The Therapeutic Welfare State

0:00Before I begin, perhaps I could add something to Professor Lorenzo's eloquent diatribe against Lincoln. I discovered after speaking to Lew Rockwell that I have been mentioned in the weekly standard as one of two recalcitrant historians who has refused to bend his knees before the Lincoln icon, Despite what seems to be the overwhelming support of the Lincoln cult and what is called sometimes the American right or scholarly right, I am one of two historians who do not consider Lincoln to have been the greatest American president. I think I actually inflicted upon Lincoln the further indignity of saying he was a below average president, rather than depict him as a thoroughgoing miscreant and villain.

0:51I just said he was on up to the job of dealing with the South and stumbled into a war which caused the death of over half a million Americans. I think Professor Lorenzo may be correct. He was much worse than being below average. He was an utter disaster. Be that as it may, though, I've come to speak on a different topic, and what you're going to hear is really an outline for a book, Something that was intended as a sequel to the book that I now have coming out with Princeton University Press, which deals with what's called After Liberalism, Mass Democracy and the Managerial State. And this is the part of what was to be a much longer book that I never included in the volume that is about to appear.

1:41And I thought I would try this argument out on you and it is an examination of what I consider the latest and perhaps most intrusive phase of the welfare or managerial state, the therapeutic welfare state. Among contemporary welfare states, the United States stands out as the least socialist. Unlike European countries, well over half of our workforce draws at least half of their salaries from a relatively private sector. Major American industries are not nationalized and the tax burden facing most American workers has remained less than 50% of their gross earnings. About 70% of GMP does not go as taxes into the public sector.

2:32While the percentage of GMP earmarked for the federal government has even declined slightly in the last 20 years. Reading Robert Higgs' study of the expanding U.S. federal state, Crisis and Leviathan, and working with, then looking at some of the National Bureau of Statistics data which Higgs draws for his study, I was struck by how modestly our state has taken from its citizens relative to other, euphemistically called, industrial democracies. Public administration at all levels, including the armed forces, takes as a percentage of GMP less than half of what Scandinavians, Germans or if they actually pay their taxes Italians fork out to their political class.

3:20If these standards of comparison were all we had to measure our index of freedom, it would seem that we Americans were doing well indeed. Though habituated to bloated entitlements and capricious governance, we have proved Goethe right when he observed America du Hastes Bessel. Our administration is leaner than its European counterparts, and our people more in control of their earnings. But this is not the whole of the story, nor am I offering an impersonation of Ben Wattenberg, Michael Novak or other purveyors of empty happy talk. Though the U.S. as a redistributionist state has lagged behind other governments, in one respect it has created the authoritative model for the rest of the world. Our welfare state since mid-century has become increasingly are slowly preoccupied with behavior modification.

4:14Our administered democracy and its media priesthood are interested less in expropriating productive means than they are in re-socializing subject population. And they pursue this reconstructionist project by invoking a crisis that, as the state and media define it, gets steadily worse, a surging outburst of prejudice, insensitivity, which which must be perpetually contained and punished. One can trace the intellectual foundations of what became the American therapeutic state through a series of works. For example, Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, first published in 1944, and the Studies in Prejudice series initiated with the authoritarian personality in 1950. Such works and derivative ones treat prejudice in the United States in the first This is the first case against blacks in the second, specifically against Jews, but more generally against women blacks, homosexuals and Marxists, as festering social problems that only the state is adequately equipped to deal with.

5:22In these special pleas, presented or tricked out as clinical analysis, public administrators are charged with making society less prejudiced. We can accomplish this mandate, or so we are told, by allowing the state to re-educate everyone. Moreover, the understanding of democracy and liberalism, contained herein, is the one that has prevailed in our time, accepting the will of enlightened administrators and expressing their standard of sensitivity. That such notions have become non-controversial for Americans, and that opposition to them is today limited to gatherings of what are perceived as the political fever swamps can be attributed to various causes, though not to the ones most commonly given.

6:10Americans do not have a particularly egregious record of dealing with alien minorities, nor did our treatment of blacks necessarily lead to the victimological and behavioral excesses

6:52were exposed by Jesse Jackson, the Justice Department in ABC News. It is not, after all, quite clear whom or what they said that suggested prejudice, whether they were anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-whatever else. It was never actually made clear, and from what we know, none of these things were actually said on these tapes. But the point is that one prejudice is seen as the same as other prejudices and all prejudices, whether they're real or not, are seen as interchangeable. Moreover, even if blacks did not exist as a victim group, others would take their place and are doing so already in the American political and social context.

7:37Women, for example, have benefited far more than blacks or Hispanics as recipients of affirmative action and in winning money in so-called discrimination suits. The therapeutic state about which I intend to write represents a fusion of two tendencies, both strong in our society. a therapeutic culture based on ascribing victimhood to perceived or real underachievers who are then to be compensated by having administrators raise their self-esteem or lower everybody else's and the irresistible growth, the hitherto irresistible growth of the American welfare state but not in a purely socialist direction.

8:29The argument being made is this, though the American welfare state expanded like other social democratic regimes, it also ceased in the second half of our century to grow as rapidly as an income redistributionist mechanism as other typologically related regimes. The public sector here has never absorbed as much of the economy or taken as higher percentage of personal income as came to be the cases in interwar Sweden, postwar England and Germany, or in France and Italy particularly since the 1960s. One reason for this difference is the more deeply ingrained classical liberal tradition on this side of the Atlantic. Unlike Europeans, Americans have both a liberal and a Protestant sectarian culture, which stressed individual merit and individual achievement.

9:22Our original regime was conceived in a tax revolt, and until the passage of an amendment in 1913, the federal government was specifically prohibited by the Constitution from levying a capitation or income tax. Though this liberal founding, this classical liberal founding, came to have less and less to do with America as an administered mass democracy, it did have certain residual effects. The United States did not move as doggedly toward a collectivist economy or socialist state as other industrialized or industrializing countries, e.g. Sweden with its deeply authoritarian in the past or France with its état dirigiste, its very strong central state coming out of the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution both. Rather, the U.S. chose its own path towards serfdom, which is suggested in my book after liberalism is today becoming the dominant model of political collectivism and which involves more thought control than economic management. It actually involves both, but I would argue that the thought control is is greater than elsewhere, and the economic management may in fact be less than one finds

10:38in other industrial societies. In this American therapeutic model of the welfare state, entitlement programs and income redistribution are not ends in themselves, but preconditions for re-socializing the public. Though this re-socialization goal was always an aspect of social democratic Planning. In practice, and over the long haul, it signified less in Europe than in the United States. Until recently, European socialism was fixed on social class inequality and in remedying this problem by nationalizing production and by making citizens materially more equal.

11:23Probably perhaps since the 1960s has European socialism become interested in the kinds of behavior modification which are really basic to the American welfare state and I would argue in many ways as part of an imitation of an American hegemonic model. Having read the tracks of English Fabians, of German socialists and others, I do not cannot find any of these therapeutic themes present as opposed to discussions of economic efficiency or inefficiency and discussions or laments about the rickety bones and tooth decay of the European working class, raising health standards, introducing eugenics, very important for European socialists, planning marriage, reproduction to produce a more genetically for a Really Fit Population, Making Democracy Scientific and Rational to Public Administration, Removing Class Barriers, Helping Women to Enter the Workforce, were all recurrent plans of European Social Democrats. They can be found in the statements of socialist parties in publications and were advanced by such socialists as L.T. Habhaus, August Bebel, Pietro Neni, Arthur Beveridge, Jules Gued, and in Sweden, Gunnar and Alvin Myrdal,

12:50noticeably absent from such sources are demands for special esteem for underachievers, compensatory respect for lifestyles long despised by Judeo-Christian morality, or government plans for making the subjects of therapeutic states sufficiently sensitive to groups and individuals designated as victims. Nor were European Social Democrats or labor movements particularly eager to throw open national borders to alien, uneducated minorities. However, loudly, leftists proclaimed their devotion to internationalism. Anti-immigrationism has a long and predictable history among the working class and its representatives. From the Third Republic in France to the 1924 Immigration Act in the U.S., which received the enthusiastic support of Samuel Gompers in the American Federation of Labor.

13:46Note that I am not suggesting that social democrats and earlier welfare state types had nothing to do with therapeutic politics. To the contrary, their assaults on the liberal bourgeois order, their reckless empowerment of public administrators, and their praise of social engineering all contributed to building Building a state that snatches our minds as well as our income. And even a cursory study of progressive intellectuals in the U.S. at the turn of the century indicates that social and family planning were much on the minds of early 20th century American social democrats, also a public education as an indispensable tool to achieve their end. And what distinguished these people from the therapeutic epigones and from the people who have taken over the United States today, our government, is at least a vestigial dedication to a private sector in which citizens would live in self-chosen groups and think and express their thoughts, their private thoughts.

14:52For Dewey, John Dewey, for example, the pluralistic society he envisaged would continue to make make distinctions between the state and private human association. Though in Dewey's case, as a sympathetic biographer Robert Westbrook observes, there was insufficient understanding of the intrusiveness of modern public administration. Like 19th century liberals, the social democrat Dewey did view society as the vital part and primary source of human education. He thought this was a good thing. You actually believe there should be limits as to how far the state should be able to go in reconstructing social relations. With a therapeutic state, however, any demarcation between the public and private spheres were eventually erased.

15:42Far more, I would argue, than the situation in many post-war communist states, which at least did not try to reconstruct gender identities or to turn sexual impulses toward homoeroticism. Now federal guidelines for value instruction in public schools from the U.S. Department of Education clumsily and deliberately do both. The Department of Education, since 1991, has required that a suitable non-hostile environment be created for blacks and women at all institutions receiving direct or indirect government subsidies. And in 1994, a black federal bureaucrat in The U.S. Department of Education threatened Wesleyan University, University of Connecticut and several other universities with government action, unless they adopted her plan for a multicultural curriculum, a decision that had been made by other institutions of higher learning, leaned on by the same multicultural bureaucrat.

16:41The University of Texas Professor of Law, Lino Graglia, who has been much in the news lately, has written extensively on affirmative action as a cudgel for beating educators and employers into acceptance of government-imposed, victimological studies and multicultural curricula. According to Gralje, who has studied the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and other agencies intended to advance designated minorities and nondiscrimination, affirmative action is no longer primarily about jobs and admission slots, but about constructing environments in the workplace, in the academy and everywhere else, which minority spokespersons and public administrators prescribe. Failure to do so allegedly shows insensitivity, which requires government intervention against the offending parties.

17:32In a provocative book published back in 1985, the political philosopher Nicholas Capaldi compares the managerial state in its therapeutic mode to interwar Italian fascism. I should say just inter-Italian, it's redundant, all Italian fascism until the Second World War's interwar. Capaldi argues that like the fascists, the Italian fascists, modern managerial Legal Democrats exercise political power without genuine regard for legality. Legal rationales are confected to justify the fiats of public administration, which are accorded a moral dignity by virtue of their enactment. The state, as an instrument of the collective will, determines what is good or bad, and they even invert what had been declared good the day before. For example, solemnly prohibiting racial or gender discriminations on Tuesday and then on Wednesday turning around and imposing such discrimination in the name of non-discrimination.

18:32When this happens, those constitutional phrases or congressional acts which had been invoked in the first instance are declared to mean exactly the opposite and continue to mean that until the state decides they mean something else. Vocapaldy is on to something, in my opinion, and liking our sensitizing liberals to fascist theorists, several distinctions should be noted. For one thing, Italian fascists, whose political theories Capaldi brings up, were morally conventional authoritarians. They had no desire to reconstruct gender roles or to de- or recode the family. They coexisted for many years with a powerful Catholic Church, which the fascist state concluded the latter and packed with in 1929.

19:18Unlike the contemporary therapeutic state, moreover, Italian fascists talked honestly about power. They did not pretend to be making individuals feel comfortable after being physically, mentally or culturally challenged. Last week, after being hauled, or actually several days ago, while being hauled before the rogue IRS to be shaken down for a research travel expense deduction claimed in 1995, I learned that the auditor had brought me thither to assist me with my finances, quote, so we could get it all behind. I was even given an envelope with a peppermint adhesive in which I was able to place a sum of money which they claimed, which had nothing to do with anything that was allowed or disallowed in the course of our discussions.

20:10Never would any decent fascist have spewed such hypocritical gibberish. The fascists, like the curial government of Henry VIII or Louis XIII, took what it could get, while exaggerating, even exaggerating, the fullness of its power. By contrast, the therapeutic state disguises its force by attaching to its activity such mealy-mouthed, sentimental names as healing, sharing, caring and combating prejudice. It does not bully by its own lights, but stops harassment and stops the suffering of those who seem to be unjustifiably afflicted with low self-esteem. The last thing the therapeutic state wants to talk about is power, which it links to fascism and white male hegemony.

21:01Thus it beats us up and shakes us down as a form of healing, or to create the resources to expand its curative activities. There is no reason from this perspective to retain the anachronistic distinction between public and private institutions. The therapeutic state does not exercise power, so it sees it, or encroach on anything that should be kept out of its reach. It goes forth to heal. It goes forth to sensitize. It goes forth to make all of us feel comfortable with each other. The only one who would oppose these activities is somebody who intends to oppress or harass with impunity. In an updated rephrasing of St. Paul's admonition to heed authority as a divine instrument for the common good, one is now urged to cooperate with therapeutic managers in their role as providential healers, who, after all, should oppose them by claiming to have his life unduly interfered with, save for those who stand under the judgment of prejudice.

22:03And as a further caricature of the primitive church, the therapeutic search state, searches out our hearts to determine whether we have fallen short of its standards of non-discriminatory perfection. I believe that it is probably a mistake, you know, to argue that all of this starts sometime in the late 60s or early 1970s, that these were not problems that we had to face before. And I entirely agree that the civil rights movement acted as a time bomb. And I also believe that Jeffrey Tucker was right in several penetrating essays that he wrote in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. One, actually, I discovered the two of us collaborated on.

22:48And Jeffrey is correct to say that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was already fraught with the damage that would later be afflicted by anti-discrimination agencies. The power given then to a free-wheeling congressional commission and its bureaucratic ramifications to policemen's thoughts and intentions developed ineluctably into the therapeutic state under which we now live. It was less important, Tucker observes, that the Civil Rights Act banned racial and gender discrimination and the fact that it claimed to have this power for a congressional agency that is really unconstitutional or extra-constitutional and even more importantly that it placed itself in a position where it was allowed to judge our actions by making judgments about our intentions.

23:38By the late 60s and not by historical accident, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission created by the Civil Rights Act imposed quotas outright. By then, moreover, the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies were pushing the private sector into adopting their notions of gender and racial relations. For example, as when the IRS withdrew the tax-exempt status of educational institutions that did not actively encourage interracial dating. If you remember, this was the famous Bob Jones case that broke out in the early 1980s. Bob Jones did not deny blacks the right to attend their universities. They did not even categorically disallow interracial dating.

24:24They simply insisted on parental permission. This, however, was used as an excuse to remove their tax-exempt status. When Reagan tried, too timidly in my opinion, to restore that tax-exempt status, he was then brow-beaten by the media and he immediately told the Justice Department or whatever was the appropriate department to once again remove the tax-exempt status, maybe it was the IRS which was told to remove the tax-exempt status from Bob Jones. This I think was really part of the political climate by the 1980s, but the IRS had begun to engage in social policy as early as the 1960s in terms of racial relations.

25:11As Chilton Williamson points out in the immigration mystique, moreover, by the mid-60s, all kinds of globalist imperatives had come together in a restatement of the American civil religion. Immigration expansion, the removal of any trace of effective state as opposed to federal control over the franchise, federally enforced equality, and a human rights mission abroad were all part of a Cold War liberal creed that became the only respectable American and Patriotism. Anti-communism by then had been safely ensconced in this Americanism of porous borders, crusades against prejudice and human rights litmus test. And as an instance of historical irony, the anti-communism identified with Hubert Humphrey, Arthur Schlesinger, Christian Century and the early ADA migrated by the 80s to the European left, including including the communist parties of Europe.

26:06In Italy and France, the communists have abandoned Marxist Leninism for garden-variety social democracy, but above all, for support of hate speech laws directed against real and fictitious bigots, but anyone, for example, accused of opposing further third world immigration is now subject to criminal prosecution in France, Italy and Germany. Like the American political spectrum and American public administration, Euro-Marxism has come to exemplify the therapeutic state religion. As long as entitlements hold out and the media monolith continues to hold sway, this new phase of the welfare state will likely continue. It will be presented as a global democratic alternative to socialism and communism, while while bogus conservatives and bogus liberals come together to celebrate this age of consensus and finally tune sensitivities as the end of history. Thank you.