After the fall Book

This is Gottfried’s first in a series of books trying to explain the current state of western civilization and possible future conflicts and failures. It is a pretty devastating book that up ends notions of the current government as liberal or democratic. Instead, ours is pluralist managerial therapeutic system that ignores the will of the people to fulfill moral crusades, but in doing so creates its own problems. Indeed, while somewhat impressed by the early pluralists, Gottfrieds finds the new ones to be a shell. Liberalism is simply a cover, and as events have shown, the elite have no loyalty to liberalism or democracy. Only by way of social programs is the order fine. Tellingly, Europe’s populist revolt (right and left) only gained strength once austerity was practiced after 2008.

Chapter 4 is brilliant, a combination of clear and biting analysis mixed with tight prose, which is not always the case in his later books. Chapter 4 argues in part that current Leftist actions are driven by a fear Nazis, despite the fact that Americans crushed the Nazis and the party had no mass traction in America. In chasing imagined Nazis, the pluralists are depicted as over zealous, unwilling to consider contrary opinions, and worst of all cheerfully blind to what will be wrought by their policies. They are people making personal opinions masked as expertise. Their messianic proclivities are masked by appeal to science and decency as they define it. Of all the pluralists, Gottfried despises Theodore Adorno the most, finding him hypocritical, narrow-minded, and something of a toady.

Much of what Gottfried’s general predictions on where conflicts would arise have been correct. That is because he has mostly mastered that rarest of talents, the ability to perceive what is actually happening instead of seeing what you want to see. Part of this is seeing the weaknesses of each side. Yet what of the predictions? In short, the acceleration of censorship, the impossibility of total censorship in a literate society, the misuse of fascism as a catch all boogeyman, the populist challenge to the intellectual order, the priority given to identity over openness of intellect, and most tellingly the failure of the populist challenge, but not precisely of the intellectual challenge,to the current order. It should be noted that the populism he saw getting the most traction in America was that which Donald Trump exercised, and this book was published in 2001. Since then, voices were drown out which remerged after 2008 in the wake of the financial crash and the openness of the Internet.

This book, and everything by Gottfried, has one major weakness. He does not address capitalism save in the abstract, which shows conservatism’s continued weakness in understanding its implications. While I do think there is a pluralist managerial therapeutic system, I do not think it trumps capitalism and consumerism as the dominant forces in our age, and the two have an uneasy relationship.

As I did in previous books, below are some choice quotations from what might be the shrewdest conservative thinker of our age.

“In their hands multiculturalism has become an instrument of control, one designed to privilege their own concerns and to stigmatize those who think differently.”

“In nontraditional societies without recognized moral authorities, intellectuals compete, according to Weber, to make their private value-preferences generally accepted. Such “assertions of a highest value [Ho¨chstwertsetzung]” become typical of a society which declares itself open to discussion but is searching at the same time for moral bearings.”

“With due respect to its former practitioners now suffering second thoughts, all phases of pluralism reveal the same endencies, the ascendancy of the managerial state and its restructuring of social relations. Whether a humanistic conception or an arrogant court religion, pluralism has consistently justified a socially intrusive public administration. And by its own politicizing momentum, it has contributed to a postliberal democratic age, to which pluralists continue to attach misleading liberal labels.”

“The sensitivity needed to practice “democracy” or to enter the political conversation continues to rise. Unlike his counterpart of 1960, today’s public personality must master gender-inclusive language, remain abreast of the changing designations for designated minorities, and say nothing to offend gays. The apparent reasons for these restraints are the growing compassion and openness being practiced by society. But the real reason may be widespread fear. People are afraid to engage in pathologically described dissent or to oppose the favored values of journalists and government administrators.”

“And for those thereafter engaged in debates about liberal democracy, it became convenient to treat one’s opponents as prejudiced and sick. Political debate, as Lasch notes, would be limited to increasingly narrow parameters of dissent, and whoever crossed those lines would be singled out as enemies of democracy and bearers of social disease. Defenders of welfare state democracy, who, like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., saw themselves as upholding the “vital center,” would thus acquire a new arrow for their quiver. Being a pro-welfare-state liberal internationalist betokened not only virtue but also mental well-being.”

“The argumentative ruses adopted to consolidate the political status quo go from forcing an argument to actual intimidation. They begin by appealing to unproved premises, which the reader is nudged into accepting, move on to therapeutic criteria for right reasoning, and finally, as seen in recent hate speech and anti-Holocaust revisionist laws, end by reverting to the argumentum baculinum, which may mean arresting those considered criminally insensitive. At stake here is not the idle pastime of scribes. It is an attempt undertaken by prominent intellectuals to elevate pluralism into behavioral coercion.”

“What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of “free” individual participants, setting goals under scientific direction and having their material interests monitored by a “conductor state.” The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientific management.”

And lastly, the biggest gut punch of them all…

“The political class has forgotten that its subjects will serve it and its court religion to whatever extent it goes on feeding and protecting. As in Hobbes’s Leviathan, though subjects are materially driven and fear obsessed, their loyalty is not unconditional. It is only there when their needs are being met—or, more precisely, when people believe this is happening. Fearful subjects have given up liberty for security, but they may regret this choice if the sovereign loses their respect. This Hobbesian understanding of the nature and limits of authority goes back to the dawn of modern political thought, and it throws light on the populist insurgency that now confronts the managerial state.”