Was the #Resistance just the PMC brain overheating?

The new Silicon Valley MAGA gang hates the professional-managerial class, but not because they've been reading their Barbara Ehrenreich.

Photo by Flickr user Joi

Please read my latest New Republic article, in which I shake my fist at Donald Trump — in this case over his response to the Los Angeles wildfires.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been fascinated by the transformation(?) of Trump’s new Silicon Valley billionaire capos, and in particular their relationship to the professional-managerial class (PMC). The PMC is a group that internet leftists talked about a lot a few years ago, but I don’t see the term used much anymore, I guess because it has a porous definition, and because most of the committed leftists in American society live within a sort of mutated tumor on the PMC’s shoulder, which muddies the issue. I still find it useful.

I’m starting to wonder if one explanation for the dazed, complacent response to the new Trump administration so far is that there was a sort of PMC brain glitch that happened on November 8, 2016, and now they’re finally recalibrating, with some of them shifting to the right — maybe enough to change the nature of the PMC altogether.

The new tech MAGA guys are not members of the PMC because they’re too rich, but they might have thought they were part of the PMC at one point, because they are mostly dunces who, back in 2016 obviously didn’t want to rattle cages among the fleece-vested Obama liberals who surrounded them. So apparently not realizing what was going on, it seems they paid lip service to left-coded culture war signifiers, and sometimes even talked tough about marquee political issues of the moment like Russiagate. In the case of Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, people actually entertained the notion that he should run against Trump in 2020. The dawn of Trump 2.0 was a cleansing fire for the cobwebs in these guys’ minds.

The recent episode of Bari Weiss’s podcast featuring arch venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has been a big help as I’ve tried to get a grip on what’s happening. I’ve rewatched parts of this many times now.

In particular, it’s helpful to really chew on what Andreessen is saying about his own mental state during the Trump 1.0 years. He says he “spent those five years basically confused.” He thought to himself, “I don’t understand the country. I don’t understand what’s going on with either side.” And, as he has explained in the past, he read The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham — a book that spread like a disease among the Silicon Valley billionaires in about 2022.

I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg also read The Managerial Revolution, but he’s talking in similar ways to Andreessen lately. During the Biden years, Zuckerberg has claimed that the Biden Administration was mean to his company because it wasn’t doing enough to suppress right-wing propaganda and antivax stuff. "Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse," he told Joe Rogan a few weeks ago.

But few of these billionaires had, let’s say, rock solid political commitments in the first place. Andreessen later refers, tellingly, to the concept of “preference falsification” to explain wokeness, but he and his ilk also falsified preferences and went along with the liberal program because they didn’t know what else to do. I gather George W. Bush had discredited the Republican Party in the early 2000s, and the Obama-era Democratic Party — in particular, its Silicon Valley form — had positioned itself as the technocratic custodian of liberal democracy.

The tweet where OpenAI’s Sam Altman came out as MAGA is especially remarkable. I would bet that there’s significant overlap between “PMC” and “NPC.”

People like Andreessen and Zuckerberg, along with Musk and Sam Altman probably didn’t ever actually like the Democratic Party, but they didn’t want to say “fuck you” to it yet like Peter Thiel already had many years ago. To a certain kind of rich tech guy, liberalism’s legitimacy was, I assume, based on a vibe of competence.

But back to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution: the book sort of collapses under scrutiny. It argues that the Nazis were likely to win World War II, which in turn would help complete capitalism’s transition to “managerial society” because, like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany was transferring real power from the capitalists to the super-powered technocrats. This is not how things turned out.

But one thing the book captured — which was better framed later by Barbara and John Ehrenreich — was the idea that managers, not the super-rich, wield power in a way that is distinct from both the capitalist class and the working class. What the Ehrenreichs came to call the professional-managerial class operates the institutions that structure daily life like universities, the media, and “The Groups,” — even though, or maybe because?, they don’t own them.

So this is the part I find so fascinating: You’re a tech billionaire. You wake up one morning and Biden staffers are yelling at your staffers. The same class of six-figure-income functionaries who have placed these angry calls also comprises the group of six-figure-income private sector functionaries who are taking the calls. In other words, the people yelling and the people getting yelled at are all the same. And they’re all — let’s just say it — the woke people. And next, your staffers are making you sit through meetings about how you need to be woke too.

Andreessen calls this political moment the breaking of "The Deal." In the pre-Trump tech world, there had been an unspoken agreement between the professional managerial class and the super-rich. The Deal is that tech founders who start unicorn companies and acquire godlike economic power offset any sort of ill will from the public by creating jobs, paying taxes, and then eventually donating their money to philanthropic causes (at death, presumably. These guys don’t ever actually get less rich via philanthropy while alive). The professional managerial class — Andreessen specifies members of the media, universities, and nonprofits — clap their hands and say thank you. That’s The Deal. And Andreessen is, of course, totally right about this part.

But in the last ten years, Andreessen now says, “the people in charge of this” — and then he holds up finger quotes and says “They” — “broke the deal.” Everything he stood for, he claims, is “basically held to be presumptively evil.” Being rich became evil, tech became evil, and with maximum pearl-clutching, he says even philanthropy became evil.

But unlike the first part about The Deal, this part is nonsense. Andreessen is mixing up two things that happened. 1) The professional managerial class upheld The Deal faithfully, but also became woke and started yelling at Andreessen about identity politics, and 2) Listeners of the Chapo Trap House podcast started yelling at Andressen on the internet about guillotining the rich. At the margins, there were moments in the past few years where, say, Bernie Sanders emerged as a momentary political force before being electorally suplexed by the Democrats themselves, or Barack Obama said he enjoyed Parasite, or Ezra Klein took income inequality seriously, or Kamala Harris said we need to make sure billionaires pay taxes, but in Joe Biden’s America, billionaires were always treated with warmth and deference.

However, it’s pretty clear that the real phenomenon that made Andreessen feel like he was betraying himself on behalf of the PMC was the sudden obligation to do “preference falsification” by paying lip service to, say, Black Lives Matter. Below is an accidentally revealing quote in which Andreessen summarizes Václav Havel, making Havel’s story not-so-subtly about the wokes instead of the commies. If you read the whole thing, you can see in real time how the slippage between “people hate me because I’m rich” and “I don’t want to say ‘black lives matter’” occurred:

But [Havel] wrote this book and he describes the other side of this which is “Workers of the World Unite.” Right? He describes what he calls The Parable of the Greengrocer, which is, you’re a greengrocer in Prague in 1985 and for the last 70 years — or 50 years — it’s been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your store that says “Workers of the World Unite.” Right? And it’s 1985 and it is like crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite. Like, of all the things that could happen in the world, that is not going to happen. The commies have been at that for 70 years. It is not happening, but that slogan had better be in your window every morning, because if it’s not in your window every morning you are not a good communist. The secret police are gonna come by and they’re gonna get you. And so the first thing you do when you get to the store is you put that slogan in the window and you make sure that it stays in the window all day long. But he says the thing is, every single person — the greengrocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it’s a lie. Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public, and the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he’s caving in to the system and lying in public. And so it turns into a demoralization campaign. It’s not just ideological enforcement. In fact it’s not ideological enforcement anymore because everybody knows it’s fake. The authorities know it’s fake. Everybody knows it’s fake. It’s not that they’re enforcing the actual ideology of the workers of the world uniting; it’s that they are enforcing compliance. And compliance with the regime, and “Fuck you. You will comply.” Right? So anyway, that’s the other side of that, and of course we have lived in the last decade through a lot of both of those. I think that anyone listening to this could name a series of slogans that we’ve all been forced to chant for the last decade that everybody knows at this point are just simply not true. I’ll let the audience speculate on those.

Andreessen’s initial account of The Deal being broken doesn’t spell out the view that the problem, ultimately, lies with things like Black Lives Matter and DEI, but in spite of his coy little finishing flourish, that’s what he spells out here, not really leaving any room for ambiguity. I don’t recall Nancy Pelosi making anyone chant “Workers of the World Unite” or “Philanthropy is Evil.” I don’t recall seeing lawn signs vilifying billionaires. Economically leftist ideas never achieved any real purchase in the decade Andreessen is talking about. DEI, pro-trans ideas, and anti-racist ideology certainly did. And while the way liberals went about proliferating these ideas may have been politically costly and alienating, Andreessen is essentially saying everyone knows woke ideas are lies — which in my view overstates the case a whole lot.

It’s typically sloppy work for Andreessen, intellectually speaking, but it’s useful to see him lay this all out for us. Elsewhere, Andreessen distills the idea of the fascist thinker Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy down to "you always have a small minority in charge of a large majority.” He doesn’t say what idea followed from this for Michels: that the affinity between a charismatic fascist dictator and the working class will lead to a sort of utopia where there’s no need for a management class mediating relations between the dictator and the people.

Somewhat sharper and more ideologically committed right-wingers like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin probably helped Andreessen with his reading list over the past few years. Needless to say, Thiel and Yarvin did not wake up the day after Trump won the election and wonder what America had come to. These are people who have sensed for many years that there is exploitable contempt for the six-figure-income scolds. If you need a crash course on Yarvin, here’s a recent one. And here’s one on the overlap between Yarvin, Thiel, and for good measure, J.D. Vance. That second one contains a choice paragraph about our new Vice President’s animus toward the PMC:

This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy [Vance] calls “the regime”—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America. This is a fundamental difference between New Right figures like Vance and the Reaganite right-wingers of their parents’ generation. To Vance—and he’s said this—culture war is class warfare.

But I don’t credit these right wingers with any real political insight — just the ability to notice and exploit the fact that there are three classes in the United States. This isn’t a right wing idea.

Readers of this newsletter will probably be more at ease hearing this stuff from a leftist angle. Adam Tooze, who is on the left, lays out the three-class model like this:

1. People making $50,000 or less, who experience “a lack of control at work that goes hand in hand with relatively less credentials.”

2. The rich, who experience “wealth and power and the security that goes with that.”

3. The PMC, who are “credentialed by the education system, occupy positions of authority within the economy and society at large, and exercise control directly, often over working class Americans.”

The PMC are the authority figures the working class actually encounters in daily life. They wield expertise at the schools where people’s kids go every day, and the hospitals where their parents die, and they show up to tell people what they’re not allowed to build in their front yards. That’s managerialism in action.

Whether you’re a phony “working class” millionaire owner of an HVAC company who drives a $120,000 pickup truck, or someone who actually survives by doing, y’know, work, you’ll find it easier to hate the PMC than a billionaire like Donald Trump, who is allowed to, as Tooze puts it:

…flaunt and show disrespect and scorn for the values of the professional middle class, which the rich folks can afford to just spit on, and working class people have to suffer, right? Trump and Co. can say out loud what many ordinary Americans think, which is that they simply can't get with the highfaluting ideas of everyone from the school teacher to the librarian all the way up to the fancy Ivy League professor and the folks on television who want to talk about, you know, complex norms of transgendered identities or structural racism or climate change.

The right figured out how vulnerable this structure was before the left did, is all that happened. While progressive Democrats and even some leftists were mostly defending the professional managerial class as imperfect allies, which I think was a miscalculation, the right came to regard them as a parasitic caste that needed to be annihilated, which I think was also a miscalculation, but a less costly one. The right made the PMC synonymous with concepts like the "woke mind virus," and successfully framed attacks on DEI initiatives as anti-elitist. It worked, not because the PMC was the real ruling class and the MAGA movement is authentically populist, but because in that moment the PMC was the mushiest, softest spot on the dragon to stick their lance in.

The need to study hardcore political theory long after college snuck up on many midwits, myself included, but Andreessen and Zuckerberg are the ones bumbling through this stuff in the most hilariously public way. These people never realized they would need to theorize liberalism’s monopoly on the perception of competence. They just felt like the prevailing smart-person ideology existed to keep them on top, and suddenly it felt like it was bullying them into taking a knee during the national anthem. A (digital) mob was making them feel besieged. It wasn’t the peasant uprising they once feared, but their former allies suddenly acting as the moral purity police.

I would argue that the new MAGA tech billionaire gang is maybe, sort of, missing the point of the professional-managerial class. They think being scolded about identity by the PMC marked the loss of something that was supposed to be theirs forever, but the political character of the PMC might just bend with the ideological winds, because its not some law of nature that it has to be loyal to the center-left. Its role is to be the steward of legitimacy, and for a while tech and liberalism dovetailed nicely, in part because the economic system still had enough slack to keep functioning, which was keeping the PMC relatively stable. But we live in a much weirder time than Ehrenreich did, and we might end up with a much weirder PMC.

Enough of the PMC might just embrace conservatism (or at least RFK, Jr.-ism. Is that guy a “conservative” at this point? Who can say?) to change its ideological character. I’m not the first person to suggest this. Admittedly, this might be a sort of perverse form of wishful thinking. If American leftism could stop being regarded as a quaint little PMC hobby, that would be convenient in some ways for the working class left (a very small and insignificant group currently).

But what Andreessen experienced as the PMC breaking The Deal was just the PMC serving power as best it could in a time of crisis. When reactionaries were first coming to power, the PMC adapted by scolding the reactionaries, which was a silly thing to do over and over again when they were also trying to compete with them for votes at the same time. Hilariously, they even read a tweet by Barbara Ehrenreich herself in bad faith and tried to cancel her during this period.

So the #Resistance might have just been the PMC brain melting down. Critical mass for this meltdown was around the time of the decision to make the @gushers Twitter account tweet “Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community and your voices.” Now the reactor has exploded, and the PMC are currently scratching their heads, and struggling to figure out what their new role is if it’s not #Resistance.

The next few years could shake out in a lot of possible ways, but it seems to me like one way looks like the very people who greenlit that Gushers tweet transitioning to writing op-eds about the virtues of national conservatism and AI-powered governance. What may have felt to Marc Andreessen like an ideological rupture between the Silicon Valley billionaires and the PMC may turn out to have only been a temporary moment of friction before the PMC got back in line.