Yesterday’s Senate hearing to investigate Big Tech’s quite evident control of information leading up to the election was revealing in at least one respect: government is relatively powerless against these multinational corporations. https://twitter.com/hawleymo/status/1321485840707653632

What is today called “woke capitalism” is really an outgrowth of what Burnham dubbed “the managerial revolution”: where in an earlier era the ambitious might have sought political power, today they seek key positions in the managerial economy and semi-private institutions.

Think “the consulting class.”

Mangerialism is the realization of the displacement of an old aristocracy in favor of the liberal ruling class: a “limited” government that is apparently under the control of a voting public, but a far vaster technocracy that controls actual sources of power in the modern world:

Namely, control of financial flows, data, information, and credentialing. The managers who control these loci are completely unaccountable to any public. They build systems that people rely upon, and thus cannot dissociate or even criticize.

We should understand this is at once the inversion and realization of liberalism: the appearance of a limited and responsive government, alongside the Leviathan of an unaccountable private/public technocratic regime that exercises intimate control over every person’s daily life.

Thus, we remain “free” liberal citizens to an increasingly ineffectual government but wholly liberal subjects to private institutions exercising governmentality. As citizens, we give voice to the government over the desired direction of public policy.

But as subjects, our government is largely irrelevant. We live today in far greater fear of being “cancelled” by our employer, fellow employees, even a Twitter mob that can swiftly destroy reputations.

This was, all along, the dream of ur-liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham: all of us living in a panopticon. He mistook that it would be run by government. Instead, our lives are increasingly controlled by an entirely unaccountable set of non-governmental technocratic institutions.

Yet: it is important that the existence - even outrageousness - of this non-accountable power has become highly visible during an election season. Citizens have the opportunity to demand empowerment of their government to bring these institutions to heel.

Ironically, to do so will require an “illiberal” use of public power to secure the freedom and power of citizens. This is the endgame of whether liberalism fails or succeeds: do citizens govern through public exercise of power, or do private entities govern the governments?