In the twilight of a democratic-managerial regime, “the masses will seek to transmute even a haberdasher into a mask of Caesar.” So prophesied the 20th-century writer James Burnham.
The New Right’s ideas are usually not new. Their concepts usually have an older lineage within the broader American Right, which helps to make the ideas accessible and meaningful to their contemporary purveyors. Among the New Right thinkers who have emerged in the past decade to explain Donald Trump (and to staff his administrations), the concepts of Managerialism and Caesarism both have growing currency. These concepts represent some of the New Right’s most significant deviations from conservative republican constitutionalism, and they share an intellectual history. Both were theorized and popularized in American right-wing circles by the cult theorist James Burnham, who saw Caesarism as a political corollary of the “Managerial Revolution” he diagnosed.
Burnham’s successors and admirers have proven poor students, mistaking the disease for a cure, and toying ominously with embracing their own Caesars.
For all his faults, though, Burnham strenuously opposed the Caesarism he worried may be inevitable. His successors and admirers have proven poor students, mistaking the disease for a cure, and toying ominously with embracing their own Caesars.
Caesarism and MAGA’s “Red Caesar”
Caesarism has had a range of meanings. For a brief time, it served as an academic term of art for authoritarian regimes ruled by a charismatic leader and endorsed by plebiscitary votes—think Mussolini, de Gaulle at various points, and Napoleon III. Napoleon III was so emblematic that Bonapartism was frequently a synonym for Caesarism.
More recently, New Rightists have begun experimenting with Caesarism as a plausible future for American politics. The “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people,” notes Hillsdale’s Kevin Slack. Michael Anton, formerly of Hillsdale’s Washington, DC, satellite and currently the Director of Policy Planning Staff in the Trump Administration, probed the possibility of Caesarism in his 2020 book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. Anton defines Caesarism as “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity.” Although he officially thinks a Red Caesar—a strongman representing Red State America—is unlikely to succeed, he nonetheless surfaces Caesarism, Red or Blue, as a realistic possibility.
As the root word “Caesar” implies, Caesarism is built on a Roman analogy that claims the American republic is in near-terminal decline. Right-wing influencer Dave Reaboi has made much hay out of this parallel, describing the present moment as the “Late Republic.” You only need a cursory knowledge of Roman history to know what came after that: namely, the death of the republic and an empire under the rule of the Caesars. Fittingly, the most absurd figure associated with Caesarism, Charles Haywood, prefers the term “Augustan.” Haywood, a former haircare magnate with intellectual and political pretensions, openly favors Caesarism, writing, “I like, if not love, the idea of Red Caesar” and “Let’s get on with it.”
Historically, conservative intellectuals have opposed Caesarism, generally seeing it as a left-wing or at least statist phenomenon. Anton and Slack’s Hillsdale connection is not a coincidence, since the college is closely linked with the Claremont Institute and its brand of West Coast Straussianism. Indeed, Reaboi and Haywood have frequently engaged with Claremont or Claremont-adjacent enterprises, too. The Caesarist undercurrent at Claremont makes some sense insofar as West Coast Straussianism’s fixation on statesmanship has always had a personalist element to it, and under Trump this statesmanship has undergone an authoritarian shift. Of all the conservative think tanks, the Claremont Institute shifted toward Trump the earliest and most emphatically. It may be that toying with Caesarism—a concept they are officially ambivalent about—performs a psychological function, a mode of abstract distancing, that allows Claremonters to engage with (and, in a way, to legitimate and defang, since Caesar as a historical figure is ambiguous overall) the often unstatesmanlike and ideologically amorphous Trump in a way that feels familiar. There is a parallel here to Evangelical leaders’ framing him as the good Persian king, Cyrus.
A theme in Burnham’s work saw Caesarism—sometimes Bonapartism—as the signal threat posed by democratism, or an unreflective faith in democracy. Unless thoroughly disciplined by republican myth and normative constitutional structures, Burnham argued, mass democracy reduces complex challenges to binary choices, usually between charismatic candidates or largely symbolic slogans.
Burnham’s work saw Caesarism as the signal threat posed by democratism, or an unreflective faith in democracy.
There is perhaps a minor parallel to be found in the thought of West Coast Straussianism’s key thinker, Harry Jaffa. From entirely different premises to Burnham, Jaffa dedicated nearly half of his magnum opus, The Crisis of the House Divided, to a sophisticated and ultimately negative assessment of majoritarian democracy. In his more intemperate writings, Jaffa would equate majoritarianism divorced from his favored guiding principles with Nazism.
In The Machiavellians, published in 1943, and Congress and the American Tradition, published in 1959, Burnham suggested that a two-way process pushed democracies toward Caesarism. On the one hand, he wrote, successful democratic leaders undergo a “psychological metamorphosis,” identifying themselves with the party or nation: “Criticism of the group is personal libel against the leader; criticism of the leader is subversion and treason against the group.” On the other hand, the logic of democracy necessarily turns the “will of the people” into the “will of the majority” in a plebiscitary vote. The leaders elected in a majority vote in turn, Burnham claimed, wield their victory with the moral certainty of “the Divine Right of Demos” that overrides traditions, norms, and paper barriers. Caesarism, for Burnham, “is a popular, a democratic despotism, founded on democratic doctrine, and, at least in its initiation, committed to democratic forms.” And while Caesarism, “in fact rather than in theory, denies democracy, it does so by bringing democracy to completion.”
Burnham as the Theorist of Managerialism
Burnham’s other concept, Managerialism, is both more original and more mainstream. Managerialism holds that there exists a distinct class of “managers.” Neither working class nor capitalists, managers are technicians whose claim to power rests on their ability manipulate the complex economic and technological systems of an industrialized and post-industrialized society. The managerial class, consciously or not, seeks to advance its own interests and to justify its dominant place in society. The idea has a strong pedigree across the political spectrum, especially through the concept of the “professional-managerial class” (although with totally different emphases and implications for the Left and the Right). The concept is currently in vogue. The Substacker and rising New Right thinker Nathan Levine, pen name NS Lyons, promoted the concept in a recent New York Times op-ed: “What is commonly called populist politics,” Levine wrote, “can be more accurately described as part of an anti-managerial revolution attempting to roll back the expansion of overbearing bureaucratic control into more and more areas of life.”
In 1941, Burnham divined that an epochal shift was underway. He saw capitalism and its attendant liberal ideology giving way to the new managerial regime.
In 1941’s The Managerial Revolution, Burnham divined that an epochal shift was underway. He saw capitalism and its attendant liberal ideology giving way to the new managerial regime. He predicted that soon a new ideology would emerge to justify this new world order. Burnham saw the managerial revolution advanced in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, where apparatchiks wielded the awesome power of the state, and partially in FDR’s transformation of the American state in the New Deal.
In a tetralogy spanning his break from Trotskyism to his role as a foundational figure for American conservatism, Burnham outlined his sometimes perceptive, sometimes hysterical view of the modern political order. A conscious “Machiavellian” and an ex-Marxist, he paid close attention to the ways in which (in his view) political structures worked beneath the rhetoric and assumptions of modern liberal democracy. In particular, his Congress and the American Tradition, part of a larger conservative literature that emphasized congressional supremacy over the executive, warned presidential expansions of power would soon eclipse America’s traditional republican government entirely.
For Burnham, Caesarism was not only the likely outcome of democratism, but of Managerialism as well.
Intriguingly, Burnham discerned a particular link between Managerialism and Caesarism. To him, Caesarism was not only the likely outcome of democratism, but of Managerialism as well. Traditional republican politics made little sense in a mass society. Thus, in Congress and the American Tradition, Burnham wrote:
Within the emergent managerial society the typical political form links a huge, pervasive governmental bureaucracy with a Caesarism-tending political leadership sanctioned by mass plebiscites. This combination, supported by a bureaucratized military and police apparatus, operates primarily through administrative decree while using an assembly as recording device and sounding board.
Although he, citing Amaury de Riencourt, predicted the rise of Caesars globally, including in the United States, Burnham detested Caesarism. In fact, despite his pronounced tendency toward catastrophism, within the conservative movement, Burnham was something of a political moderate, at least domestically. Working from his idiosyncratic outlook, Burnham wanted to balance elites and maintain a fruitful cycling of elites within America’s governing structures in order to sustain political freedoms.
Sam Francis and Burnham’s Long Shadow
In his op-ed for the Times, Levine was right to cite Burnham; he also included Samuel T. Francis, a conscious student of Burnham’s thought. The late Francis is a controversial figure, a fact that Levine elides. He was fired from the Washington Times for racist writings, and before his death in 2005, he associated openly with white nationalists. But Francis has been “rediscovered” since 2016, since his Burnhamite populist analysis seems awfully prescient regarding Trumpism.
Francis saw the contemporary American order as a liberal managerial state that took its justification and motivation from progressive egalitarian dogmas. Within the counter-institutions of the conservative movement, Francis was often in the minority. He and his peers, the “paleoconservatives” and the then-“New Right,” felt frustrated and denied patronage by—as they saw it—the half-way conservatives like William F. Buckley who gate-kept and calumnied them. Francis synthesized a range of paleoconservative and New Right ideas, including the need for an alliance with a “Middle American” voting bloc to smash progressive elite hegemony, and worked them into his Burnhamite framework.
One place Francis deviated from typical conservative articles of faith, even among the diehards of the New Right, was on the wielding of state power. “The New Right must abandon the political style of the Old Right,” Francis declared. It must recognize the extent to which the managerial class had infiltrated “Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, the media.” Given this analysis, he therefore called for the Right to use “the ‘Caesarist’ tactic” as a “spearhead” against the managerial administrative state. “Only the presidency is capable of dismantling or restructuring the bureaucratic-managerial apparatus that now strangles the latent dynamism” of the Middle Americans whom Francis hoped the New Right would ride to power.
Francis specifically looked to Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, as progenitors of his new vision. He also cited the conservative academic Jeffrey Hart, who in the fallout of Watergate advocated for conservatives to make a “drastic shift” in their conception of executive power. “The only way” the federal bureaucracy could be “diverted, cut back, or eliminated” was “through the action of a powerful President who is willing virtually to go to war within his own executive branch in order to carry out his mandate,” Hart wrote in 1974. Equally, the power of the media to set nationwide narratives necessitated a potent executive response.
Hart and later Francis came to see Caesarism less as a threat than as something preferable to the progressive administrative state (or, in their view, soft left-wing Caesarism). They diverged from Burnham partly for generational reasons. Hart was 25 years younger; Francis was 42 years younger. The rise of communist and fascist states that formed the backdrop of Burnham’s intellectual development were relics by the 1970s and 1980s when Hart and Francis wrote.
Jeffrey Hart and later Sam Francis came to see Caesarism less as a threat than as something preferable to the progressive administrative state.
More importantly, for Hart and Francis, right-wing control of the presidency had become a tantalizing possibility. The collapse of the New Deal coalition in the late 1960s, and the subsequent coalescence of a right-wing alternative that powered Nixon in 1972 and would later elect Reagan and Bush, changed the political calculus for right-wing intellectuals long denied access to the presidency. Against the conservative tendency to favor congressional supremacy over the “imperial presidency,” Hart and Francis began an alternative tradition that elevated the executive, based on right-wing competitiveness in presidential—what Burnham once considered plebiscitary—elections. The ramifications of this shift are clear in the turn toward the “unitary executive theory” in conservative legal thinking.
Echoes of Watergate
The divergent paths conservatives have taken are perhaps seen most clearly in these thinkers’ contrasting responses to the Watergate scandal.
Nixon’s landslide reelection in 1972 was essential to the conservative movement’s early days because it served as proof of concept. The long theorized conservative majority was real, or at least it proved capable of electing right-of-center candidates.
Burnham’s sincere dislike for Caesarism and centralized power helps to explain his actions during Watergate. During the scandal, when many conservatives’ first instinct was to obfuscate Nixon’s possible culpability in the break-in and to blame the media, Burnham pushed the conservative magazine National Review against Nixon (over internal opposition). He saw in Nixon, who combined major plebiscitary victories with cynical use of the bureaucratic state, as a step toward the political program he feared. “Even if the U.S. is fated to be transformed into a Caesarist empire,” Burnham wrote at the time to his son, “and even if that is necessary to its survival, I still don’t like Caesarism.”
For other parts of the Right, including Francis and Hart, Watergate proved that winning elections wasn’t enough. Burnham recognized Nixon’s downfall as the republican order working itself out; in fact, he participated in it. Francis and others, though, came to see it as a slow-motion coup. The Watergate scandal showed how an alliance between the media and administrative (or managerial) state could bring down a democratically elected leader and subvert the will of the people. It all but demanded a new kind of strongman response.
Hart, Francis, Levine, and some of the Claremonters today, see Caesarism as part of this longer historical trajectory—as a way of righting much older wrongs, and as a weapon for defeating the administrative state they revile.
They are, however, very poor students of James Burnham, having inherited some of his analytic categories and his catastrophism, while at the same time dispensing with his judgment and aversion to Caesarism, and to an overweening executive. They have transformed Caesarism from a force to be diagnosed and averted into a possible pathway forward, to be tolerated and perhaps even encouraged. In this respect, they are like elites in Germany and Italy and Spain, who, out of fear of Communist revolution, backed right-wing strongmen who left millions dead and their countries in ruin.
Our contemporary Caesarists risk parlaying America’s political institutions into the service of a Caesar who demands his due. American democracy—and Republicanism—are made all the worse for their bad judgment.
Whether Trump proves to be their man, or that turns out to be someone else entirely, our contemporary Caesarists risk parlaying America’s political institutions into the service of a Caesar who demands his due. American democracy—and Republicanism—are made all the worse for their bad judgment.
Joshua Tait is a historian of American conservatism and right-wing thought. He has a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and writes the To Live is To Maneuver Substack. You can follow him on Twitter or Bluesky.
Image made using “Donald Trump – Portrait (19830600925),” by DonkeyHotey licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic. All other images used are in the public domain.
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