The reason I found the story of Harry Byrd and his Byrd Organization worth studying in depth was not just that it is an interesting but forgotten bit of history, nor that it reminds me of the Virginia gentry, a subject I find endlessly fascinating in its own right. Rather, I think it is like Rhodesia in that it provides a forgotten lens through which we can look at a pressing issue in a novel, disinterested way: Byrd and his Organization provide a model for a counter-elite that functions for the long term while managing to actively implement its own ideas in the face of stern, contrary diktats from higher authorities. This is a subject I think is exceedingly important, and is one I think we all ought study, as I have written about before:
The Necessity of a Counter-Elite
After all, this is the central issue of our time. If you want to live the sort of life that would be considered recognizably “American” to someone who existed before the calamitous FDR presidency, that is all but impossible now. In fact, to even live the sort of life considered normal before the sort of destruction represented by the obliteration of Detroit is nearly impossible now, as it is either unbearably expensive or effectively outlawed.
To reverse that will require more than a presidential term or two. It is a level of destruction that took decades to achieve, and to rebuild is harder than to destroy: the pillars of order are harder to construct than it is to smash them with entropy, the defining feature of the left. That will require more than just voting. It will require exercising power and influence along the right vector over the long term, something that democracy cannot accomplish.
A mindset shift is necessary to understand that. Ever since Randolph Churchill invented the term “Tory Democracy” to cope with the calamitous effects of the Third Reform Act, the right has been convinced that it can sustainably use populism to its benefit over the long term. This is a false hope. Populism can be used to create a one-off political force against obvious forms of elite misbehavior and perfidy, but not to create a durable political movement.
Tiberius Gracchus rallying the dispossessed yeomen of Rome to support him in reversing illegal engrossment of public lands by the elite is one such example. It had mixed results; he died, but the one-off reform was implemented, and the mob behind him gave up after his brother Gaius was killed as well. Nathaniel Bacon rallying the yeomen of Virginia against the Indians at the start of Bacon’s Rebellion is another; that portion of his rebellion was successful, but once he tried turning it into more momentous political change, he was killed, and his movement fell to pieces. Florian Geyer faced a similar fate.1 Such is the way of things; that which is easily combustible tends to not burn steadily nor for long.
Putting this problem pithily in his A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, Yarvin notes, “The basic method of Tory democracy is to appeal to the masses to support a non-democratic, i.e., reactionary, form of government. The basic problem of Tory democracy is that the masses suck.”
This presents a conundrum for the reform-minded rightist. Ours is a democratic age, so he would rule has to be elected first, which requires a certain amount of public support. But the public is fickle and ever-changing, and has been that way even before it was dominated by the watchers of TikTok and Instagram Reels, so it can’t be relied on to be more than the spark. After that, the government and its policies must be self-supporting, self-reinforcing, and self-directed along the generally correct vector, while also remaining legitimate enough in the face of an apathetic, demoralized, and generally ignorant public. “Crashing out” and going insane over losses, as tends to happen in democracy, will derail the project if it happens even once: things must instead be kept on a steady and even keel for decades. Further, it must be able to do so in the face of concerted opposition from the powers that be, whether they be enemy institutions (the media, universities, some large corporations) or rival levels of government (parts of the bureaucracy, certain state governments, sometimes the federal government, generally SCOTUS when it matters).
Originally, the landed elite did this, which is why I write about it so frequently. Supported by its income-producing and generally stable landed property that tied it to a specific place and the people within that place, it could be trusted to generally manage things with an eye toward the long-term good. This is why the British aristocracy produced much of the pro-worker legislation when such reform was needed to deal with the horrific behavior of the plutocrats, for example, and is also why capital punishment was administered so regularly and remorselessly for so long. Similarly, it is why the Virginia gentry led the charge in defending the rights of Virginians against the tyrannical usurpations of Parliament.2 Being economically “independent” and trained in the art and duties of rule ensured those men knew what to do and how to do it, even in the face of opposition.
But that world is long-since dead and buried. Even if there is much we can learn from it, which I think there is, it no longer exists. Industrialization, free trade, suburbanization, death taxes, and the explosion of both regulations and a bureaucracy to enforce them killed that world.
Hence my focus on the Byrd Organization. In its relatively patrician character, it is as close as we’ve come in the age of jets, rockets, and atoms to a governing gentry. In its opposition to everything from the New Deal to the American Cultural Revolution, it was able to stay on track for decades. In the battles it won against FDR and Truman, it showed it could win despite facing down a theoretically stronger federal government.
Our world is different than Harry Byrd’s, even if many of the problems—such as the franchise—remain the same. That means we’ll have to find different solutions. But, as there has as yet been no better way of arriving at such solutions and implementing them over the long term, I think there’s much to learn about building a counter-elite from his Organization, both in its successes and failures. That is what I will discuss below.
Listen to this article here:
![[AUDIO] Learning from the Byrd Organization to Build a Useful Counter-Elite](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!viE_!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F224326483%2F0d0e5b87-a7d7-4d88-95a1-77ad903fb095%2Ftranscoded-1794327439.png)
Learning from Byrd’s Successes
Building a Coalition of the Competent to Deliver Good Governance
The most important thing that Byrd did was knit together a coalition of the competent, at every level of society. His was not a blue-collar Organization nor a white-collar one. Nor, despite its reputation as being an “oligarchy,” was it merely a collection of the rich men in the state as defined earlier state Democratic machines.
Instead, it was a collection of the sort of men who understood what it took to succeed and were desirous of not seeing that success slip away. This included business owners and industrialists. It included professionals—lawyers, doctors, and the like. It included farmers. It included landowners. It was, in short, a collection of the sort of men who had proven that they could steward their own lives, and so could be trusted to steward the fate of the state. This was the same impetus behind Rhodesia’s “Responsible Government” and the restrictions on voting intended by our Founders.
Predictably, this meant that the capacity of the Byrd Organization government was significantly higher than that of many other state governments, and that it could remain committed to its goals for the long term rather than “crashing out” and losing hope at the first whiff of trouble. Composed of and led by competent men, it could complete projects well, on time, and without corruption. With a voter base of successful men who could steward their own lives through times good and bad, it didn’t have to respond to the whims of fickle masses and go down that path of insanity and a total lack of accomplishment.
Byrd’s road-building pledge and project is a great example of this. When he entered the governor’s office by vowing to build out the road infrastructure without taking on state debt, that was a message that struck home with the debt-averse, responsible electorate, and was a project to which he and his organization could and did remain committed for decades. Other states went deeply into debt and built bad roads; his did neither, instead proceeding slowly, steadily, and well.
When he set about encouraging development, he could attract mature, stable companies to invest significant capital in new projects not by promising special tax breaks, but by promising a long-term commitment to pro-business policies—and then delivering.
Further, the “Organization” nature of the machine meant that its preferred policies didn’t drift. His commitment to developing infrastructure without taking on debt was as firm in 1955 as in 1925. Because it was a collection of a certain type of person whose worldview doesn’t change that much—the successful man who wants to flourish—nor did the policies in which the organization engaged itself.
There’s much we can learn from that. Voters, particularly those who are at all amenable to the right, care about a discreet collection of subjects. Affordability—including everything from jobs and wage growth to inflation and healthcare costs—is the main one. Immigration and crime are the other two.3
Those problems are not intractable, but alleviating and fixing them will require steady effort that lasts not just for years but for decades. That means that accomplishing it will require buy-in from the groups that matter: a coalition of the successful that gets buy-in from those groups on the central problems of the day.
Immigration reform and deportations would be far easier if business owners were socially stigmatized for hiring illegals or for firing Americans to hire foreigners, whether via visas or offshoring. Crime would be a far easier problem to tackle if suburbia didn’t yank away in horror, as if a hand from a burning stove, at the thought of what it will take to deal with crime. Affordability is harder to tackle, but a mixture of creating a good business environment that will clearly last for the long term, pushing allies to hire locals and pay them well, and deporting those whose presence here is calculated to suppress wages is sure to help, as would a long-term commitment to deregulation, tax cuts as can be prudently effected, and so on. Relying on a base of Instagram Reels-addled voters who will “crash out” and give up after minor setbacks or policy mistakes makes doing any of this far harder, as we’re getting a good reminder of with midterms. That makes building the coalition of the competent and finding a way to rely on it rather than the “average voter” important.
Doing so would be difficult, of course. There’s a reason the coalition doesn’t exist, or where it does, it is fraying at the edges—as shown by suburbia trending bluer and bluer.
Byrd achieved it by knitting everyone behind his relatively non-controversial and generally popular road pledge, and promising the discreet interest groups the “pork” that would keep them on board without alienating the other interest groups. Southside farmers got the continuation of the poll tax and segregation, but not Deep South-style racial rhetoric that would alienate the professionals and business owners. Business owners got the tax cuts and anti-union/“right to work” measures they craved without the sort of Deep South racial animosity or Huey Long-style demagoguery that would keep new investment capital away. Professionals and landowners got tax cuts and a growing economy, and didn’t have to deal with urban crime, high property taxes, or the other things that make their lives miserable.
Further, Byrd ignored that which didn’t matter to his electorate. For example, he was generally ambivalent on the matter of public education, as Virginia had been since the days of Gov. Berkeley. If his Organization cared at all, it wanted public schools to be “basically fine” in terms of quality, as it generally educated their kids privately; as a result, schools were never a focus of Byrd’s until the desegregation battle. Energy was only expended on that which mattered to Virginia voters, a pruned group of competent citizens, and he kept them on side by doing what they wanted as much as he could without alienating them.
Much the same could be done today. A Bukele-style crackdown on crime that takes it off the streets but also just uses prisons instead of the gallows and periodically gestures vaguely at attempts to “reform” the “good apples who were in a bad situation” while punishing the “bad apples”, and never does anything to release either group, is likely to do well enough on the crime problem to win over those worried about crime without alienating suburban moms. Right to work legislation, income tax cuts, property tax cuts, deregulation of industry, and strengthening of professional credential requirements is likely enough to keep the business community and professionals on board in the face of deportations. High visibility policies to address lurking concerns—getting the plastic out of rivers with cleanup drives, periodically firing a few execrable bureaucrats to show a zero-tolerance policy for waste, and so on—are likely to be useful. Meanwhile, that which doesn’t matter to the electorate—abortion, in particular—should be ignored as much as possible because addressing it will alienate those whose support is necessary to address more important matters.
And, of course, the daily business of government must be done well. Making the DMV an exemplar of efficiency, having pothole response teams constantly fixing them (particularly in the zip codes that matter), police officers who rarely give speeding tickets but often give warnings and mostly just arrest real criminals, and so on, are all policies that make state governments popular and are what an Organization would have to achieve.
This is all easier said than done. But it has to be accomplished, and the fusion of country club Republicans with tough-on-crime and immigration rightists into a coalition of the competent is probably the only way to achieve it. Willie Horton-style propaganda will be necessary to kickstart that.
The All-Seeing Eye Fixes the Problems
The next issue is that even the best reforms are pointless at best and infuriating at worst if they aren’t implemented. That means every nook and cranny of the state needs to have someone who is both loyal and present to ensure that what is supposed to be done is getting done, and is getting done well and honorably.
Byrd handled this through how the Byrd Organization was organized and how it operated. Operating in a still relatively agrarian state, it primarily worked out of county courthouses. These had been social gathering spots since colonial times, were present everywhere, added a degree of legitimacy to the whole thing given their function, and the court staff was paid directly by a man appointed by and loyal to Byrd. This meant that every local sheriff and police officer had to be on board. All the judges were on board, as were their courthouse personnel. What happened at the county level was thus watched, and the law could be enforced with an eye toward not aggravating those whose opinion mattered, something of prime import during the Prohibition years.
Replicating that exactly would be a waste of time, and is probably impossible. But what it does show is the importance of having someone loyal present at every level at which the government is operating. Stopping and punishing corruption early on while also not turning it into a self-inflicted black eye of a scandal, for example, was continually of prime importance to Byrd.
Were such a man as Elon Musk to want to achieve this nationally, I imagine it would have to look something like this:
