1. Very interesting @IChotiner interview with Michael Lind about Lind's attempt to craft a high-brow Trumpism (although that's perhaps not how Lind would describe it).
2. One of Lind's moves is to draw a contrast between the managerial elite and the working class. He defines the managerial elite broadly as a matter of college education or higher. He cites mid-century theorist James Burnham as source for this concept. 
3. Not to pull a Marshal McLuhan in Annie Hall, but as it happens I'm one of the few people alive who has read everything James Burnham wrote. And I can assure you he explicitly rejected the Lind idea that the managerial elite was defined by culture & education.
4. Here's Burnham in 1978 (reviewing Alfred Chandler's great Visible Hand) arguing that the managerial elite are the people who actually run the large corporations, not
5. Lind: cultural shapers & post-college are managerial elite. Burnham: “Who hires and fires whom? How many men can Norman Mailer or Walter Cronkite set in motion when he picks up the telephone , compared to Harold Geneen or What’s-His-Name at the top of IBM? Come now.”
6. Burnham, as befits an ex-Marxist admired by Trotsky himself, had a far more materialist & economic understanding of managerial elite power than Lind. Lind's ideas aren't from Burnham but reheated 1970s neo-con "New Class" discourse.
7. So why is Lind wrongly citing Burnham rather than the 1970s neo-cons (Kristol, Moynihan) who theorized New Class Because Lind wants to jump on Trump bandwagon & Burnham is (via Samuel Francis) much admired by paleo-con Trumpists. It's all marketing, not intellectual history
8. Anyways, you can read the Lind interview here and keep in mind that what Lind is saying about Burnham is -- to use the politest possible term -- bullshit. newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/m…
4. (Revised) 4. Here's Burnham in 1978 (reviewing Alfred Chandler's great Visible Hand) arguing that the managerial elite are the people who actually run the large corporations, not novelists and media people!
9. One way to think about all this is that a lot of New Class theory (and, on the left, PMC theory) is about blaming the ills of oligarchy on a subset of the junior partners of oligarchy. It's the socialism of foolish pundits.
