The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies
By Auron MacIntyre.
Regnery Publishing, 2024.
Hardcover, 208 pages, $32.99.
Reviewed by Christopher Lightcap and Tom Sarrouf, Jr.
Auron MacIntyre’s recent release of The Total State provides a fresh reading list of oft-neglected theorists. Spawning from a series of Substack posts, the book employs thinkers from the “dissident Right” to explain why America has become a failing nation. For as short as it is, The Total State only offers an elementary immersion, but one that is likely to inspire further reading and a deeper analysis of the pathologies of the day—pathologies which anodyne brands of conservatism were unprepared or unable to address.
In the Introduction, MacIntyre explains how the COVID lockdowns and 2020 riots made America unrecognizable to him, prompting study into thinkers of more hard-nosed questions of power relationships. A conventional understanding of America’s Constitution as protecting against arbitrary government power did not explain what was really happening, hence a question: “what if the story our leaders have repeated endlessly about liberal democracy and popular sovereignty has actual served to expand the power of the state to unprecedented levels, all while assuring the ruled that they live in an era of freedom unlike any that’s ever been experienced?” From this paradox, MacIntyre advances his understanding of the “total state.”
Borrowing from Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power, MacIntyre identifies it as a “decentralized atheistic theocracy,” decentralized yet theocratic in that the officially independent tendrils of media, universities, and corporate culture all act in lockstep to “manufacture consensus” towards a clear “political theology.” Such description closely resembles—and directly references—the online writer Curtis Yarvin’s concept of “The Cathedral” popular in dissident right spaces. The religious language underscores the creedal nature of the present cultural consensus despite ostensible claims of neutrality towards first principles. All the while, the formal structures of checks and balances remain, making it harder to identify what and why something has gone awry with our politics.
MacIntyre fashions a narrative tracing the origins, recession, and re-emergence of the total state throughout history. “In the beginning, all states were total,” he begins. Preservation being the central goal of life, all human activity was subordinated to that aim, and to the king who organized it. Once technological advancements and more complex forms of social organization emerged, states ceased being total. In place of absolute monarchy, competing spheres of influence and authority rose to manage day-to-day living.
When these networks become massified under the pressures of modernity, conditions are primed for the re-emergence of a total state. Mass markets and mass media shrink the world, dissolving local institutions and attachments towards more uniform preferences. To operate with added scale and complexity, a new “managerial class” of bureaucrats and administrators increases as a share of the population. The self-preservation of managers is connected to complexities multiplying, becoming a shroud for mal-actors—the “fox” archetype of a furtive cunning leader who rules by soft power and deception—to incrementally steer organizations toward compliance with the ruling ideology of the total state. Those with a general familiarity of James Burnham, his student Sam Francis, and their reliance on the Italian Elite School would recognize this description as a succinct distillation of their thoughts.
The above statements validate MacIntyre’s sense of an ailing America, but risk overstating the case by relying on overbroad claims, making the overall thesis less compelling. This ultimately feeds into a central criticism: he relies on theory and generalization in ways that the historical record complicates. A charitable view submits that the logic of total states causes the outcomes MacIntyre observes, but a longer book with more research and specific examples would make The Total State a richer book.
The choice of sources are rendered effective by twenty-first-century critics, but such curation requires an abridged treatment of why MacIntyre’s specific selections merit attention and shortchanges the circumstances which they confronted. For instance, Carl Schmitt is invoked for his most significant ideas—the “friend-enemy distinction” and “state of exception”—in order to show how the total state “circumvented the Constitution.” Backgrounds of his sources are also sparse, if not omitted. In fairness, MacIntyre acknowledges places where these omissions were necessary to preserve the book’s focus and accessibility, but this is not uniformly stated with all of his editorial abridgements.
In another case, MacIntyre argues that America was a “liberal” project because Deism was a strong intellectual current during the Founding and that Deism represented an attack on theologically rich religion. There is, however, too much primary material from the Founding period contradicting this assertion. Nearly all of the colonies had established churches and maintained them. State bills of rights, such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights, spoke of the “duty of all to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.” The Declaration of Independence references the Deity four separate times. Russell Kirk and Harry Jaffa alike would cringe at such general and impossible claims.
Importantly, these ideas are not new. Before de Jouvenel observed how centralized authority erodes competing spheres, Alexis de Tocqueville made this analysis in Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution. Winston Churchill’s 1925 “Mass Effects in Modern Life” speech similarly focused on the enervating, anonymizing functions of modern scientific bureaucracy, and the lamentable death of great men. Like de Maistre, Edmund Burke recognized the problems with formalized proceduralism. His lamentation over the “unbought grace of life” and the “pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal,” is not only a rebuke of abstract theorizing cut off from common life, but also of a worldview that overly formalizes those arrangements. A 1961 speech by Richard Weaver entitled “Reflections of Modernity” sounds like it could have come from MacIntyre himself:
Everybody senses that in the modern world there exists a massive trend toward uniformity and regimentation. Individualism has never before been under such pressure, not even from the most repressive forms of government. This is true not only because of certain political ideologies which fill the wind, but also because the products of modern technology have created an order which makes the expression or even the retention of individuality increasingly difficult. Actual physical obstacles are there, and then there exists the tremendous pressure to conform and be like the majority when “what is like the majority” is heard on radio and television and is portrayed in nationally plugged advertisements. A picture is created, a way of doing things is stereotyped which crosses more and more boundaries and makes itself more and more insistently the model.
All of this leads to the question: why are the authors he chooses necessary, and what makes this book stand out and worthy by itself?
The answer is best understood in the context of the contemporary Right. The “New Right” sees a conservative movement that has failed to achieve its vision and stop Leftist radicals. A cursory glance at America in 2024 would bear this out: ubiquitous porn usage; deaths of despair; a hollowed-out middle class; an aggressive new racialism and DEI bureaucracy; collapsing marriage, birth, and family formation rates; a broken election system. To be sure, there have been conservative victories. But even given that conservative thinkers within the mainstream have offered critiques similar to MacIntyre’s dissident library, too much of the intellectual conservative movement has underemphasized or deliberately forgotten them, instead opting for bromides about freedom, big government, and Marxism. The Total State, then, offers a healthy corrective to reintroduce thinkers that think beyond a “garden variety conservatism” that has been losing itself into obscurity and impotence.
The Total State also offers an original contribution worthy of praise. His final chapter lays out possible futures for the collapse of the total state, and how to avoid the mistakes of the past in dealing with it. His analysis is sober and hedged, promoting neither counterrevolutionary recklessness nor apolitical quietism. While the subject is depressing, MacIntyre’s prediction of a slow, drawn out decay of the total state even manages to offer a picture of hope for what comes next.
The power of The Total State lies not so much in introducing new ideas into the discourse, but recovering forgotten voices and bringing them into a contemporary Right that had until recently shoved off questions about the nature of power in framing ideological and philosophical debates. Though brief and introductory, it effectively offers a more full account of what has gone wrong in modern Western democracies than the repetitive jeremiads of America’s capture by Marxist ideologues. In so doing, it both calls readers to reconsider questions that were previously closed (can democracy survive without inevitably devolving into oligarchy, especially in a mass society?), as well as provide a more sober assessment of possible forward-thinking developments: “the only way out is through.”
Chris Lightcap is an Associate Programs Officer at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and a recent graduate of Furman University, where he interned for the Tocqueville Center for the Study of Democracy and Society. Tom Sarrouf is the Senior Academic Programs Manager at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the host of their podcast, “Conservative Conversations with ISI.”
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