Donald Trump’s second term has taken a sharp turn, focusing on what some are calling a class war. But instead of targeting the traditional villains of Marxist theory—the billionaires—Trump has set his sights on knowledge workers, the so-called ‘professional managerial class’ (PMC). This group includes lawyers, university administrators, journalists, and other white-collar professionals who have thrived in the information age. The implications of this shift are far-reaching, potentially reshaping the landscape of American institutions and values.
This article delves into the roots of this conflict, tracing the historical and ideological currents that have fueled Trump’s animosity toward the PMC. From James Burnham’s theories on managerial power to the cultural anxieties surrounding COVID-19, we’ll explore how these factors have coalesced into a full-blown assault on expertise and intellectualism. Is this a calculated strategy to consolidate power, or a desperate attempt to reclaim a bygone era?
As institutions face mass firings and funding cuts, the future of American innovation and progress hangs in the balance. The question remains: Can the nation afford to sacrifice its intellectual capital in the name of political expediency? And what role does figures like Rachel Maddow play in this evolving landscape?
The Rise of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC)
The professional managerial class, or PMC, encompasses a broad spectrum of knowledge workers and cognitive elites who have ascended through the ranks of American meritocracy. This stratum of society includes lawyers, university administrators, professors, consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar professionals. Robert Reich, back in the 1990s, hailed the members of this class as symbolic analysts: people who identify and solve problems by thinking through ideas rather than via physical labor.
Richard Florida put forth the term the ‘creative class’. According to Florida, these individuals possessed the academic training and intellectual skills necessary to thrive in a globalized economy and conquer the digital world. Once, the upper-middle-class Americans who exemplify the PMC would have filled the ranks of both parties. But beginning in the 1990s, professionals began migrating in large numbers to the Democrats.
This partisan shift didn’t go unnoticed. As the PMC made this partisan turn, the right zeroed in on them as the enemy within. Conservative populists didn’t just disagree with the PMC’s political preferences; they accused an institutional elite of conniving to extend its own power. By inculcating a worldview hatched on university campuses—call it progressive or ‘woke’—this elite hopes to assert its dominion over the rest of society. It masquerades as the purveyor of science and objectivity, but it really is a hegemonic caste.
Trump’s War on the PMC: A Marxist Inversion
Animosity to the PMC is a propulsive force in Trump’s second term. Rather than merely replacing its ideological foes, the administration is bent on destroying their institutional homes and the basis for their livelihood. That’s the lesson of the Department of Government Efficiency. In short order, DOGE has engaged in mass firings—sweeping attacks on the civil service as an autonomous bastion of power. The administration has moved to uproot the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy that sprawls across corporations and nonprofits.
Although the federal government cannot crush entire universities and law firms outright, Trump has attempted to undermine their business models. The administration has eliminated many of the grants that fund research at major universities—and Republicans in Congress have proposed taxing these institutions’ endowments as well. Trump has stigmatized law firms by reprimanding them in executive orders, signaling to clients and potential clients that these firms will always be at a disadvantage in dealings with the government.
The Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize.
Historical Roots of Anti-PMC Sentiment
The ideological roots of the Trump administration’s campaign against the PMC can be traced back decades. In the 1930s, the political theorist James Burnham was a disciple of the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Burnham absorbed Trotsky’s core complaint with the Soviet Union: that it had been hijacked by a clique of bureaucrats who tended to their own interests at the expense of society, and had veered from the righteous path.
Accepting that critique of the Soviet state set Burnham on a path of apostasy. In 1940, he broke ranks with Trotsky, rejected socialism altogether, and turned rightward. But in the course of his conversion, he retained a strain of his former idol’s old analysis. Nearly everywhere he turned, he saw the danger of a domineering bureaucratic caste, even in the United States, the heart of the free-market economy.
In his 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that within the American corporation, power actually resided with managers, the experts who mastered the sprawling, technically intricate means of industrial production, not with the men who owned companies. The same dynamic held in government. It was bureaucrats, not members of Congress, who determined the path of democracy. The bureaucrats were an authoritarian cabal in the making.
COVID-19 and the Entitlement of the PMC
Two major developments that gathered force during Trump’s first presidency seemingly vindicated Burnham as a prophet who foresaw how the PMC would flex its power. One was the institutional embrace of left-wing identity politics. Corporations had spawned whole new bureaucracies devoted to DEI. Workers at Google, Nike, and The New York Times prodded the owners to shift politically in a progressive direction, ousting employees who allegedly held retrograde opinions on race and gender, propelling firms to promote minorities and invest in Black businesses. The PMC was flexing the power it had clawed away from corporate overlords.
The other development was COVID-19. At the behest of public-health authorities, societies ground to a halt. The shutdown exposed the entitlements of life in the PMC, whose members holed up in their homes, streaming movies and baking bread, as others exposed themselves to the disease in the course of packing meat and delivering groceries. The opinions issued by the likes of Anthony Fauci became the basis for a new gripe: that arrogant experts were using a once-in-a-century pandemic as a pretext for stifling reasonable policy debate and exerting their own control over the country.
Echoes of Maoism: A Cultural Revolution?
In a way, Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia—what the Communist Party of China memorably deemed the ‘stinking ninth’ class. Although Trump’s purges have been tame by comparison, there are parallels. Like Trump, Mao wanted to create manufacturing jobs in the homeland. Defying expert opinion and shunning economic common sense, Mao launched his Great Leap Forward—a disastrously unsuccessful policy of rapid industrialization—in the late ’50s. During that period and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, he resorted to scapegoating his own PMC, especially the professoriate and other cultural elites. (‘Better red than expert’ was a rallying cry.) His minions subjected its members to public humiliation and horrifying violence; the state exiled members of the urban bourgeoisie to the countryside for reeducation.
The lesson of the Cultural Revolution is that purging the PMC culminates in economic stagnation at best. In the aftermath of Maoism, social distrust flourished; anti-intellectualism resulted in historical amnesia and conformist thinking. Even if the United States avoids those outcomes, the global economic turmoil that has followed Trump’s tariff announcements hints at the perils of banishing and stigmatizing expertise.
Conclusion: The Perils of Purging Expertise
Donald Trump’s assault on the professional managerial class represents a fundamental shift in American politics. By targeting knowledge workers and institutions of expertise, the administration is not only waging a class war but also undermining the very foundations of innovation and progress. The historical roots of this conflict can be traced back to theories of managerial power and anxieties surrounding cultural elites, but the implications are distinctly modern.
As the nation grapples with the consequences of mass firings, funding cuts, and a growing distrust of expertise, it’s crucial to recognize the long-term risks of this trajectory. The echoes of Maoism serve as a cautionary tale, highlighting the dangers of anti-intellectualism and the importance of preserving a vibrant intellectual ecosystem.
The future of American society depends on its ability to bridge divides, foster critical thinking, and value the contributions of all its citizens, including the professional managerial class. Only then can the nation hope to overcome the challenges ahead and build a more prosperous and equitable future.
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