Dominion Capital Drives Institutional Capture

Updated: 2025.10.11 10D ago 14 sources
The piece defines 'dominion capital' as the coordinated use of professional skills, networks, and shared narratives to enter institutions and redirect them toward the status and material interests of activist-aligned professionals. It extends this to a thesis that left-progressive politics centers on inserting the professional-managerial class into resource flows and protecting that position by controlling what counts as legitimate discourse. — This framing offers a concrete mechanism for how ideology translates into class power and policy outcomes, informing debates on institutional trust, governance, and populist backlash.

Sources

Power Corrupts Prestige
Robin Hanson 2025.10.11 70% relevant
Hanson’s claim that powerful actors move into productive fields and convert influence into prestige, crowding out the truly productive, complements the 'dominion capital' thesis about professionals translating status and narratives into institutional control and gatekeeping.
Woke as Managerial Ideology - Aporia
2025.10.07 82% relevant
Using Burnham and Pareto’s residues/derivations, the article claims ideologies like anti‑racism and multiculturalism are derivations that legitimize the power of a managerial/professional elite, directly echoing the thesis that a class uses shared narratives to redirect institutions toward its status and material interests.
The Fall of the Alpha Male State
Michelle Braunstein 2025.10.06 70% relevant
The article claims feminist-aligned professionals and NGOs expanded a women-focused bureaucratic ecosystem and redirected resources, mirroring the 'dominion capital' thesis that ideologically aligned professionals enter institutions to secure status and control.
Some Links, 8/31/2025
Arnold Kling 2025.08.31 78% relevant
Thomas Murray names specific guilds (NAST, NAMD, ASTHO, NASPO) that train and standardize DEI/ESG rubrics inside state treasuries, Medicaid, health, and procurement offices, a direct instance of professional‑managerial networks redirecting institutions toward their status interests.
The riddle of the niggardly billionaires
Curtis Yarvin 2025.08.22 82% relevant
The article’s thesis—philanthropy converts money into soft power by cultivating elite human capital and prestige—maps onto the mechanism of professional‑managerial capture that redirects institutions toward donor‑aligned narratives.
A GOP-Teamsters Alliance Makes No Sense
Ken Girardin 2025.08.22 60% relevant
The article details how Teamsters leadership leverages narratives about 'pro‑worker conservatism' to secure regulatory concessions (keeping Biden prevailing‑wage rules, pushing PRO Act components) and personnel picks (Labor Secretary choice), a concrete instance of organized actors redirecting institutions toward their own status and resource interests.
The Chair Never Even Gets Warm
Chris Bray 2025.08.20 56% relevant
The article’s parade of short‑tenure 'leaders' across corporations, police departments, and elite law echoes the professional‑managerial class dynamic described in 'dominion capital'—circulating through institutions to extract prestige and influence without building durable performance.
We Need Elites To Value Adaption
Robin Hanson 2025.08.20 65% relevant
The article says elites denounce price signals that conflict with shared morals (citing the Policy Analysis Market episode), echoing how professional‑managerial gatekeepers use moral narratives to steer institutions and block adaptive-but-stigmatized policies.
Dominion capital: III
Helen Dale 2025.08.14 100% relevant
The article’s claim: 'The central aim... is to insert the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible... [using] dominion capital' and 'control of public discourse legitimacy.'
Washington’s New Status Quo
Christopher F. Rufo 2025.08.14 70% relevant
The piece describes a federal push to 'defund the left‑wing blob' of universities, contractors, and NGOs and to extirpate DEI—an explicit attempt to unwind the professional‑managerial networks described as 'dominion capital.'
Trump and the Dictatorship of the Upper Middle-Class Urbanites
eugyppius 2025.08.04 85% relevant
The article argues that journalists and allied institutional elites define 'democracy' as deference to their class and label challenges to bureaucrats, scientists, university presidents, and media as 'authoritarian'—a class‑power lens that mirrors the dominion‑capital thesis.
Did Marathon Petroleum Prioritize DEI Over Safety?
Christopher F. Rufo 2025.07.25 64% relevant
Marathon embedding DEI quotas into compensation and rapidly expanding 'supplier diversity' procurement reflects professionals using ideological narratives to redirect corporate incentives and resource flows away from core performance metrics (e.g., safety) toward status‑aligned goals.
The struggles of states, the contentions of classes
Lorenzo Warby 2025.07.13 75% relevant
By arguing that expanded bureaucratic and higher‑ed 'unaccountable classes' shape public discourse and policy, it aligns with the thesis that professional-managerial networks redirect institutions toward their own status and control.
Diversity is the Inverse of University
Darren Gee 2025.07.10 60% relevant
By describing universities as 'quangocracies' steered by the Office for Students and staffed with EDI bureaucracies, the piece maps a professional‑managerial takeover using legitimacy narratives (DEI) and regulatory leverage to redirect resources and priorities.
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