of the America Alexis de Tocqueville admired in the early 1800s: a network of community associations created and maintained by hard- working and dedicated citizens willing to bind themselves together and better the lives of their neighbors.

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Apart from authority, as even the great anarchists have insisted, there can be no freedom, no individuality. What the anarchists said, and this is the splendid essence of anarchism and the link between it and such conservatives as Tocqueville and Acton, is, first, that there must be many authorities in society, and, second, that authority must be closely united to objectives and functions which command the response and talents of members. Freedom is to be found in the interstices of authority; it is nourished by competition among authorities.

MacIntyre is almost indistinguishable from the venerable conservative.

It’s true that in New Right circles, status comes in large part by demonstrating your familiarity with edgy thinkers outside the mainstream. You mention Maistre, I’ll mention Louis de Bonald. You mention Concept of the Political, I’ll mention Land and Sea. Yet that kind of easily parodied erudition-signaling is to be expected in any quasi-literary circle, old or new, right or left:

In the case of the New Right, those flirting with more controversial ideas or thinkers are often far less radical than they initially appear. Many just want to build a system that doesn’t award privileges on the basis of race. Which text, imbibed since primary school, is more likely to have taught them to appreciate that? Spengler in The Hour of Decision? Or King in “I Have a Dream?”

As Tocqueville might say: in the beginning, the New Right quoted and commented on Schmitt; in the end, they talked of no one but Nisbet.

This is one of the paradoxes of Auron MacIntyre’s book, and a paradox of the New Right that much commentary misses.