We Were Right About the Managerial State

By Free Republic | Created at 2025-01-15 01:10:23 | Updated at 2025-01-15 07:12:59 6 hours ago

We Were Right About the Managerial State
Chronicles magazine ^ | January 2025 | Paul Gottfried

Posted on 01/14/2025 5:08:49 PM PST by Pelham

What is now called “woke” started with the social engineering obsession of the “democratic managerial state” and the threat it represented to traditional social relations. Chronicles began as a recognizably Boomer publication. As an early contributor to the magazine, I noticed that its founders, Rockford College President John Howard as publisher and the Polish émigré writer Leopold Tyrmand as editor, held what were establishment conservative views for the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were exceedingly high on Ronald Reagan, whom they regarded as the great champion of our “ way of life” against our pervasive Communist foes.

Opposing world Communism led by the Kremlin and defending the American free market, which by then combined capitalism and an already existing welfare state, were constant themes in early Chronicles writings and speeches. Although I had problems with the cut-and-dry nature of these positions, as a professor at nearby Rockford College surrounded by conventional academic leftists, I appreciated the willingness of the Rockford Institute and its leaders to recognize the dubious character of what Reagan designated as the “evil empire.”

All that changed irreversibly in the late 1980s, when what The New Republic magazine designated as “the conservative wars” broke out. This turn of events, in which Chronicles’ editors were deeply embroiled, resulted in our growing and finally immutable isolation from the conservative establishment. While the media-savvy victors in this confrontation, which continued for several years, became the voice of the authorized opposition, Chronicles grew into the main source of independent, non-prescribed opinion on the right. In this role, its editors and contributors made bold arguments that an increasingly predictable conservative mainstream ignored or avoided.

(Excerpt) Read more at chroniclesmagazine.org ...

TOPICS: History; Miscellaneous; Society
KEYWORDS: chronicles; gottfried; managerial

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While the neoconservatives became the dominant force in the mainstream movement of the 1980s, Chronicles took a very different path. It engaged in an intensive investigation of why the U.S. had strayed into becoming a polity profoundly different from what the founders of our country could have imagined or wished.

The main focus for some of us was the size and reach of the managerial state, which ruled over us in an increasingly arbitrary manner. We began exploring how this transformed state acquired its moral authority as well as its unsupervised power. While addressing those questions, we unavoidably trampled on some already obligatory sensitivities by taking a critical view of the civil rights revolution. Something, we assumed, had gone drastically wrong with our constitutional republic. What’s more, this deformation was becoming more and more acute, and it was centered on a governmentally led war against “prejudice” and “discrimination.”

A widening crusade against racism, legally and socially recognized gender distinctions, and finally gender itself had come to characterize this post-constitutional regime, both here and in other Western countries. American government, together with its media allies and academic priesthood, had set out to redeem us from our anti-egalitarian past. This redeemer bureaucracy and its judicial enablers were combatting, or so we were told, the allegedly false consciousness produced by a reactionary past. As soon became painfully clear, these projects “victimized” most heavily those who held the lowest victim card, namely white straight male Christians.

1 posted on 01/14/2025 5:08:49 PM PST by Pelham

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