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Speaker 8: All right, Sean Griffith, Welcome to the Jay Burdon Show.
Speaker 9: How you doing man, I'm doing great. Thanks so much
for having me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. It's funny you
sent me a pre production version of this piece, and
then very shortly afterwards I saw it again in Chronicles,
which is a magazine I read quite regularly. And so
before we get into the article you've read, who are
you and what do you do well?
Speaker 10: I'm a law professor. I'm a law professor at Fordham
Law School in New York City. I've been a law
professor for something like twenty five years. My area is
corporate law, which isn't as political or at least didn't
used to be as political as some other areas of
the law, but these days it is, and the politics
enters through this idea of ESG or environmental social governance
and what some people call the woke corporation. And so
the essay that I sent to you is an attempt
to explain the persistence of ESG and corporate wokeism.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 8: It's an interesting angle because a lot of people who
I don't particularly enjoy define themselves in opposition to woke
You see, obviously the woke left, but also this new
emergent phrase, the woke right, and their conception is that wokeness,
whatever you want to call it, is inherently Marxist. They
are one and the same. And again sort of playing
Desil Devil's advocate here, If communism and wokeness are synonymous,
how can a corporate corporation corporate corporation, How can a
big corporation go woke?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 10: I think that's an interesting question. You know, I think
that the question presents itself as a kind of a paradox.
On the on the one hand, wokeism is persistent. Right,
so we have a new administration, but we still the
woke hasn't gone away, at least in the corporate world.
I saw a statistic the other day that something like
fifty or sixty percent of a fortune five hundred have
board level reporting to their DEI departments. And there are
all these big corporations that are you know, that are
that are resisting the pushing to eliminate DEI.
Speaker 9: And they're hiring and promotion operations.
Speaker 10: And you can certainly see wocism still in some consumer brands,
most most obviously maybe the NFL. So it seems like
it's a persistent phenomenon. It's not just that it came
up in the first place. But at the same time,
it doesn't seem like it's entirely sincere. So when I
talk two business people, CEOs, you know, they'll often say
things like, oh, you know, I'm not very political. I
don't consider myself ideological. It's not really who I am,
you know. I'm just about doing the right thing for
the corporation. Even when you talk to academics about ESG
or woke corporatism, they're just like, Hey, isn't this just
a some words that we have to say so that
we can get back to business as usual And So
that's kind of a paradox, right. You would think if
the thing was insincere, it wouldn't be persistent, or you
would think that if the thing was persistent, it couldn't
it would have to be sincere. And it seems like
those two things are butting up against each other. So
the essay is really attempt to explain that paradox, and
the way that I explain it is that wokeism is
a form of managerialism. It's a necessary iteration of the
current managerial elite.
Speaker 8: It's an interesting thing you point out because, look, I'm
a full time internet person now, for whatever that's worth.
But I did work in the corporate world, and one
of the things that was very striking to me is
how often it's sort of the business equivalent of having
kids to save the relationship, where it's something you pull
out when things aren't going well. For instance, my last
real corporate job, the company ended up going under, but
really about a month and a half before, when the
writing was on the wall, everyone on the sales side,
which is where I worked, was painfully aware that we're
getting shell ACKed. And the big pivot was a pivot
to diversity. We had hired this range of DEI consultants,
and so I wonder if part of it is that
it is DEI diversity. All of that has entered this
level of best practices where this is simply things that
successful corporations do. We are not successful, we don't have this.
So clearly this is part of the transformation into a
successful business. Now, obviously you and I understand that that's
not the case. But to me and I'm glad you
tied it to managerialism, it has become for managers, for
the people who direct almost every company. It's become one
of those key performance indicators, right, those metrics that determine
whether or a company is successful or not. So in
the same way that no one really questions why we
want to be more profitable this year than last. It's
not quite at that level, but it's a similar level
of sort of received wisdom. If you see what I'm
getting at, Sean, I do.
Speaker 9: I think you know.
Speaker 10: Your point is that there are all these departments essentially
inside corporations that do wokeism.
Speaker 9: And that's true.
Speaker 10: It's basically ingrained as part of the corporate structure, and
which explains to some degree why it's so hard to eradicate.
On the other hand, the managers, if they wanted to,
the CEOs of the corporations that you're describing, could just
be like, well, we've got to cut costs. We've got
to cut them somewhere. Let's cut them in the in
the DEI department or whatever. And they seem not to
do that. That seems to be a move that they're
loath to do, and so there must be something there, right,
There's something about how these things that seem like obvious
things for the chopping block don't tend to go there,
and I think that's in the nature of managerialism itself.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think that you're entirely right. And by the way,
for those wondering, because I will always get comments on this.
The reason you can see I'm looking at something in
the other window. It's not me scrolling Twitter. It's me
referencing the article.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 8: I do actually do my homework every once in a while.
But you're entirely correct there. You mentioned the history of managerialism,
and to me, I'm not nearly as well read on
this subject as you are. But it goes back to
Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, and he talks about the transition
from capitalism to managerialism. For those who aren't familiar, he
was writing in the thirties talking about the death of capitalism,
which involved the death of the capitalist. At that time,
there was a time where you could go to Ford
Motor Company, walk up to the penthouse suite and there'd
be a guy named Ford there who was in charge
of it, sort of this baronial figure. It was almost
feudal arrangement, and that was replaced due to any number
of financial or technical innovations with managers joint stock, you know,
the idea that no one really owns the entirety of it,
and so who runs it, well, these managers for hire,
and what Burnham describes and again I think what you're
getting at there is that the system becomes self interested.
Managers are interested in themselves, interested in people like them,
and the fact that you know, their sort of jobs
continue on continue being highly compensated. And so it really
is like DEI and H. Let's be honest, HR is
just DEI from a different era. They become entrenched interests
and they become not for the corporation but for the
managers essential both because they enable the managerial apparatus to
run ever more minute parts of the office of the
corporation to increase their control. But also it is an
element of patronage, right, Those are good, high paying jobs, which,
let's be honest, in the case of DEI, don't seem
to be particular, really strenuous, and so like anything else,
there is a sort of client patron relationship there. Am
I overstating the case, Sean, I.
Speaker 9: Don't think so.
Speaker 10: I think that you're right there. There's at least two
things going on there, right. The wocism, if for whatever
you want to call it, it sort of justifies it
has a role in justifying the existence of certain managerial folks, right.
So it most obviously that would be your hiring, your
DEI hiring department and so on, but also the people
who implement those policies that are maybe a little bit
above that department in the hierarchy, who are doing those things.
So it's a thing to do, right, So I call
it in the article a forever project. It's a perfect
project for a manager because it's a project that you
can always work towards but never achieve. But more importantly,
maybe you can measure incremental movements towards that goal and goal,
whatever it is, and get compensated for it, or at
least pat it on the back for it by whoever
it is that's patting you on the back.
Speaker 9: So it justifies there existence.
Speaker 10: It gives them a sort of a perpetual employment, perpetual
goals to work towards. And that's true, I think, in
the public and private sector, right, So that describes the
managerial goals of the administrative state in the public sector.
It also describes, let's say, the managerial goals of a
big giant corporation in the private sector. I love the
Burnham stuff, and I totally agree with everything that you said,
and your characterization of it is exactly right. What I
think is interesting is that it goes back even before Burnham,
to a book called The Modern Corporation Private Property by
burleyan Means, which is like a nineteen thirty two book
which is still referred to in contemporary corporate law classes
like which I teach, and we teach it in we
cite it for the proposition of the separation of ownership
and control. So burleyan Means in the early thirties, notice
that those big corporations, they're very large, and they've outgrown
the size to where a single shareholder like Ford in
your example, could exert any control over them. And and
they are so they're large, and their control is separated
from ownerships. So the capital contributors aren't really in charge anymore.
It's this other class of managers, as you say, now,
burleyan Means call this the quasi public corporation. And their
argument is that that's totally different from any other form
of private property, and therefore it entitles the government to
come in and run those companies for like stakeholders. Right,
So this is kind of like what some people now
call stakeholder capitalism.
Speaker 9: When we when when we.
Speaker 10: Talk when we refer back to Burley and Means, these
days we refer back to the separation of ownership and control,
But most people don't refer back to the to the
stakeholder capitalism part. But Burnham, interestingly in The Managerial Revolution,
he cites Burlean Means and he says, these guys were right,
like they had that they had the right idea. The
separation of ownership and control is happening like they're their
historical demonstration, their economic demonstration, or that fact is true.
But then Burnham says they didn't draw the logical conclusion
that this is actually a revolutionary event. Just like a
bourgeois capitalism replaced the hereditary monarchy or aristocracy as the
governing class, this is this other class supplanting capital right,
supplanting the ownership class as the governing class in the world.
And then he had examples in the United States, Western Europe,
and the Soviet Union where he's trying to show that
in spite of the surface differences between those regimes, they're
actually all running the same code.
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Speaker 9: It's managerialism. It's the separation of ownership and control.
Speaker 10: It's the liberation of managers from their controlling inputs.
Speaker 8: And it's an interesting thing obviously, you know. Orwell's nineteen
eighty four is written largely in response to James Burnham,
and you know, as much as my sympathies are with
the span soldier who shot him, you know, Orwell brings
up some interesting things there, and you know, one of
them is this idea of these three super states opposed
one to another, sometimes in an unstable alliance, but ultimately
the same structure, ultimately directed in the same way. And
to me, this is sort of one of the the
primary errors of to be kind shall we say, a
previous era of conservative many who are right now in
the sort of anti woke coalition because they're so wrapped
up in the dichotomy of the Cold War, which we
understand was a real event and one that, to be honest,
threatened the existence of human life. But also that dichotomy
between communism and capitalism, or say, is not nearly as
deep as many like to pretend. And also going forward,
that dichotomy does not describe the current relationship with the
whatever you want to call the woke mind virus, as
the mean goes, Because you're completely correct, this is this
managerial revolution is a revolution. It is a dramatic departure.
But there is no inconsistency with this fusion of woke
ideology and shareholder capitalism or managerialism, because ultimately they're pretty
much not the same, but very much related. And you
see the hatred from both the managerial class and the wokesters,
if we could use that term towards the closest things
we have to modern day capitalists, someone like Elon Musk,
who fair enough you can buy stock in many of
his companies, but he owns his companies in a much
more definite way than most other CEOs, that most other leaders.
And look, this is not supposed to be a you
know what, this is not supposed to be sort of
an acomium on Elon Musk. He certainly has many personality
flaws we don't need to get into. But it's interesting
that much of the hatred towards Elon Musk seemingly has
very little to do with what he actually does or says.
It is his stance as being outside of that managerial framework,
again not entirely, look like we understand that his corporations
are still run by managers, but he is a monarchical
figure in that way. You know, he is the guy
who decides the direction of his companies. Again not necessarily
in the same way that Henry Ford could have, but
still it's a different it's a different arrangement than one
often found. And I think that that explains why so
many disparate people hate him, or seemingly disparate, because again,
it really is a like, I mean, we could even say,
like a class based disdain. You see what I'm getting
at there, Professor Griffin, I.
Speaker 10: Do I like all that? I mean, I guess there's
a bunch of pieces. So let me see if I
can put a couple of different ones together. I think
that you were right to mention the Cold War. You know,
when you think back to sort of prior managerial projects,
I think we have an interesting question that we should consider,
which is why is ESG and wokeism the current managerial project,
which I think is hard to answer, but it's something
we're thinking about. But there are definitely prior managerial projects,
and the Cold War is one, right that is, and
think about how the Cold War was fought. It was
not fought with like, you know, a bunch of like
separate business managers working on their own in separately and independently,
like in a free market way. To deal with like
the threat of Soviet communism, no where was a sort
of a centrally managed central intelligence agency operation to undermine
the Soviet Union. There's sort of a central coordinated way
to think about it. It was a problem that needed
coordinated administration to solve. The Second World War from our perspective,
the US perspective, was a a large problem that needed
coordinated administration to solve. Right the army, I read this biography.
I think it was a Omar Bradley one time and
the title of the biography was the Organizer in Chief,
or maybe it was even the Manager in Chief, suggesting
that Bradley's primary attribute and why he was a great
general in the Second World War was that he was
such a good manager. So a lot of like that giant,
massive military effort, the coordinated economy that went into winning
the Second World War, the administration of the military across
different continents was a managerial project run by managers. Those
generals were managers, not necessarily war fighters. And then the
Cold War is a definite managerial project. But then these
projects are left and right, so you might think of
both of those as a little bit right coded. But
like the Great Society, all this sort of war on poverty,
all those are managerial projects which are sort of co
coordinated problem solving.
Speaker 9: And I think that.
Speaker 10: That's an interesting that continuity of managerialism going back to
the forties is an interesting thing to remark upon. I
think the interesting thing in front of us now, though,
is like why this project, like what what what about
managerialism has made it necessary to be a project focused
on I don't know, anti racism, gender norms, uh, perpetual
self sexual liberationism or something whatever you however you want
to think about those nested issues that are at the core,
why are those the the subjects of of of managerialism now?
And I think one of the reasons that Elon has
hated is that he does not display those values. And
it's and I don't I think that, as you were saying, Astutelee,
he's kind of the controller of Tesla. I mean, if
I wanted to nerd out on Delaware corporate law, which
I will not do, I would tell you that there
is a there's a dispute in Delaware about whether where
Tesla was formerly incorporated, about whether Elon actually controls Tesla.
But he is close to a controller of Tesla, for sure.
And and he is not an ordinary CEO in the
way that that Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan is an
ordinary CEO. And so Elon has certain kinds of power
inside his organization that other CEOs don't have. I like
the I like what you were saying. He's sort of
more monarchical than managerial, and he as a result of that,
doesn't have to toe the line of the managerial orthodoxy,
which is all of this woke ESG stuff.
Speaker 8: Yeahs, as far as the question of why this project
over anything else. Sort of paraphrasing my buddy Arun's book, right,
the Total State, he talks about how you're the This
sort of managerial system is sort of organic, right, It
seeks to grow in expand and really it is an
expansion of control into ever more minute aspects of the
human experience. Obviously, you know, with a great number of
you know, the laws coming out of the nineteen sixties,
you have an injection of management into freedom of association
you know. Later, obviously we have this applied to the
War between the sexes. We mentioned HR earlier. But it
effectively creates another sort of deeper apparatus for control when
you think to the sort of things that are often
mentioned in these you know, DEI seminars. Obviously you have
the personnel question, which is from my perspective, creating a
patronage network within the workplace, right, people who understand even
if you know implicitly that they are there because of
the DEI and other things. But also, I mean, I
think that it's a natural extension from the perspective of
ever greater control over just human existence, right, the idea
that things that were previously not to say, a political
in the sense that people didn't have opinions about them,
but outside of the realm of politics have entered into
it and entered into management. Right, things that were previously organic,
were previously mediated consocially and informally become part of you
could say, like the political or managerial apparatus. It's not
a fully formulated thought. And I'm gribbing from a book
that I read two years ago, so you know, don't
don't don't crucify me for it, But that's I think
at least one element to it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I like Oron's book, and I think he's got
He's onto something for sure. I think for here's a
question that I think we could pose that to try
to draw, to draw some lines between maybe Oron's book
and this essay and other ideas. Could you have a
right wing managerialism? I think is a question that we
could We could ask like, is there or is there
something about managerialism that codes left? And so my answer
to that question probably Orn's answer to but I'm gonna
give my answer and he can speak for himself, is
that there there there, you know, Burnham to go back
to Burnham for a second. Burnham certainly thought that managerialism
could be right coded.
Speaker 9: Right, so he treats.
Speaker 10: European fascism as a form of of managerialism, and so
there's that we should acknowledge that. And maybe you could
say that the Second World War and the Cold War
were right wing projects and they were managerial projects. So
it's possible that there could be some forms of right
wing managerialism in the past. I don't know, but I
think that you can't really have sustained right wing managerialism
for for two reasons. One reason is theoretical and one
reason is more practical.
Speaker 9: So the theoretical.
Speaker 10: Reason is and I think you were getting at this,
like what is the defining.
Speaker 9: Trait of the left, Like what does the left want?
Speaker 8: What is it?
Speaker 9: What is it after? What is its goal?
Speaker 10: And I think it's something like perpetual problem solving in
order to make things better for mankind? Right, Like, So
if you go back to like Francis Bake and Enlightenment philosophy,
their idea is, look, we're going to stop doing all
this science and philosophy to like live virtuously or whatever.
Like that doesn't mean or figure out the good, interrogate
the good. We're going to direct philosophy and knowledge towards
enlightening man's state, right, making things better, right, making their
material conditions better. So from that point onward, the left
project is sort of to make life easier for human beings.
And so the motivating energy on the left is always
to like incrementally improve things through coordinated administration, and that
I think is the managerial project par excellence. If everything
is a problem to be solved through coordinated administration, then
everything comes into managerialism and it becomes something to work on.
Whereas the motivating energy on the right, I think is
something else, and we can talk about what that could be,
and maybe it's something like hierarchy and transcendence. To put
it somewhat provocatively, right, the left, the managerial left, wants
to save mankind, but the right knows that mankind was
saved two thousand years ago by God's intervening grace.
Speaker 9: Right, if you wanted to be really provocative.
Speaker 10: But the left has got a project all the time,
and the right it's not clearly about a project.
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Speaker 10: Hierarchy experiencing transcendence through hierarchy. Right, So there's a theoretical
problem that's a theoretical obstacle to sustain right wing managerialism,
Like it just doesn't fit. We're not always trying to
solve problems, And insofar as the way that managerialism works
is by always solving material problems, it wants to take
on those characteristics of the left. So that's a theoretical
objection to the possibility of right wing managerialism. The practical
ejection is just these days, like left liberalism is the
cultural code of the elite. And so if the if
the managerial elite UH want to get into positions of
authority in the managerial state, Uh, they need to they
need to you know, internalize that code. And and as
a pragmatic matter, it happens in you know, three different ways.
It happens at school, right, So UH, to get into
the managerial elite, you have to be credentialed through elite schools.
And as everyone your entire audience knows, elite schools are
a place of you know, intellectual conformity, left intellectual conformity.
So you have to come out with a credential from
that credentialing institution inside the manage the organization. To rise
to positions of authority in the managerial uh organization, you
have to survive successive promotion tournaments, right, And so in
a promotion tournaments, the question is are you going to
get promoted or is it going to be some other person?
And that's an opportunity for you to be well more competent,
would be the nice way of putting it. But the
other possibility is other factors could enter into that promotion dynamic,
and those factors can be ideological factors. So if you
don't conform ideologically to the norms of the organization or
to the norms of the culture, generally, you don't survive
in the promotion tournament to move up. And as those
organizations are more and more woke, those tournaments are more
and more woke. And you know, this is the reason
that you know, white men complain about their inability to
rise within.
Speaker 9: Corporate hierarchies these days.
Speaker 10: And then the last one would be, you know, let's
say some some right wing person, some conservative gets to
the top of a managerial organization and decides it's time
to raise the Jolly Roger. Well, that person is going
to be denounced, terminated, and probably canceled unless they have
some insurance against that. And the only insurance against that
is to own the organization like Elon does.
Speaker 9: Right, only that level of.
Speaker 10: Actual access to capital provides for safety. I don't think
that Jamie Diamond has the same level of safety in
that sense as Elon. But anyway, those practical those practical
hurdles sort of make it impossible for right wing managerialism
to exist. So basically left wing left liberalism is encoded
within the managerial organization, and that's the world that.
Speaker 9: We live in.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so there's a lot there. I think if we
examine that idea of is it possible to have a
right wing managerial regime. I'm glad you brought up the
examples of the European fascists, the prominent mid century German regime.
But to me, I think that it's sort of up
for debate in my mind whether that is a possible future,
Like we could have right wing managerial fascism. Not something
I would advocate for per se, but just saying like
that is a mathematical possibility. I wonder if one could ask,
I guess if our current situation is a result of
sort of living in the house that FDR built, that
this great progressive figure sort of entrenches the managerial regime
in America, and ultimately our government still exists in FDR mode.
Right The French would kind of number their republics. We don't.
But effectively it's sort of a new dispensation, some might say,
of America. That's one point, and I'm actually not convinced
either way. On that question, is it possible to have
a right wing managerial regime. But you're quite right to
bring up the question of intragroup competition and also of status,
because I think that the status question is incredibly important
to this. You mentioned that all of these institutions which
both provide accreditation, which is both a key to enter,
you know, different kind of tears of the managerial regime,
but also provide status, and I think that that cannot
be underestimated. To kind of pull a trick out of
my Marxist hat here, I think that the the middle
class is incredibly interested in social status and social standing.
And for instance, you see this with there's certain changes
in American society. Gay marriage is unpopular before Berga fell,
it becomes popular the law of the land, and all
of a sudden we see that sixty forty split reverse
because again, you know it is it is endorsed by
the government. It is a normal quote unquote, actually we
could just say normal and statistical sense opinion now and
it becomes widely held. And I think that your your
comments again about the necessity the necessary level of capital
to insulate yourself from this, I mean, look, that's entirely correct, Like,
look all the Shenaniganst. Peter Teal has had to go through. Right,
He's he's in California. He's clearly fighting off the kind
of encroachment of the Wolke regime, and he's resorted to
all kinds of crazy stuff. Right, He's required to have
a woman on his board, and he finds some random
reporter who's never sat out a boardroom in his life,
that's loyal to him personally and says, all right, she's
my woman. So point is like, that's not something that
that sort of entry is of just working your way up.
And then, as you said, raising the Jollie Roger, it
is not possible for any number of reasons. I guess
I'm kind of spoiling this, but I will have Will
hild On soon, who's you know, writes quite a bit
about this, to talk exactly about the sort of capital controls,
artificial or not, that are put in place to keep
that exact thing from happening, to keep there from being
a conservative company, or even a company that puts out
a right of center product, you know, whether entertainment or not.
And I realized I threw a bunch of you there.
But let's specifically pivot to that question of status, because
I'm not entirely sure how you and many have tried.
I mean, Barry Weis, so I'm no big fan of,
but she's, you know, part of this project to create
sort of an alternative anti woke university in Austin, which
doesn't seem to be going anywhere. But it seems to
be a very difficult nut to crack because the system
is ever more left wing, because the institutions which provide
both entry to that system and accreditation are incredibly left
wing and without effectively, you know, as Jarvin would say,
putting tanks in Harvard Yard, I don't know how you
create or destroy that network of prestige and accreditation.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well, I saw You're raising a really important question,
which is the universities and the culture basically, and I
would put those institutions in a different category from like corporations,
which we're talking about now, or corporations. At the end
of the day, it's still true that if you know,
for as woke as some CEO wants to be, if
they're not returning dividends or growing the share price or whatever,
they're going to be consequences for that, and so there's
a there is a I don't think it is an
adequate correction, but there is some correction.
Speaker 9: Like you have. You can be woke, but you have.
Speaker 10: To be woke and still a crete to capital. In
other institutions, that is not true. So that is not
true in universities. They don't have that same real world
ultimate rubber meets the road moment that corporations have. In
universities are different and the people that populate universities are
different too. So you know, I'm a university professor and
I don't make as much money as I would make
as a university professor as if I were doing the
same thing in the private sectors as a corporate lawyer
for example. Right, there's a there's a pretty big delta,
but that's okay. And so the people that go into
universities to make those sorts of those same sorts of.
Speaker 9: Trade offs they have. There's a trade off, right, it's
a psychic trade off.
Speaker 10: And you're like, well, I get to live with ideas,
I get to pursue questions. I get to ask questions
that I'm interested in all the time, as opposed to
like what my client wants me to do and and
so this enriches and it's a worthwhile trade off for me.
Now some people make that same trade off, and their
their engagement with ideas is as an advocate right or
a believer or a adherent to a particular school of
social thought. And I think that what happened you can
draw so those we were talking earlier about those people
who want to say this is all Marxism, and there's
definitely a group of people that want to say this
is like neo Marxism, and this like marching of the
take it like a Gramskia control of the institutions. I
think that is a You can tell that story much
more convincingly in universities than you can tell in corporations.
And the reason why is the people that are in
the universities are were trained by, like literally trained by
members of the Frankfurt School, came over to the United
States and created disciples who trained further classes of university professors.
So there's a straight line if you wanted to draw
a straight line from person to person to person. And
then there's just the fact that cultural, that post colonial,
deconstructivist mode of thought took over American universities and whenever
it was in nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies, and won't
let go it's critical theory now. So I think that
universities are run by true believers, and I think there's
no fixing that other than to have our own institutions.
As you say, and I don't disagree, that's really hard
to do. It's interesting why that's so hard to do.
Maybe that's something it's a sort of separate question. But
I will agree with you that I wouldn't describe universities
as simply managerial. I don't think they are. I think
that corporations are simply managerial. I think that managerialism codes
left and because of that, corporations, big corporations, the quasi
public corporation's code left, But university's code left for a
different reason, which is that they are ideological and their
faculty are very often true believers.
Speaker 8: So to interject there, and look, I have spent much
less time in higher education than you have, so I'll
admit like I'm not an expert in this field. I
left university as quickly as I possibly could, but nonetheless,
couldn't you look at the incredible growth of administrators within
education in the last twenty years and say, look, that
is a system becoming more and more managerial. You see
the same thing in K through twelve right that the
student to teacher ratios have stayed the same, the number
of administrators have grown. I think this the figure I'm
talking about with. I think just since no child left
behind but was up over one hundred percent, couldn't you say,
well that is maybe it was not at one point,
but it's becoming more and more managerial, especially as there
is the infusion of government cash. So just a sort
of a hypothetical throw at you there.
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Speaker 10: I think you could say that's more managerialism coming into
the university.
Speaker 9: I think so. I think you could say that there's
that that you know.
Speaker 11: Uh.
Speaker 10: One of the lines, I mean, it's not a line
in the article, but one of the takeaways from my
article is that when you hear the phrase public private partnership,
like you should run away.
Speaker 15: Uh.
Speaker 10: And that's one of the situations where you have like
government money coming into universities to staff up particular types
of particular.
Speaker 9: Parts of the university. I also think there's something.
Speaker 10: To the idea that the ideologically committed faculty who ultimately
govern the university appreciate that certain departments in trench left ideology, right,
so like diversity administrators in trench aspects of left ideology.
And so if you're a left wing faculty member, you
are super happy to have a bud of diversocrats at
your university because basically that put that ensures the hiring
of future left wing ideologues and throughout the personnel structure
of the university, where you know, you can only control
faculty hiring, but in the administration of the university you
can sort of push.
Speaker 9: Your values onto all forms of hiring as well. So
I wouldn't.
Speaker 10: Disagree with you that managerialism comes into the university. I
would just say the explanation for why the university has
its sort of left liberal orientation, I think is more
is more related to actual ideology, you know, the Frankfort
actually the Frankfurt School, actual critical theory as opposed to
like what happens in corporations, which is just like this
sort of you know, as we started with persistent yet
not entirely sincere.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's there's something too that I want to go
back to something you said earlier and I realized horrible podcasting,
But you know what, it's my show, my name's on it,
so we do it whatever I want. That said, you
make the distinction between the kind of left wing and
right wing vision and your description kind of smacks of
Thomas Soul to me, right, the idea of the constrained
versus the unconstrained vision, or the tragic versus the utopian.
I can't remember what his half of that diet is,
but point is, I think that even in that you
see a common thread between both the kind of priors
of liberal academics and I mean capital L liberal, and
then also with the you know, the DEI kind of
business model, because both of them place a primacy on training, right,
the idea that you can fundamentally change people through the
application of training, basically either forcing someone to sit through
a seminar. And of course the versions that you and
I see of this are kind of the cartoonish, right,
the billboard that says, you know, stop raping women. It's like, okay, well,
does does any you know, violent park rapist particularly care
about this being you know, wrong or incorrect? And that's silly.
But you see the same thing in other areas as well,
the idea that man can fundamentally be transformed through the
application of technique into something different, He can be improved.
And obviously, you know, capital L liberals from another era
would have a much more reasonable view of that ability
to transform man from a lower to a higher status.
They might have said, but you see the same idea
sort of echoed dimly in the idea of diversity training,
This idea that you know, racism is this sort of
you know, inherent invisible force, but it can be pulled
out of you. And look are their true believers? Are
their synics with regard to that premise one hundred percent?
But I think that that's an interesting sort of shared
prior in both the idea of fectibility of man, that
you can transform man from being flawed and understand that
the classic liberals and the modern you know, Wolkesers have
a very different understanding of what it both means to
be flawed and then perfected. But I think that's an
interesting kind of shared like load bearing premise. Do you
see what I'm getting at, Sean, Yeah.
Speaker 9: I do.
Speaker 10: I like your toying with this idea of training and
what can we really get out of training? I guess
I would just push back a little bit and ask,
you know, do they really believe that they're training your
essential your rapist? The rape billboard idea is about, right,
do we really believe that our training is changing people's
way of thinking, or are these training programs just providing
jobs for our ideological friends, in other words, a form
of patronage. And I think a lot of training programs,
a lot of the diversocrat stuff, is really just patronage
for that the team, And once you understand it in
that way, it's hard to take it very seriously. But
on the subject of training, there's a there's a case
that drives me crazy. So this is a case on
the in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Florida,
and it's about a diversity training program. So Governor DeSantis
in Florida had passed a law that said something like
you couldn't corporations couldn't force their employees to attend training
woke training, I think it was diversity training or some
kind of training. You couldn't force your employees to attend
the training, and so you know, if they didn't want
to attend, they didn't have to attend.
Speaker 9: Period. That was the law. And so some corporation the.
Speaker 10: Title of the case is Honey Fund versus Something, State
of Florida, and some corporation that was that wanted to
hold the training sued the State of Florida and said,
you're this rule that says I can't force all of
my employees to attend this training violates my First Amendment
speech rights and and spoiler alert, the company wins and
defeats the State of Florida in this case. Now what
that means is that, according to the eleven Circuit Court
of Appeals, the speech rights of the corporation, which isn't
it's an artificial entity, right, it's not, it doesn't exist.
The speech rights of the corporation itself trump the citizen
rights of the citizens of Florida that the governor was
trying to protect from being sort of you know, ideologic,
you know, propagandized by the court by the training program
to not have to hear the message, to be free
from that sort of a thing. And I think that's
a whole that's a whole, separate area of Like, the
managerial problem in our society is the extent of the power,
including legal power, constitutional rights power, that corporations have. So
you take this giant managerial corporation, the quasi public corporation
that Burleian means and Burnham identify, and you.
Speaker 9: Give it like close to the.
Speaker 10: Full citizen constitutional rights of a of a person and
then just set it free, uh uh, to wreak havoc
on the on the society. That's sort of the state
we're in. I think the reason why I think it
is important to think about managerialism and in the corporate
context is that it allows you to see corporations as
potentially as much of a problem as the administrative state,
and specifically, it allows conservatives to see them as a
problem like liberals have seen have seen corporations as problematic
for a long time, mostly for wealthy whatever reasons, and
their their critiques are not entirely crazy, but conservatives have
trouble right the the the alliance between big business and
the Republican Party is an ancient and honorable alliance, right,
And but I think that the conservatives need to see
that these corporations aren't very conservative and and if you're
just going to default to protecting big corporate rights as
a political matter, you're not protecting conservatives.
Speaker 8: Well, and that's sort of an interesting thing you bring up,
because you see this constantly that conservatives are and I
think that this especially post twenty twenty, with the emergence
of honestly the discussion around esg. The discussion around that
phrase the public private partnership, that that diad of capitalism v.
Socialism has really broken down because we're not The system
we have currently has really almost no relation to a
sort of an cap capitalist system anymore. Right, Like, Okay, sure,
you know, Raytheon isn't literally part of the government, But
I mean, would it really be that much of a
change if we just did what the Russians did right
and made it a state owned corporation A functionally there's
not that big of a difference. And I see exactly
what you're talking about, which is people on the right
who understand this problem, who understand that this segment has
become an ideological enemy, but lack the lack the language
to address it, last lack the language to discuss it.
And some of it. I think that role has been
taken up, although you see less of this now by
kind of the you know, the the wef tinfoil hat
kook stuff. Right, that's a way to address that. And look,
I'm not going to pretend that I like Klaus Schwab,
but I don't necessarily take the maximalist view of his abilities.
But nonetheless I think that's a very important project because ultimately,
if you could right, if you could could smash the
education system, you know, route them into the sea, right
in sort of a cone and the barbarian esque move like, sure,
that would be positive from an ideological perspective. I'm speaking hyperbolically,
of course, but that still doesn't solve this other problem,
which is everyone works for a company that has ultimately
the same teleology, right is pointed in the same direction,
at the same set of values. And I think that
that's why this needs to be addressed. And again going
back to that false dichotomy, the idea that the only
way you can oppose big business is if you are
secretly woke, which is something you see from you know,
alleged conservative influencers constantly. This idea that if you have
any issue with you know, big corporations, if you have
any issue with this managerial system, that you are communist
in some ways is laughable and to be honest, needs
to just be driven out of you know, the public
conversation is not a serious uh, not a serious point there.
So one of the things that I think is important
to address with this right is, uh, how how do
you how do you to lack of a better term.
How do you market this? Because look like this has
been a very heady academic conversation. We're citing our sources.
How do you explain this without going into to be honest,
fairly grim domes from one hundred years ago?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 8: Look, I may enjoy reading Burdam quite a lot, but
you know it's not Stephen King. It's not exactly a
page turner. So how do you express that in a
simple mass market for Well.
Speaker 10: So there's a I hope everyone on this podcast will
read my essay. But there's another great essay, and I'm
sure you've talked about it before. That's the NS Lions
essay I forget the China convergence or something it's called.
And he basically in that essay makes the point that
you were making, which is, what's the difference between this big,
publicly American corporation versus a state controlled Chinese company?
Speaker 9: And there's not.
Speaker 10: Much of a difference. And the reason that there's not
much of a difference in his argument as well, is
managerialism is the common denominator. It explains both of them.
I think that you're right about the question of how
do we pitch this to the audience that's hard to
get at. I want to respond to that, but I
want to sort of get there in this maybe circuitous way.
You know, some people say there's a civil war on
the right, and there's some truth to that around all
sorts of topics, and I don't like to think of
it as a civil war. I guess what I would
say is that the right is more intellectually interesting.
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Speaker 5: It was just a moment, but you saw how her
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Speaker 10: First of all than the left. That has probably always
been true, but it is more intellectually stimulating now than
it has ever been really in my professional life. Like,
there are different kinds of arguments being raised on the
right that that would not have been raised in a
prior generation. And that's exciting, frankly. And I think part
of the problem about how to express the relationship of
conservatives to big business goes to what what is the
what is our what is our identity as a conservative?
Or what does it mean to be on the right?
And I think there are all kinds of answers to
that right, Like there's a lot of people who want
to just like go back to neutral principles of like
I don't like the kind of liberalism, the kind of
right liberalism, like libertarianism, or like the version of liberalism
that's just free market capitalism and do whatever you want, right.
And then there's the kind of right, the kind of
conservatism that says, look, that's that's that's maybe an okay
intermediate spot, but that's not really conservative because if it's
just do whatever you want, it's hard to distinguish that
from like, you know, the heart wants what it wants
and the you know, the decline of civilization, and so
what we really need to do is reorient ourselves towards
the good and there's some other source for that other
than what we want right now, and that's another kind
of conservatism. I think this question goes to that. Right,
if we're just orienting ourselves back towards libertarianism, we're not
going to get out of managerialism. There's no way out
of it. And there's no way to persuade people that
it's even a problem, because they'll just say that the
market will self correct. By the way, when libertarians say that,
when they say, look, I hear what you're saying, Griffith, Yeah,
it looks terrible that these things are woke, but the market.
Speaker 9: Will fix it.
Speaker 10: And then I say, well, look, the market hasn't fixed it,
and the market isn't going to fix it because these corporations,
the big ones, they're connected with the state and they
protect themselves from entry. So how's the market going to
fix that? And they say, well, the market would fix
it if it was just a free market. The problem
is that we don't really have a free market, and
then they sound like socialists who basically have never seen
socialism right every time you explain.
Speaker 8: It, every time, markets have never been tried right.
Speaker 9: Exactly exactly.
Speaker 10: So I think that if you're if your preferred regime
can't exist in reality, it's not a good argument, right.
Speaker 9: And so basically.
Speaker 10: I think we have to find a way to bring
back to bring people to to a place beyond liberalism.
I mean, I think that's basically the most interesting conversation
on our side. That's complicated, right, how do you say that.
Speaker 9: To enormy I don't know.
Speaker 10: I'm trying to find a way to sneakily say it
to law students, but you know.
Speaker 9: But not say it directly. So it's hard to know
the answer to those questions.
Speaker 8: Well, look, good luck on that. I don't envy you
at that project, but I share your diagnosis. I genuinely
think that the right currently is the most not only
is it the most interesting conversation currently happening, but it's
also the most interesting conversation that has happened in public
in my entire life. I mean, look, it's part of
the reason why I started using my face and made
this what I do because I believe it. I think
there's interesting things happening. I think that to your point
about the kind of to be honest, the irrationality of
the kind of libertarian economics, to me, I find it very,
very frustrating, because and Jesus, this is a space on
the bingo card for watching my show. But David French
recently put out a piece the New York Times called
what happens if you refuse to admit that America is
in decline? Or something like that, you'll be able to
find it, And I wrote a piece responding to it
because what's interesting to me about it is this sort
of selective application of certain lines of attack. So for instance,
he is talking about, you know, the new right, and
he accuses them of nostalgia, right, you long for a
world which never existed, And then the whole last third
of the piece is saying, well, I just I long
for the days of the conservative movement of the eighties
and nineties. Was everything so grand then, where men were
wise and august and weren't into you know, partisan politics.
So there's some hypocrisy there, but you see a very
similar thing with that attitude towards social right. The meme
if we can use that term of real socialism has
never been tried. I mean, look, you can buy a
t shirt that says that from you know, any number
of you know, Republican T shirt shops. It's fully entered
into the culture. But very many of those same people
will talk about the free market and it's like, well, okay,
like do the free market of when, like the free
market of four years ago? Well, I mean that wasn't
really a free market. Again, this shore, the federal government
wasn't quite as big as it is now, but it
was still giant. It was huge, and you know, even
companies like IBM, you know, maybe Boeing, any number of
these corporations existed in relation to the government. This public
private partnership was not as advanced as it currently is now.
But simply, you know, rolling the boulder off your own
foot and further up the hill only to let it
go again does not solve this problem. And look, I'm
being dismissive to conservatives and being dismissive towards these arguments,
not because I hate them, not because I disliked them,
far from it. But this is a losing playbook, Like
we have tried and failed at this project before, and
so to your point, like, you can't simply put your
head in the head in the sand and pretend as
if we are back in the Cold War, where we
can neatly divide the line between you know, the Pinko's
on one side and the you know, the patriots on
the other. Like, look like I understand the appeal. There's
a certain amount of moral clarity. It's easy to dismiss,
but as you said, it's simply not a strong argument,
and clearly it does not lead to positive political results.
Speaker 10: You know, they should sell t shirts that say socialism
has never been tried on one side, and then free
market capitalism has never been tried on the other side.
Then you know, it would be the truest T shirt
that has ever existed. You know what, if I could
just indulge in a little nostalgia myself, you're mentioning French's nostage,
you know, I would I would say the era of
bourgeois capitalism right where where companies were set up by
capitalists in in local communities with employees who and and
a community that was also the consumers, right where everything
was kind of like I think what I would say
and I do say at the end of my essay
is that like the managerial corporation is is the is
the enemy of bourgeois capitalism, is the enemy of local business,
is the enemy of small business.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 10: And that's that's where I think our conservative sympathies should be.
Like there they should be with the local business owners
who are really in the community, who are who are
members of the community, who don't come in from some
other state or some other country. Uh and you know,
dump product on us or you know, extract whatever. I
think that's the that's that's the that's maybe the place
where the alliance between the right and business can be.
I mean, it seems to me that the whole idea
of the republic is that the self governing middle class, right,
And it seems like the self governing middle class they
do things like run small businesses, like podcasts, like doctors' offices,
like whatever. Like that's and that seems like the alliance
between where the alliance between business and the conservatives should be.
It probably should not be at the level of the
multinational corporation.
Speaker 8: Rashan, we are fast approaching time. Obviously, I will have
your very excellent article linked. I think everyone should read it.
You may notice we kind of jumped around. This is
not a reading of this article. There's still a lot
to be gotten from actually sitting down and scrolling through it.
It's well written, it's easy to read. Highly recommend it.
But where else can people find you? And where can
they find your work?
Speaker 10: Well, you know, I'm not a highly online individual. I
have a bunch of really boring law review articles that
anyone could find on my SSRN website, and if anyone
downloads and reads it, it will be you and my mother
who have read those articles.
Speaker 9: So thank you if you do that.
Speaker 10: But I love it if people read the chronicles essay,
and I hope they find it interesting.
Speaker 8: This may come back to haunt me, but my mother
has literally no idea what I do, and I'm not
particularly interested in telling her. But she'll find out one day.
Hi Mom. But yeah, like I said, I highly recommend
this article. It's quite good. Thank you for sharing it
with me. As far as my stuff, the Jay Burdens Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you want to listen to podcasts. As I've said before,
this is what I do and I depend on your support.
You want to throw me a few bucks a month.
I think I'm at the lowest setting on every site.
It's like five bucks or twenty two cents a show.
You get the episodes early in ad free. I know
the ads are irritating, but they pay my mortgage. And
let me tell you, modern interest rates mean that that
is much more of a project than it would be otherwise.
But that said, thank you guys so much. The podcast
has been growing and I couldn't do it without you guys.
Also check out our sponsor Axios Remote Fitness Coaching. I
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Makes a good product, and yeah, we're friends. It's another
good reason again, Sean Man, it was great to have
you on.
Speaker 9: Thanks Jay, it was a lot of fun.
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