It worked pretty well for alcohol prohibition, and appears to be working for drug prohibition.
I think it has a reasonable chance of working for managerialism over the next couple of decades for a few reasons.
One is the giant spike in inequality. The elite are capturing more and more of the money, causing more and more resentment.
Another is the shift in public communication. For a while, most of the information people received was filtered through mass media. The internet has made it much harder for moneyed interests to dominate what people see. HN is a great example; I'll probably read 5x the words from commenters versus the original article, and much of it is contrary or probing. And a lot of what is linked here is not commercial media; it's individuals publishing directly.
A third is a shift in communication costs. Large companies had a major advantage when communication was hard and expensive. But now that it's free and easy, people have less need to work in highly controlled corporate structures. Thus the rise in freelancing and entrepreneurship. It also makes it much easier for people to switch jobs, reducing the effective power of a managerial elite.
I think those together are having interesting effects. It's my hope that we'll shift back toward seeing executives as stewards of valuable organizations of people, and less treating them as magic sources of all value.
