The Making of the Professional Managerial Class: Understanding PMC Discourse
The conflation of say, DEI with the PMC, dramatically oversimplifies what have been large-scale economic, cultural, and technological changes that are more tangentially than causally linked. It is a fact that the shift to a knowledge and service economy has been dramatic—and for some, harmful. We do not need to explain the past 70 years of history with a structural framework. Instead, PMC discourse leaves us with an amorphous, culturally distinct group. They are well-educated, anxious, broadly altruistic, but inevitably selfish. They are here to stay for the foreseeable future. And they deserve a frank, but not hysterical analysis of American politics.
Photo by Andras Vas on Unsplash
It goes by many names: the new class, verbalists, intellectuals, the laptop class, or the email caste. It is to some extent what populist pundits conjure when they rail against “coastal elites,” and it is this class that suffers most from liquid modernity. If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are a member of what has become known in parts of both the left and the right as the “professional-managerial class,” or PMC.
From sources on the left and right, a critique of the PMC has emerged as a discourse among both the dissident left and radical right. It purports to unmask the seemingly benighted class of specialists and social workers as a class unto itself, with specific interests antagonistic to the working class. For some, challenging the PMC poses the possibility of a new, radical politics. But the PMC discourse is unstable, and the right and left deploy the concept for deeply contradictory reasons.
Alternative Genealogies
Some antecedents of the PMC can be found in post-Marxist analysis of communist dictatorships. Simone Weil, for instance, blasted the Soviet Union for its descent into “bureaucratized dictatorship.” Milovan Djilas excoriated Yugoslavia’s construction of a “new class” of governing bureaucrats in the communist party-state. Critics of communism rightly saw in communist states not a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a regime of apparatchiks with their own interests and levers of power. Key conduits of this broad concept to the United States, and subsequently to parts of the rightwing intellectual world, were James Burnham and, a generation later, Irving Kristol; they and their successors adapted the critique for democratic America.
Once a chief American lieutenant of Leon Trotsky, Burnham broke with Trotsky, Marx, and dialectical materialism in the late 1930s. (He eventually departed the left entirely, becoming a critical figure in the emergence of intellectual conservatism.) During his great rethinking and with the nascent Second World War in the backdrop, Burnham identified, he thought, a world-historical shift. Just as five hundred years ago the bourgeois class emerged, replaced its feudal overlords, and created an ideology—liberalism—to justify its ascendance, Burnham foresaw the dominance of a new class, the managerial class, and with it, a new governing ideology that would replace liberalism.
“Just as five hundred years ago the bourgeois class emerged, replaced its feudal overlords, and created an ideology—liberalism—to justify its ascendance, Burnham foresaw the dominance of a new class, the managerial class, and with it, a new governing ideology that would replace liberalism.”
The managerial class were experts and technocrats. They rode a wave of scientific management, technology, and the new, gigantic scale of both states and corporations that required—above all—planning. Whatever its attendant ideology—and Burnham saw Managerial ideology in Nazism, Bolshevism, and the New Deal—he argued that the Managerial class believes salvation of society coincides with their political elevation. A self-described Machiavellian, Burnham believed what matters for ideologies are their real-world effects, and managerial ideologies reinforce the managerial state.
Burnham undercut himself with superheated predictions and anti-communist extremism; but his analysis of the managerial revolution has had a long tail. This is especially true on the right, but no less a liberal icon than J. K. Galbraith acknowledged that Burnham “never got full credit for his contribution. In early editions of The New Industrial State I was among those in default.”
In the 1970s, neoconservative (and himself a one-time Trotskyist) Irving Kristol and his wider set popularized the New Class as both an analytic category and polemical device (building on analysis by David T. Bazelon). Rather than a class on the make, Kristol saw the New Class as an ironic byproduct of capitalism. The surplus produced by the market and the opportunities it created in turn generated a pool of educated and credentialed experts. These “scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, public health doctors” were in fact a new class.
In Kristol’s view, the New Class represented something alien to the American left. Materially satisfied, but unfulfilled, they were an “ambitious and frustrated class.” While openly committed to the ideal of public good, Kristol intimated the New Class in reality acted “upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation […] toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left.” Their authoritarian ambitions, Kristol argued, were obscured by their cultural libertarianism, something that sets this interpretation of the New Class apart from current readings of the PMC. But anticipating a different aspect of PMC discourse, Kristol argued the New Class combined expertise and idealism to seek control “under the guise of coping with nasty ‘externalities’—air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, traffic pollution, health pollution, or what have you.”
While references to the New Class gradually fell out of favor on the right, the concept has been firmly lodged in rightwing discourse—perhaps more as a stereotype than as a category of sociological analysis. Meanwhile, around the same time Kristol and others popularized the New Class from the neoconservative bastions of the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and The Public Interest, Barbara and John Ehrenreich diagnosed the professional-managerial class in a pair of controversial essays in 1977 for Radical America, a New Left journal.
Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich dispensed with the classic Marxist binary of the working class and bourgeoisie. In modern capitalism, they discerned a class—the PMC—that despite some antagonism toward capitalism, still lives on the expropriation of working-class labor. Like Kristol, the Ehrenreichs saw the PMC as essentially unproductive and reliant on capitalism. Not Burnham’s ascendant Managers, the PMC’s overall function is “the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
In other words, in a world where the elite can no longer send in the Cossacks, the PMC, whatever its pretensions, is the enforcer of the capitalist order. They might do this explicitly, as teachers, social workers, psychologists, or in the media. Or they may “be hidden within the process of production,” in some sort of management or technical role. “Thus the relationship between the PMC and the working class is objectively antagonistic.”
Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich emphasized, again like Kristol, the PMC’s technocratic basis. Having emerged especially in the Progressive Era, the core professions of the PMC valorized their specialist training and expertise, their civic-minded ethical standards, and their independence. Since it sits ambiguously in the capitalist structure, the PMC exhibits a “mixture of elitism and anti-capitalist militance.” It is jealous of its expertise (its claim to authority), and it detests the capitalist class on which it ultimately relies. But it also looks down on the working class, in part because of its elite taste, education, and credentials, but also because the PMC is conditioned to regulate the working class through management consultancy, safety regulations, therapy, and so on. It is also a very anxious class. Not born to wealth or to the working class, the lives of the PMC are fixated on class reproduction—getting into the right schools, programs, internships, jobs, relationships, networks, and then assuring the same path for the next generation.
What made Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich’s essays explosive was that their audience, theoretically minded New Leftists, were inescapably members or aspiring members of the PMC. The Ehrenreichs took baseball bats to shaky pieties of the New Left—the centrality of students, the broad-tent working class, transforming the system from within—and called into question the entire New Left project. Channeling Djilas, they warned, “in any leftist ideology which fails to comprehend the PMC and its class interests, there is always a good possibility that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ will turn out to be the dictatorship of the PMC.”
Thus the PMC entered the analysis (and pejorative vocabulary) of the radical left. From there it has, in part through serious intellectual cross-pollination and in part through members of the Dirtbag Left’s ideological peregrinations, intermingled with the right’s Trump-era critiques of what amounts to the same class of people.
THE PMC IN THE TRUMP ERA
Neither sociological analysis nor attacks on something resembling the PMC are new to the American right. Yet right-leaning critiques of the class have proliferated in unusually high numbers since 2016, especially although not exclusively in venues drawn to the populism unleashed by the Trumpian transformation of the GOP. For instance, two writers from the conservative milieu, Michael Lind and Christopher Caldwell (both with debts to James Burnham), published books in 2020 highlighting the role of essentially the PMC in the emergence of rightwing populism across the West.
In Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, the Claremont Institute senior fellow argues that the complex of legislation enacted in the 1960s in response to the civil rights movement transformed the American political tradition by creating a “rival constitution” inimical to the authentic founding. The targets of the civil rights legislation swiftly shifted from Southern segregation to a range of alleged inequalities and, in doing so, transformed America itself. Often the enactors of the implications of this legislation, Caldwell sketches the PMC as cosmopolitan, snobbish, liberal, and anxious. It simultaneously steamrolls traditional hierarchies and pieties with appeals to diversity and tolerance, while selling out the white working class with McKinsey- and Deloitte-approved neoliberal policies. Implicitly, if not explicitly in Age of Entitlement, white working-class support for Trump is a justifiable response to the cultural imperialism of the PMC and the deindustrialization and marginalization that the white workers have experienced as a result of their policies.
With less winking to Trumpism and more grand geopolitical analysis, Michael Lind also takes aim at the managerial elite. In his view, Western elites have failed. “Almost all of the personnel of elite institutions of all kinds belong to the managerial-professional class and have similar educations and shared outlooks.” This uniformity “produces a common mentality, tending toward Orwellian groupthink among corporate executives, investment bankers, elected politicians, civil servants, and nonprofit leaders.” Without a rival elite to either replace or discipline them into strong performance, the managerial elite has faltered in responding to the challenge of large-scale modern capitalism and the aftermath of the Cold War. Like Caldwell, Lind points to the adoption of neoliberal policies—“globalization, itself a voluntary policy choice enabled but not required by new technology”—that have undercut the salutary mid-twentieth-century capitalism, moderated by countervailing powers. In this process, the managerial class in its global cities has prospered while, once again, the workers in the hollowed-out core suffer.
Caldwell and Lind have by no means been the only thinkers to advance PMC arguments in rightwing or right-adjacent spaces. The journals explicitly seeking to foster a radical left-right alliance, such as American Affairs and Compact, seem especially impressed by the possibilities of the framework.
In Compact, for example, George Hoare argues the traditional capitalist class is in retreat, while “PMC-led societies embrace environmentalism, reactionary identity politics, and a frightened anti-fascism,” warping their response to working class populism.
American Affairs editor, Julius Krein, puts a modern spin on PMC self-interest: “Today, few if any of the 9.9 percent are willing to sacrifice something for an ideology, yet a great many hope to raise money on one. […] Whereas at one time a political cause might be criticized for beginning as a movement and degenerating into a racket, now most just begin as rackets—or ‘grifts,’ in contemporary parlance.” While Matthew B. Crawford gives a succinct outline of the PMC in an otherwise turgid essay: “Recall that the role of the professional-managerial class is to tell other people what to do, and it rests its claim to authority on knowledge.”
If the PMC is the dominant class du jour, what is the ideology with which, per James Burnham, they justify their ascent? To N. S. Lyons, it is Wokeness, a quasi-theological outlook that reveals society’s oppressive hierarchies of power, which must therefore be overturned. In the form of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, HR departments, and other therapeutic roles that often follow, Wokeness—Lyons argues—is a work program for the PMC. But more sharply, the inequalities Wokeness identifies entrust a “select awoken vanguard” to “guide a revolution in popular consciousness.” Once again, an ideology that justifies a certain white-collar authority on the basis of special—in this case highly progressive—knowledge.
Along essentially the same lines, Wesley Yang sees the (slightly facetiously named) Successor Ideology as in a contest with traditional liberalism.
As it marches through the various institutions, scaling up through a combination of social contagion and institutional capture, the Successor Ideology brings practices once confined to left activist spaces into new territory: struggle sessions, campaigns of rectification, rituals of purgation and repentance, denunciation and confessional, unencumbered by due process, which it explicitly abjures as an instrument of an unjust status quo.
Where once liberalism replaced the theologico-monarchical justifications of the ancien regime, the Successor Ideology seeks to supplant liberalism with “emotional blackmail and intimidation.”
Yang zeroes in on DEI programs as a tool of the Successor Ideology. And while there have been a number of DEI-related culture skirmishes over the past decade, backlash alone does not explain the emergence of especially rightwing interest in the PMC and the class-based analysis it entails. Instead, PMC analysis is a potent tool for both the dissident left and the right to explain both Donald Trump (along with Western populism writ large) and the politics of COVID-19—the effects of which are still with us.
The shock of the 2016 election demanded an explanation. As Caldwell and Lind both imply, Trump is at least in part the product of a popular revolt against the PMC. Both books are part of a major body of work seeking to explain Trump, and, on the right, give him and his political impulses theoretical depth. As Lind writes, “the populist and nationalist wave on both sides of the Atlantic is a predictable rebellion by working-class outsiders against managerial-class insiders and their domestic allies, who are often recruited from native minorities or immigrant diasporas.” The “native working classes” have been pushed by the “selfishness and arrogance of managerial elites” into the arms of “charismatic tribunes of anti-system populism.” It is increasingly conventional wisdom among parts of the right (and dissident left) that this is so.
And the PMC’s response to populist challenge has been characterized by #Resistance hyperventilation and safety-first authoritarianism. As George Hoare puts it, “Our politics—from the response to Trump and Brexit to the Covid crisis and now anti-Russian hysteria—reflects [the PMC’s] whims, prejudices, and psychopathologies.” To those looking to recalibrate in the face of Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party and the rightwing intellectual establishment, this is eminently believable. It comports with seventy years of excoriating the Liberal Establishment, and points to a new electoral base for the future.
Western populism lent credence to PMC analysis by making the class the target of backlash. The COVID epidemic proved all the more convincing. The political response to COVID was in many ways the arch-PMC crisis. It featured specialist expertise (epidemiology), demands for deference to knowledge (“Trust the Science”), safetyism (“Out of an abundance of caution…”), the enforcement of rapid new norms (mask wearing), unprecedented regulation (lockdowns), and material improvements for the PMC. “The ‘email-job caste’ was able to greatly improve its work conditions—mainly in terms of increased ‘flexibility’ and a greater freedom to work from home,” writes George Hoare. All of this while working-class events were forbidden as “super-spreader” risks.
A RHETORIC OF REACTION
Between Trump’s transformation of the political landscape and the exceptional circumstances of a global pandemic, class analysis with a focus on the PMC looks—to some—like a genuine explanatory concept. To people drawn to the analysis, it appears to be a possible basis for a new political future. One aligned against a moribund, self-interested, white-collar center.
There is something to recognizing the professional-managerial class as a class, or at least a real cultural grouping. Doing so sheds light on real behaviors and foibles. The anxiety about class reproduction through education is a sharp observation; “the boutique tastes in music, food, clothing, and art that reflect their cultural capital”; the tensions between the working lives and expectations of PMC and working-class people are real and have significant impacts on electoral politics. A certain progressive outlook does predominate in elite cultural production, and it is not always the norm outside the homes of the PMC. There is a potent and quite American reverse snobbery—and sometimes anti-intellectualism—to the PMC discourse as well, although it just as often pierces the pseudo-intellectualism of certain liberals and progressives.
It is sometimes said that the neoconservatives brought sociological analysis to American conservatism. The PMC discourse, like the neoconservative discovery of the New Class, lets the right dabble in an extremely useful form of class analysis. The wielders of PMC discourse can engage in ideologiekritik—the unmasking game of contrasting a foe’s stated principles with their real-world actions, and revealing the hidden motives behind the discrepancies. It is a tantalizing prospect for those on the right, who have historically felt themselves to be the victims of such criticism. Revealing the self-interested motives of the ostentatiously benevolent actors of the PMC gives the progressive left a taste of its own hypocritical medicine: “We’re not racist; you’re classist snobs, and your policies hurt those you claim to care about while granting yourselves six-figure sinecures.”
To some extent, opposing the PMC helps align the dissident left with the more radical right. In Compact, for instance, Christian Parenti laments how swiftly the PMC has, “especially in the age of Trump, embraced fear-mongering about the white rabble of the heartland while aligning itself with elite preferences has made it an ideal constituency for an emerging authoritarian politics of the center.” In this reading, moderate politics are little more than cramped defenses of narrow class interests. Unmasking this tendency and restructuring the basis of the American political economy away from the dominant (read: Democratic) political class is therefore a defense of democracy.
But the idea that confronting the PMC presents an opportunity for a radical challenge to the center is illusory. Despite parallel critiques and the similar ways it operates in their rhetoric, ultimately there is a fundamental difference in how the left and right use the concept of the PMC. The left analysis of the PMC is at bottom revolutionary. The PMC is a class to be reckoned with. It is a gatekeeper and stoppage to authentic revolution, or worse, a class objectively opposed to the working class and seeking its domination. The left wants to break down the ways the PMC supports capitalism and represses the working class.
But, at least for Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, the PMC you will always have with you. And although they support capitalism, they are also hostile to the capitalist class. This is the basis of modern American leftwing politics; it must be recognized and overcome. “In order to forge an alliance between elements of the PMC and the working class, the left must address itself not only to ‘bread and butter’ issues but to all the issues it has readily shelved as ‘cultural.’” Both classes “confront the capitalist class over the issue of ownership and control of the means of production. They confront each other over the issues of knowledge, skills, culture.” If the left can confront and overcome this class-based chasm, then it would transform Western politics by restoring the New Deal coalition for the twenty-first century.
By contrast, the rightwing approach to the PMC is ultimately in service of a counterrevolution. For the right, the PMC discourse is a device for splitting the left and motivating their voter base. It is also a kind of sanitized populism. It does not play on anti-Semitic tropes, necessarily, although it echoes themes from them. And in its most extreme forms, the PMC is treated as a cancerous internal threat to the good regime.
Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich make clear that the working class often has a genuine grievance with members of the PMC. They are the judgmental ones with soft hands who tell them how to live their lives. As an anonymous working-class writer (with niche podcast tastes) writes for American Compass, “In an economy made increasingly zero-sum by forces beyond our control, those in the ‘e-mail job’ caste are literally taking money out of a pie which would be more deservedly enjoyed by the families who do the actual work.”
This sentiment, the Ehrenreichs write, “grows out of the objective antagonism between the working class and the PMC.” But it “receives continual encouragement from rightwing demagogues who emphasize exactly these points: the role of PMC members (‘pinko intellectuals,’ ‘effete snobs,’ etc.) in radical movements and social-control activists.” Usually this comes with a “wholesale rejection of any thing or thought associated with the PMC—liberalism, intellectualism, etc.” It is hard not to think the Ehrenreichs at least partially had the neoconservative critique of the New Class in mind with this insight. It nails the rightwing infotainment complex’s brief against coastal elites.
Writing about the neoconservatives, heterodox historian Christopher Lasch (no friend to elites) argued that the New Class argument was their major contribution to the growing strength of the right in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. It let the right attack “elites” without attacking big business. Since the New Class—now, we would say, the PMC—theoretically controlled all the centers of knowledge production, from schools to universities to magazines to streaming platforms, the right could claim to be victims of a subtle but real progressive authoritarianism.
There is a certain having-it-both-ways about the right’s view of the PMC. On the one hand, it is to be mocked. They are soy-induced softies sweating over microaggressions and masks. Far from Burnham’s technocratic managers to the modern right, the PMC is a feminized elite. At a basic level, this offends conservative sensibilities. Compare the PMC with the archetypes of the right: the Claremont School’s essentially heroic conception of politics; libertarianism’s individualized decisiveness; the tough-minded hawk; dynamic entrepreneurs; even the hardscrabble workers or the long-eclipsed grandeur of the WASPs.
The PMC is a class-without-chests. But this makes its authoritarianism all the more ominous. It dominates through feminine, passive-aggressive means. As a result, the class’s ascendance saps the vitality from the American nation, both domestically and abroad.
On the other hand, though, the right is obsessed with the PMC’s power, especially its dominance of the chief cultural institutions, dramatically illustrated by the breathless coverage of Harvard and Claudine Gay or other plagiarism offenders. In this respect, the right treats the PMC—at worst—as the vanguard of a destructive force or new dominant class, and—at best—as the shock troops of a real elite of progressive billionaires.
Illiberal regimes and far-right movements rely on the threat of revolution, either domestically or circling them from abroad, to maintain their grip on or springboard to power. In the most extreme example of this dynamic, center and center-right fear of the revolutionary left led mid-century Italy and Germany to ride the fascist tiger. In contemporary rightwing discourse, the PMC, and the ideologies attributed to it (Wokeness, DEI, the Successor Ideology), occupies the place held by communism—albeit more subtle, and more insidious. By painting run-of-the-mill bureaucrats, politicians, and workers in the knowledge economy as modern Bolsheviks, the radical Right justifies its counterrevolutionary program.
THE IRONY OF INTRA-PMC CONFLICT
There is always some ambiguity about who constitutes the PMC. The Ehrenreichs put it between 20 and 25 percent of the US population. Perhaps it is the top 10 percent. Or maybe only the attendees of elite colleges. Do you need to be a professional, or merely work with a laptop? Is the adjunct in the academic precariat or an intern at an NGO a member of the PMC, or merely an aspirant? The nebulousness is part of the utility of the PMC as a category. It can stretch or narrow as the argument demands.
Regardless, it is generally understood that the PMC is the inevitable consequence of modern capitalism. From within this reality, it is almost always members of the PMC that identify and critique the PMC as a class. (Such reflexiveness is a distinct trait of the PMC.)
The obvious irony that it is the professional managers who fixate on the PMC has different implications for the left and right. Leftist critics see themselves as defectors from their class, working to liberate the working class from oppressive systems, and the PMC from its pernicious myths. Rightwing critics of the PMC sometimes also have a genuine interest in the welfare of the working class, especially those dispossessed by the structural changes in the modern economy. But it is also a defense, implicitly or not, of the old order, and, as above, a justification for counterrevolution. Rightwing critics perhaps envisage a more meaningful life free of the PMC. As such, their analysis is almost always that most basic of conservative genres—a declension narrative.
The right’s concern with the PMC and especially its cultural symbols and sites of authority becomes a kind of PMC egoism. It makes cultural production the site of the revolution (or counterrevolution). Its beachheads are bureaucracies, magazine mastheads, film studios, government departments, and, most symbolic of all, faculty lounges. In other words, this is the politics of the culture war, not authentic and effectual politics. Moreover, the ideologiekritikcuts both ways. The right has its own PMC, as can be seen among those associated with the Claremont Institute, Heritage, or any of the conservative think tanks or colleges. These educated, credentialed elites seek a specific form of the PMC class interests, only within the right’s counterinstitutions.
Matthew B. Crawford hopes that the failures of the modern party-state might lead some to break free. “In disillusioned or ‘red-pilled’ pockets of the PMC, we may see the seeds of an emergent counter-elite.” But if the class basis of PMC analysis is correct, then the idea of a genuine counter-elite is a mirage. The charge of intellectual rent-seeking cuts both ways, and there is no reason to believe a rightwing PMC would offer any more to the working class; it is more likely to become a self-promotional red-state clerisy. Critical analysis of the PMC that ends in a plea for a rightwing PMC has failed. If the answer is a cultural argument after all, then PMC discourse offers little more than a class of villains.
I am skeptical of imputing too much causality in these quasi-Marxian systems. The conflation of say, DEI with the PMC, dramatically oversimplifies what have been large-scale economic, cultural, and technological changes that are more tangentially than causally linked. It is a fact that the shift to a knowledge and service economy has been dramatic—and for some, harmful. Likewise, the mores around race and gender have changed significantly too. We do not need to explain the past 70 years of history with a structural framework. Instead, PMC discourse leaves us with an amorphous, culturally distinct group. They are well-educated, anxious, broadly altruistic, but inevitably selfish. They are here to stay for the foreseeable future. And they deserve a frank, but not hysterical analysis of American politics, and a practical politics that understands interests compete, but must also compromise.