Although I agree with Larry [Auster] about the need for a moratorium on immigration, particularly from Latin America, and although I share his view that decadent, childless Europeans are committing physical and demographic suicide by repopulating their countries with lower-class Muslims, who often incline toward Islamic Fundamentalism, I strongly dissent from his unqualified generalizations about adherents of Islam.

I am not “suiciding” myself and I don’t know anyone who is. What Gottfried misidentifies as “suicide by repopulating their countries” is actually genocide by immigration. It is being imposed on lots of people I do know who don’t want it by a class who most certainly do not see themselves as “us” or these countries as “ours.” It is rationalized and excused by a number of specious arguments, the most effective of which is that any substantive resistance to this supposed “suicide” makes you a horrible, immoral, ignorant person — a “racist” or “nazi.” You’re a mortal threat to the interests of “minorities.”

Jews, of course, are the prototypical threatened minority, with a mind boggling disproportion of wealth and over-representation in Western media and politics. That’s why anyone who stands against this so-called “suicide” is called a “nazi” — whether or not they have any knowledge of “nazi” history or jewish power. Whites may be ignorant of our interests, but jews are not ignorant of theirs, and they don’t hesitate to use their power to viciously attack anyone they perceive as an enemy.

Neither Gottfried nor Auster are powerful, in part because they oppose immigration. Despite their differences on muslims both feel free to make unqualified negative generalizations about Whites. Both scapegoat us for “suiciding” ourselves. Both talk about and even criticize jews, but ultimately excuse them and blame Whites instead.

Larry might wish that Jews thought differently about Christian believers since he himself is one, but alas most of them don’t. Jewish organizations here and in Europe view Christians as people whose exaggerated guilt over the Holocaust can be channeled into support for the Israeli government. Prominent Jewish groups, such as the World Jewish Congress, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League, show nothing but indifference or hostility to the continued existence of Christian institutions in what used to be Christian countries.

This isn’t about religion. Christianity here is nothing but a proxy for Whiteness, and Gottfried and Auster both know it.

Those same prominent jewish groups joined with muslims and the Catholic Church, the media, and the EU ruling caste to condemn a popular, secular Swiss vote banning minarets. Led by jewish example and jewish rhetoric they all take the slightest indication that the Swiss want Switzerland to remain Swiss as a sign of “nazism,” which they see as a mortal threat. Never mind the mortal threat to the Swiss. In this and dozens of recent examples across the West, opposition to genocidal levels of immigration is more and more explicitly described as bad for jews and the alien migrants they identify and sympathize with. The rationale is that such opposition threatens them with genocide.

The impact of this inversion of reality isn’t anti-Christian, it’s anti-White. Even when White opposition to immigration is deracinated and expressed in terms of law, economics, or culture the genocidal immigrationists shamelessly inject their own ethnic and racial interests into the debate while accusing the White opposition of disguising “racist” motives.

I’m not as familiar with Gottfried, but I know Auster follows European politics almost as closely as he follows domestic American politics. His main concern isn’t religion. It’s “anti-semitism.” If he gets the slightest whiff that a person or organization opposes jewish interests, explicitly or not, it doesn’t matter whether they are good Christians, dislike muslims, or agree with him on every other point of his pro-jewish worldview.

There might well be problems with the liberal ideas that Jews have supported until now, but it is simply wrong to pretend that Jewish liberals act from liberal motives that have nothing to do with their Jewish fears and hostilities. I’ve never met a Jewish liberal whose leftist politics was not in some way connected to his self-identity as a Jew.

Auster only poses as an anti-”liberal” “conservative.” His preoccupation is with defending jewish interests. His opposition to immigration into the West is based primarily on it being bad for jews. His dissembling about “liberalism” and “judeo-Christian” heritage is only part of his deliberate and more general conflation of White and jewish interests. Gottfried likewise but less blatantly poses as a “conservative” against “liberalism”. Together he and his friend Auster demonstrate that self-identity as a jew is not only connected to “liberals” and leftist politics.

I’ll conclude with an exchange in June 2009 between these two hyper-conscious jews about how jews are innocent and Whites (disingenously euphemized first as “Protestants,” then as “Christians,” and finally as the “white gentile majority”) are to blame, excerpted from Black racial preferences at Annapolis; and a conversation with Paul Gottfried about white guilt,, Jews, and Protestants (Auster’s emphasis):

LA replies:

Let me see if I can reconcile these statements.

You seem to be saying that the egalitarian fiction (the races are equal in capacities, so blacks’ backwardness must be due to white racism) is the source of white guilt, but that the energy pushing this guilt and never giving it a rest is the projection of Christian spiritual guilt onto secular racial guilt about nonwhites.

Is that an accurate summary of what you’re saying?

However, this leads me to another point, I think I have just finally understood something you’ve been saying to me for a number of years. You have often told me that Protestant liberals are worse than Jewish liberals, and I never quite understood what you meant by this. But now I think maybe I see it.

What distinguishes Jewish liberalism from Protestant liberalism is the following.

Jewish liberals see white Christians as guilty. The Jews feel ok about themselves, they think the white gentile majority is the problem.

By contrast, white Protestant liberals feel guilty about themselves. This leaves them without a confident group selfhood. They believe only in equality, only in their own guilt for somehow standing in the way of equality. It is this lack of collective and even individual selfhood, this inner nothingness, this willingness to be destroyed, that makes the white Protestants the true liberals. The Jews, whose collective and individual psyche is not guilty under liberalism (since in the liberal world view Jews are victims and the champions of victims), have psychological power and self-confidence and thus are not true liberals.

A true liberal is a person who is willing to accept his group’s extinction. Protestants are willing to accept their group’s extinction. Jews are not. Therefore Protestants are closer to the true liberal essence than the Jews are.

Is this what you’ve been saying?

Paul Gottfried replies:

You’ve summed up my views on the differences between Jewish and Christian liberals with more succinctness that I’ve been able to apply to the problem. And your conclusion is spot on. True liberals, who incarnate the Freudian death wish, yearn for the extinction of their ancestral group.

Jews, including “conservatives” like Auster and Gottfried, feel ok about themselves, they think Whites are the problem.

UPDATE 16 April 2010: Alt-Right’s ongoing construction of a fictional Auster is Auster’s lame reply to “ignorant and off-base statements about me.” He complains that:

Every time an article about me appears at Richard Spencer’s website Alternative Right, which is not an infrequent event, it attributes to me, without evidence, without any quotations from my writings, views that I do not have and that I have never stated and that frequently are the opposite of my actual views. There have been so many such false attributions, particularly in Richard Spencer’s long article, “Austercized” (which I only gave a careful reading recently, after Spencer’s podcast interview of me), and in Richard Hoste’s blog entries about me, and it would take so much work and time to reply to them all, and there are so many more pressing and more interesting things to write about, that I’ve put off replying to them so far, though I will try to get around to it.

The latest Auster-critical fantasy fest (or, rather, “Larry”-critical fantasy fest, since the writers at Alt Right do not refer to me by my last name, but as “Larry”) is a 1,600 word article posted yesterday by Paul Gottfried which, without a single quotation of me, attributes to me numerous views that I do not have and have never stated.

Of course whenever I write about Larry I quote him extensively. My frequent critiques of him have been rooted entirely in his views and his arguments. It has never stopped him from writing any number of ignorant and off-base statements about me.

Focusing finally on Gottfried, Auster writes:

Beyond his wild mischaracterizations of my views, of which I’ve only touched the surface, is a much more consequential matter. Gottfried’s main point in this vile and incoherent article is to drive a wedge between Jews and Christians, to make Christians feel that Jews are a greater threat to the West than Muslims are.

The quotes Auster provides and his statement of his “real” views do not demonstrate any “wild mischaracterizations” made by Gottfried. And Auster provides no quotes in support of his own wild mischaracterization of Gottfried’s main point, which Gottfried put right in his title: “The Myth of ‘Judeo-Christian Values.’” Gottfried is accusing Larry of mischaracterizing the history of European/jewish relations. The only real flaw with that criticism is that Gottfried neglects to add that many other jews and zionist Christians join Larry in that mythologizing. “Judeo-Christian” rhetoric is the norm, not the exception, and in fact the only politically correct, mainstream, “liberal” view of “judeo-Christian” history is one in which jews have always been the completely innocent victims of undeserved persecution, repeatedly perpetrated by envious, irrational, and ignorant Europeans.

As usual Auster doesn’t address the criticism that’s actually aimed at him. Instead he complains hypocritically about “personal attacks” and “reckless indifference to factual truth” and changes the subject. And of course the subject that he really wants to talk about is the threat to jews posed by Gottfried’s blunt words concerning their dim views of “Christians,” i.e., Europeans.

I’m disgusted by the dissembling coming from both of these jewish “conservative” poseurs, but I’m happy to see so many in the Alternative Right commentariat aren’t fooled.

Age of Treason, April 15, 2010

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy

Sam Francis (1947 - 2005)

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt is the sequel to Professor Paul Gottfried’s earlier volume, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, published by Princeton University Press in 1999. In both books Professor Gottfried, a prominent paleo-conservative polemicist, intellectual historian, and Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, tries to account for the emergence of “post-liberal” trends in political thought and behavior, especially the rise of such phenomena as “multiculturalism” and what is popularly called “political correctness.” The problem underlying his efforts is that such political and cultural views are so self-evidently absurd, based on such transparently false beliefs about history and culture, and so evidently harmful to intellectual freedom and social cohesion, that it is a mystery why anyone believes them at all, let alone why they have become such powerful and all but irresistible trends in academic, intellectual, and political life. Is the acceptance of such views by various key elites in Western society genuine, and to what extent does their acceptance point either to some hidden agenda reflecting the material interests of these elites or to some equally obscure irrational motivation, a collective “death wish” on the part of the leadership sectors of the modern West? This is perhaps the central problem Mr. Gottfried’s series seeks to answer. Aside from what I take to be certain flaws in his presentation and argument, both books are well worth reading, and not only for the large amount of anti-Western foolishness that he documents. They are major contributions to our understanding of what is happening to the Western world and why.

Both books take off from the common assumption that the United States and most of the Western world are now governed by what Gottfried calls the “managerial state,” a term and concept that derive from conservative theorist James Burnham in his The Managerial Revolution of 1941 and which I to some extent reformulated in various essays, columns, and books in the 1980s. Gottfried’s usage of them, however, is quite different from their meaning as defined by either Burnham or me.

In the first place, Burnham was writing under the influence of a Marxism from which he had only recently defected and of the largely Italian school of what are known as “classical elite” theorists, in particular Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, which he had recently discovered. Hence, his theory, as well as the reformulated version that I developed, is framed in terms of elites—relatively small groups within a population that share a common relationship to the instruments of power within a society and a common interest in how those instruments are used and which exclude the majority of the population from access to power. The key concept for Burnham, then, was a “managerial elite,” a “managerial class,” or a “new class,” which was displacing the older elite or ruling class in modern society. He saw this process going on simultaneously in Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the United States of the New Deal era. The new elite, like the old, dominates the state, the formal apparatus of government, but also extends well beyond the state in its control of the economy (as a corporate elite) and of the culture (the structures of ideological formulation, education, and mass communications). In both the original and the reformulated versions of the theory, the behavior of the managerial elite is largely determined by its consciousness of its power interests and its pursuit of those interests, and its ideology is constructed by a managerial intelligentsia (academics, journalists, think tank verbalists, etc.) to justify its interests.

Gottfried’s work, by contrast, owes little to elite theory, and he seldom speaks of a “managerial elite” or “managerial class” at all. Instead, his discussion focuses almost exclusively on the state itself. Large corporations, unions, foundations, mass media, and schools and universities play far less of a role in his model of managerial dominance than in Burnham’s or mine, and his concept of what motivates the thinking and behavior of those who control the managerial state is also radically different.

Secondly, and consistent with his abandonment of elite theory, Gottfried’s usage of the term “managerial state” itself is quite different from that of the Burnhamite school. In the latter, much as in classical Marxism, the state is largely the “executive committee” of the ruling class—in Marx’s case, the capitalist bourgeoisie; in the Burnhamite case, the managerial bureaucracy, which is closely wedded to the corporate and cultural managers. In the absence of the elite theory concept, however, Gottfried’s “managerial state” appears almost spontaneously, merely as the product of liberal ideology combined with political ambition. For Gottfried, the “managerial state” seems to be mainly a synonym for what a Goldwater conservative of the 1960s would have called “big government”—the centralized federal government that regulates the economy, dishes out welfare and special benefits to selected constituencies, and overrides state, local, and private authorities as vaguely defined “mandates” or “social needs” dictate—but neither the interests of the elite that runs the state nor those of sister elites with which it is allied seem to constitute significant driving forces for its behavior and policies. There is therefore little connection between Gottfried’s usage of the term “managerial” and the special sense in which Burnham developed the concept of “manager”—specifically, one who holds power through proficiency in modern technical and managerial skills.

Those who hold such skills are able to dominate the state, the economy, and the culture because the structures of these sectors of modern society require technical functions that only specially skilled personnel can provide. The older elites simply lack those skills and eventually lose actual control over the key institutions of modern mass society. As the new, managerial elites take over, society is reconfigured to reflect and support their interests as a ruling class—interests radically different from those of the older elites. Generally, the interests of the new managerial elites consist in maintaining and extending the institutions they control and in ensuring that the needs for and rewards of the technical skills they possess are steadily increased, that society become as dependent on them and their functions as possible.

Little of this analysis is apparent in Gottfried’s discussion, however, and it is never entirely clear why he is using the term “managerial state” at all or what the relationship between his usage and that of Burnham is. Indeed, the bulk of his second volume is concerned with how and why the “managerial state” evolves into what he now calls the “therapeutic state,” which undertakes “therapeutic” functions intended to “cure” the pathologies of bourgeois society—its “racism,” “sexism, “homophobia,” etc.—and which adopts what is now called generally “multiculturalism” as its dominant ideology. Whereas the old “managerial state” was concerned principally with the public administration of material welfare, the new therapeutic state is concerned mainly with the instillation of “correct” mental and psychological attitudes and behavior.

Social guilt, antifascist education, and the search for subterranean prejudice are integral to the moral mission of European politicians and intellectuals as much as it is for their American preceptors. The mental cleansing that European sensitizers desire must go so deep that it can never be brought to completion. The road is indeed everything, but on the never-ending road toward the unattainable goal, the prescribed reeducation warrants a draconian control over citizens, who remain susceptible to old ways (p. 10).

As Gottfried demonstrates, adopting therapeutic functions does not mean that older managerial functions vanish or significantly diminish, despite the claims of neo-conservative champions of “democratic capitalism” that “socialism has died” or the “era of big government is over.”

But while it is clear that the therapeutic functions have been added onto the older ones, it is not so clear that the “therapeutic” state is as fundamentally different as Gottfried seems to claim. “Therapy,” after all, is merely one kind of technical skill that more recent managers have adopted and applied as an instrument of power and social control. The metaphor of a “sick society” that requires therapy is indeed more recent than the older managerial one centered on the idea of “social engineering,” but the concept of “therapy” does not deviate from that of a technically skilled class (even if the skills are largely pseudo-scientific) asserting hegemony over the rest of society. “Therapy,” in other words, is merely the current codeword by which the managerial class rationalizes its dominance over other social and political forces and especially its claim to reconstruct the human mind itself through the manipulation of emotions, attitudes, and social relationships. Even though the new therapeutic regime reaches much further into the psychic and social roots of behavior to inculcate submission, it is not essentially different from the Burnhamite concept of managerial totalitarianism. It should be recalled that Orwell based 1984 on Burnham’s work, and the consummate achievement of therapeutic managerialism in that novel is the engineering of love for Big Brother, at the expense of all other human affective relationships. Brainwashing masked as “therapy” was thus by no means unknown to the older apostles of managerial domination.

Yet Gottfried’s “managerial” or “therapeutic” state by itself seems to be harmless enough; its drive toward tyranny does not, in his view, derive from its own structure or the interests of its controlling elite. If we could somehow take out the ideology, change the minds of those who control the state, and convert them into paleo-conservatives, the state apparatus itself would be neutral. What really animates its drive toward a totalitarian conquest and reconfiguration of society and the human mind itself comes from the ideology that the masters of the managerial state have adopted, a force that is entirely extraneous and largely accidental to the structure by which they exercise power. In Gottfried’s view, this ideology derives from and is largely identical to what he calls “Liberal Protestantism.”

As Gottfried writes, “A religious worldview gives direction to the managerial state’s progress toward a therapeutic regime concerned with the self-esteem of victims. This worldview is liberal Protestantism, understanding that term in the current sense and not in the way it might have been taken in the past” (i.e., not as a movement to adapt Protestant theology to modern scientific and political trends so much as a theologically based ethic demanding recognition of and collective repentance for such “sins” as “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “anti-Semitism,” etc.).

Gottfried is no doubt correct to point to recent expressions of guilt and guilt-mongering among various Protestant theologians in Europe and the United States, but there are two major problems with his use of such maunderings as an adequate explanation for the practices of the managerial state. In the first place, he fails to establish any significant connection between this body of theological thought, on the one hand, and actual members of the managerial elite (or administrators of the managerial state, if you will), on the other. The closest he comes is a brief account of a speech by ex-President Bill Clinton not long after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in which Mr. Clinton spoke of the collective responsibility of the West for atrocities committed against the Moslem world going back to the Crusades. That sort of rhetoric is common enough, of course, and it may in fact derive from what Gottfried means by “liberal Protestantism.” But there is little reason to take anything Bill Clinton says very seriously except as an expression of his own personal and political interests, and no reason to think that serious feelings of guilt derived from liberal Protestantism really animate the managerial class as a whole.

In the second place, such expressions are by no means limited to Protestants or to liberal Protestants. As Gottfried acknowledges, the so-called “Christian Right” is not exactly immune from emoting about the “sins” of “racism,” and groups like Promise Keepers (before its collapse) specialized in “overcoming guilt” and actually promoted interracial marriage. Gottfried also cites a rhetorical belly crawl over Christian guilt for anti-Semitism by Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed before the Anti-Defamation League in 1995 as illustrating that “the politics of atonement has spilled over to the American Christian Right, the side of the religious spectrum where one might think it would be hardest to find.” But such performances do not derive from the kind of liberal Protestant theology of sin and guilt that Gottfried is talking about. They are more likely either a kind of public theater intended to avoid charges of “racism” and “insensitivity,” or else reflections of the real guilt experienced by various religious neurotics and oddwads who compose the leadership of the “Christian Right.”

For that matter, Pope John Paul II in the last few years has taken up the habit of crawling about on his hands and knees in a protracted apologetic to Protestants (for the Inquisition), Jews (for “The Holocaust”), Moslems (for the Crusades), and even Eastern Orthodox Greeks (for “intolerance”). Whatever the meaning of “liberal Protestantism,” guilt is hardly confined to it, but again there seems to be no special linkage between feeling such guilt or acknowledging its legitimacy and the policies of the managerial state. While Gottfried argues, perhaps accurately enough, that Protestantism harbors inherent tendencies toward guilt and repentance for sin and the rejection of social hierarchies and authority in favor of individualism, he also tends to ignore the profoundly conservative and anti-liberal Protestant heritages of the American South, the pre-twentieth century Church of England, Prussian Lutheranism, and South African Calvinism, among other expressions of Protestantism that fail to suit modern managerial ideological needs. What he seems to have identified is not so much “liberal Protestantism” as “liberalism” itself, which rejects authority and hierarchy explicitly, has succeeded in permeating virtually all Christian sects in the course of the last century, and has evolved into what the late Revilo Oliver dubbed the “succedaneous religion” of the modern West that leads it to racial and cultural suicide. There is no special reason to blame Protestantism for this development and less reason to blame it than other forces.

Searching for such forces that help animate the managerial-therapeutic state’s war on Western culture, we should extend our inquiries to other religious and ethnic formations besides those of Protestants. If we are looking for the sources of the collective consciousness of “sins” such as “racism,” “sexism,” etc. and the systematic, politically enforced reconfiguration of American society, then the Jewish role in promoting racial egalitarianism, promoting feminism and subverting male social roles, instilling collective guilt, promoting mass immigration, and pushing multiculturalism (through Franz Boas and his disciples in anthropology, the civil rights movement, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, any number of Marxist and New Left movements, Jewish feminist ideologues like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Sontag, pro-immigration lobbying by Jewish “public interest” groups and individual political figures, and the major architect of multiculturalism, Horace Kallen, not to mention the largely Jewish “neo-conservatism” of recent years) can hardly be ignored. Gottfried, however, does ignore it almost entirely, though he gives a casual and not very complimentary nod to Kevin MacDonald’s work, which he characterizes in a footnote as “methodologically uneven but occasionally illuminating.” (p. 42, n. 5; and see also p. 15, n. 21) In short, even if we grant, as Gottfried seems to think, that the managerial elite has no inherent tendency to wage war on traditional Western institutions and values and even if we resort to extraneous forces such as religious and theological movements, there are any number of such forces present in modern society that are at least as plausible as the “liberal Protestantism” Gottfried accuses.

Finally, Gottfried argues that “a transformation of the self-image of the majority population would have had to take place in order for the therapeutic state to have reached its present strength,” and it is the “altered religious consciousness that has affected Protestant majorities in the United States and in other Anglophone countries” that has brought about this transformation. Yet he also points out the “catastrophic” (his word) decline in mainline Protestant church membership and attendance and remarks that “More and more of the 58 percent of the American population consisting of churched Protestants are joining Fundamentalist and Evangelical denominations” in protest of the liberalization of the mainstream churches. In other words, American Protestants, so far from having their religious consciousness altered by liberal Protestantism, are in fact fleeing it.

Moreover, it is not to my perception true that any “transformation of the self-image of the majority population” has taken place at all or that such a transformation is necessary for the dominance of the managerial state, even if the managerial state today is granted the power Gottfried attributes to it. Challenging the possibility of a nationalist, populist political reaction against the managerial regime, Gottfried remarks that “nothing connected to American nationalist politics resonates as strongly as the concern registered in polls about ‘fighting discrimination in the workplace.’ Not even quotas and affirmative action in education, issues that engage the entire American Right, have aroused a national opposition as noticeable as what is counterpoised on the other side.” (pp. 116-17)

The main foundations for these claims that the bulk of the American population now embraces the anti-discrimination policies of the liberal managerial state (as well as mass immigration) are various opinion polls that Gottfried adduces, including one from 2000 showing that 53 percent of the public approves of the federal government “guarding against discrimination in hiring.” But opinion polls often show different attitudes at different times, depending on how the questions are asked, and a mere 53 percent approval of what is an essential function of the managerial-therapeutic state is actually somewhat encouraging. Virtually all polls up to 2000 showed solid majorities favoring reduced immigration, but Gottfried uses one from that year that reported only 45 percent of the public favoring reduction as the basis of his claim that “a majority of Americans have become benignly indifferent to or positive about the government’s immigration policy.” (p. 144) Yet only four pages later he cites a Roper poll of 1996 that showed that 83 percent of the public favored reduced immigration. More recent polls since the 9/11 attacks have shown that a majority again favors reduction. It is likely that most respondents answer such polling questions not after long and deep reflection on and study of public issues but on the basis of vague associations, implanted images, and exposure to mounds of carefully selected information and misinformation about issues like race, affirmative action, and immigration. How reliable any polls on such issues can be for divining what “most” Americans “really” believe is questionable.

Yet in any case, it is not at all clear that Gottfried’s assumption that such a transformation of the majority population is necessary for a therapeutic state to function is true. Elites and states function continuously in most societies, imposing policies to which most citizens have not actually consented and do not even understand. The manufacture and manipulation of “consent” by elites skilled in propaganda and public relations is the foundation of what the state does, not what its citizens really support. Indeed, if Gottfried were correct in his analysis—that a majority of the population, influenced by their religious persuasions, has accepted the legitimacy and necessity of “curing” themselves and their institutions of various repressive pathologies—he would have largely removed most grounds for objecting to what is going on. If most Americans support multiculturalism, why object to it?

Gottfried’s reliance on liberal Protestantism as the animating force behind the managerial-therapeutic state’s war on traditional culture is one of the two main flaws in his thesis. The other main flaw in his argument is his conviction that the managerial state and those who run it are not driven so much by what he calls “calculation” of self-interest on the part of the elite as by “a Protestant culture of social guilt and of individuals ashamed of their collective past.” Such irrational motivations no doubt are always operative in any social or political group, but reaching for irrationalist explanations is never as persuasive as looking for perfectly rational reasons why an entire class thinks and behaves the way it does.

In the case of the managerial class in the Burnhamite analysis, such reasons are not hard to locate. The managerial elite as a whole shares a vested interest in making sure that political, economic, and cultural organizations are dependent on the skills that only the elite possesses. Unlike earlier elites in history, the managerial class does not depend on the transmission of property, power, or status through the family but on skills that cannot be inherited or passed on. Hence, institutions such as large accumulations of private property and the family are relatively unimportant to it. So are the specific identities that multiculturalism combats. As Burnham argued, the reach of managerial power is transnational and supranational; national boundaries, sovereignties, and identities present mainly obstacles to managerial power, and Burnham explicitly predicted the managerial movement away from traditional nation-states and toward supranational organization. For much the same reason, the managerial class is at best indifferent and actually hostile to most other specific identities such as those derived from class, ethnicity and race, religion, region, and gender. Managerial power is heightened by the eradication of such identities and by the triumph of a universalist ideology and ethic that celebrates such abstractions as “humankind.”

Movements like “multiculturalism,” which ostensibly defends the legitimacy of many different cultural and ethnic identities, would seem to be the opposite of the abstract universalism that the managerial system prefers, but in fact the main social and political function of multiculturalism as it is deployed in schools and government policies today is to undermine white, Christian, male-oriented, bourgeois values and institutions—those, in other words, that remain the principal institutional constraints on managerial reach and power. Despite a good deal of play with such ethnic heritages as those of American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc., the real “cultural” bonds that discipline these different groups are those created and deployed by the managerial regime—through government bureaucracy, educational manipulation, mass routinization by the economy of managerial capitalism, and disciplining by the mass media. Managerial elites can clearly afford to patronize tribal, often paleolithic, practices such as musical styles, clothing, cuisine, and religious rituals; there is little danger that such folkways will seriously interfere with real managerial control and interests, and the elite neither expects nor desires them to do so. The main use of such diversions is to embarrass and discredit their Western counterparts as repressive, genocidal, boring, and uncreative, not really to elevate primitive and Third World cultural strains into the dominant culture created and controlled by the managerial class. The multiculturalist ideology promoted by the managerial regime is supposed to remain subordinate to and controlled by the “color-blind” universalism and egalitarianism that the regime also sponsors.

Yet Gottfried’s analysis, despite the flaws on which I have perhaps dwelled too much, remains a compelling one, and we can agree that even if “liberal Protestantism” is not the major animating force in the managerial regime, it is certainly capable of providing an influential ideological rationale and justification for managerial guilt-mongering, especially in cultural regions where a Protestant heritage remains prevalent. We can agree also that while the “managerial state” is by no means the only structure constructed and deployed for the pursuit of managerial power, it is the major one, and increasingly in both Europe and the United States, cultural and economic control and manipulation of mass society are dependent on the state itself. There are therefore points of congruence between Gottfried’s analysis of “managerial” power and that of Burnham.

Gottfried concludes his book with a warning that the multiculturalist and immigration policies of the managerial state may well be undermining its own power and the stability of the system it dominates (this is a major element in his argument that managerial policies reflect irrational motives rather than rational interests). Thus, the managerial state

will not benefit and may destroy that [managerial] order if the culture shifts in ways that diminish its control. If a certain kind of multiculturalism may have that effect, reasoning leaders will try to prevent it from destabilizing society. This has not happened with immigration: Short-term gain and ideological commitment have both driven the managerial class and its media and academic priesthood toward “empowering” those who live parasitically on multicultural institutions. Hispanic racialists, Third World patriarchs, and Mexican irredentists will likely eat up the present regime, if given the demographic chance. What will then ensue will not be a return to what the managerial state supplanted. At most a precarious truce may be struck, before the advocates of group rights resume their competition for power. (p. 147)

Of course, the managerial class would have a ready answer—that the Balkanizing forces against which Gottfried warns will themselves eventually be assimilated into the managerial stewpot, that managerial techniques of social control will neutralize any such forces, that Gottfried exaggerates them anyway, and that anyone who mentions such problems is probably a “xenophobe,” if not an outright “racist.” Nevertheless, Gottfried has an entirely valid and indeed powerful point, that the dynamic of managerial power undermines its own regime. In particular, what he is alluding to in this passage is the emergence of a non-white and indeed anti-white racial consciousness among the immigrant populations and subcultures (though by no means confined to them) that does not yet fit into the managerial superculture and which has emerged in the course of the last century as an entirely independent force, the “rising tide of color,” the rebirth of non-white and anti-white racial consciousness on a mass scale.

As noted, it is of course the conceit of the managerial class that eventually the threat of Balkanization that such consciousness and the population streams that carry it will be “assimilated” into the superculture through application of its universalist policy of “color-blindness” and the disciplines of economic reward and that they present no long-term threat. What Gottfried is suggesting is that the emergence of Third World racial consciousness cannot be assimilated, that it is impervious to managerial bribery and manipulation, and that it presents a far more serious threat to the stability and functioning of the managerial regime than the masters of the regime realize or — given their ideology — are able to understand.

“Thinking these leaders govern through calculation disregards the fantasy aspect of their vision,” he writes on his last page. Perhaps so, though interest and the greed and lust for power that it engenders can blind ruling classes just as easily as fantasies. While Paul Gottfried has analyzed the irrational and fantasy aspects of managerial power admirably, he fails to dwell sufficiently on the obvious truth that no elite can come to power or remain in power unless its ideology and behavior allow for a considerable amount of accurate calculation of its power interests. The managerial class that has now become the dominant force in American and European societies is at least as calculating as any other in human history, and its power cannot be fully or accurately understood without grasping this truth.

Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers

Dr. Paul Gottfried, currently Raffensburger Professor of Humanities at unpretentious Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, is a naturally ambitious man whose plans for academic eminence and influence with the mighty did not come to fruition. The book’s cover suggests a Horatio Alger story in which the son of a small town fireman grows up to advise presidents; but in the work itself we learn that he made Richard Nixon’s acquaintance only years after he had resigned the presidency. Referring to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story The Celestial Railroad, Dr. Gottfried compares his own earthbound journey to the Strasburg Railroad, a quaint tourist attraction in his own Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which winds through the lovely Amish countryside without ever getting much of anywhere. Many principled conservative scholars in our time could make similar comparisons.

Encounters is not a complete autobiography but a memoir, a series of vignettes featuring some of the more remarkable men with whom Dr. Gottfried has been associated through his long career. They include his father, Herbert Marcuse, Will Herberg, Paul Piccone, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Thomas Molnar, John Lukacs, Pat Buchanan, Richard Nixon, Russell Kirk, Sam Francis, Murray Rothbard, Eugene Genovese, Christopher Lasch, Peter Stanlis, Robert Nisbet, and Mel Bradford.

“I am still embarrassed to admit,” writes the author, ” that I learned true liberal intellectual exchange from a declared Marxist-Leninist.” The Herbert Marcuse with whom Gottfried crossed paths at Yale in 1964 was a “dazzling lecturer” who got his young graduate student reading the reactionary Joseph de Maistre as well as Hegel.

Marcuse was in some ways a bourgeois anachronism. This was evident from the way he dressed to the gallant (but never lecherous) manner in which he spoke to female students. With his extensive humanistic and linguistic erudition, he oozed traditional German Bildung, a quality that contrasted sharply with the careerism and narrow specialization that I encountered among most of my American professors.

A few years later, this “charming Old World academic with a touch of dottiness” was openly advocating violence and identifying himself with the cause of black Communist Party activist Angela Davis. Many find it hard to believe that authentic erudition and personal graciousness could be found in one so completely lacking a moral center. This was perhaps a symptom of an inevitable generational lag in the process of cultural disintegration: those (such as Marcuse) who first betray the scholar’s calling have most often enjoyed the privilege of learning from men who had not. The students they instruct (such as many of today’s humanities professors) typically inherit all of their defects with none of their saving graces.

When National Review published an abrasive obituary of Marcuse in 1979, Prof. Gottfried submitted an impassioned retort, noting his contributions to Hegel studies in Reason and Revolution (1941). NR decided not to publish it: no sense confusing one’s readers with moral complexity, I suppose.

As liberals and neoconservatives joined forces for the Global Democratic Capitalist Revolution, Gottfried discovered that he was able to ally himself with a number of independent-minded leftists. He found in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer a form of social analysis useful for his own purposes, and associated himself with Telos, a pro-Frankfurt School (but anti-Soviet) journal which sponsored publications like the anthology Toward a New Marxism (1970). When he asked editor Paul Piccone how they could agree on so much, Piccone responded: “because you’re a Marxist but don’t know it.”

For Piccone, “Marxism” meant principally opposition to liberal modernity, including “the kind of managerialization and cultural impoverishment globalism brings about through the market.” Under his direction, the journal shifted toward “the unmasking of bureaucratic structures that stood in the way of renewed, self-governing communities.” Unlike Marcuse, Piccone “spared no venom when he called attention to the evils of communism in practice.” By the late ’80s, he was publishing Gottfried’s work  regularly, spearheading the introduction of Carl Schmitt’s ideas into American intellectual circles and pouring ridicule on the “liberal left academic establishment.” Outraged attacks on the journal’s right-wing deviationism began appearing from former supporters. Even Sam Francis became a fan of Telos when Gottfried shared one of Piccone’s pieces with him. Sam went on to participate in a conference on populism sponsored by the journal.

Eugene Genovese is another extraordinary man of the left with whom Gottfried found more in common than with the leaders of “Conservatism, Inc.” A self-described Stalinist with a taste for tailored suits and sumptuous living, Genovese had been featured in the national press as one of America’s most brilliant historians. Our author was not able to liken him to any other leftist he had ever known, and eventually concluded that he was simply

an antibourgeois elitist trying to fit into American academia . . . . His obligatory references to oppressed black slaves and the Marxist dialectic notwithstanding, his works are essentially tributes to precapitalist societies based on hierarchy and a Christian sense of order. More conventional leftists poured wrath on the master class, but Gene admired the “mind of the slaveholder” and devoted long respectful disquisitions to those Southern Presbyterian theologians who had defended the South’s peculiar institution.

Gottfried recounts how Genovese delivered “a glowing defense of Old Southern virtues and pieties” before an audience of squirming neoconservatives; it went over about as well as “a ringing defense of Hamas.” In 1996, Genovese announced his conversion to Catholicism.

Gottfried voted for Richard Nixon in 1968, vainly hoping he would “turn out to be the authoritarian right-winger and stand-in for Joe McCarthy” the left feared. Eighteen years later, Nixon became aware of Gottfried through his book The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. Nixon praised the work in the American Spectator and cited it in his own 1999: Victory Without War (1988). Gottfried thereupon dropped Nixon a short note, which resulted in an invitation.

The president was remarkably knowledgeable about political theory; he spoke to me about Hegel and Hobbes with genuine enthusiasm and a wealth of facts. There was nothing in [his] demeanor that suggested the stiffness of his public persona; the private Nixon was effusive, eloquent and entirely affable.

Gottfried corresponded with the president for about four years, and was twice his guest for dinner. “What struck me on both occasions was how deeply Nixon continued to think about international relations after his retirement from public life.” Gottfried also came to appreciate his host’s rarely-noted sense of humor and stunningly potent gin cocktails.

One of the president’s favorite anecdotes concerned an occasion when he stumbled upon Joe McCarthy putting a headlock on liberal columnist Drew Pearson in the men’s room of a DC hotel. Nixon attempted to mediate the dispute, whereupon Pearson “ran away like a rat that had been cornered but was able to escape.” The very next day, Pearson’s column was dishing dirt on Nixon. “I should have let Joe knock the hell out of him.”

Sam Francis is the youngest figure who features in Gottfried’s memoirs. I note that the dates given for his birth and death are the correct dates for the abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis: no doubt the unfortunate result of a hasty check on Wikipedia. A characteristic vignette shows Sam energetically remonstrating with the aged Russell Kirk. “I am not a conservative but a man of the Right, perhaps of the far Right,” thundered Sam as he explained to the proverbially sweet-tempered father of postwar conservatism the necessity for an antimanagerial mass movement based on the propagation of a Sorelian redemptive myth. Kirk was happy to leave to his wife the task of defending his own views.

Gottfried has himself been strongly influenced by Francis’s ideas, but was never able to swallow his “middle American” populism.

An unfathomable mystery from my perspective is how right wing populists who often stress the doctrine of original sin forget their grim theory when they turn to politics. If one truly believes that human nature is fallen, why do sinners suddenly become angelic when they make electoral decisions? Like Russell, who preached “authority” and “degrees and hierarchy,” I grimaced when the others talked positively about the “people.” When I was recently invited to discuss with libertarians from the Cato Institute whether the people have the government they deserve, I responded that “the government is far better than the masses actually merit.” I doubt that Russell would have come to a different conclusion.

Gottfried also shares with his readers the insufficiently known story of how, following his firing from the Washington Times for impermissible candor, Sam was enabled to stay in the Capital area and continue his writing.

The last years of Sam’s abbreviated life were spent amid his myriad books on the third floor of Robert E. Lee’s childhood home in Alexandria, Virginia. The ample working space and a salary that allowed [him] to continue turning out his syndicated column were the gifts of a marvelous patroness, Sylvia Crutchfield. Sylvia, who had perceived in her otherwise professionally abandoned beneficiary the marks of genius, went about the country raising money on his behalf.

Encounters is not a confessional memoir: it focuses on the author’s relations with others. But Gottfried does allow the reader a few glimpses of his own character along the way. He acknowledges the accuracy of Will Herberg’s observation that he possesses a paradigmatic “jecke” (German-Jewish) personality: “Teutonic pedantry and Jewish moral righteousness seemed equally distributed in my approach to political and cultural issues.” “In the war between the exponents of Nature and History,” he observes, “I generally side with those who stress historical contexts and power relations.”

Gottfried spent his undergraduate years at Yeshiva University, where he felt “a massive cultural barrier” separating him from his clannish and socially graceless East-European Jewish classmates from Brooklyn and Queens. He felt himself becoming religiously more distant from them as well.

I profoundly revered the Old Testament Deity, the God of thunder and judgment, [but] not the proliferating medieval Rabbinic glosses that His Jewish worshippers had produced on His behalf . . . . By the time I was in my third year of college I had come close to accepting, without knowing it, Spinoza’s scheme of human spiritual progress, from the Mosaic code through the visions of universalist prophets like Isaiah, to the teachings of Jesus. It is a cultural predisposition that allows me to appreciate the theological reasonings of Aquinas or Luther more than it does certain other forms of religious exposition–for example, the legal exegesis of third-century Babylonian Jews interpreting the sequence of rituals for carrying out animal sacrifices.

The author relates his decision, in his early fifties, no longer to seek academic advancement.

Besides tending to my domestic obligations, I quietly taught my classes at Elizabethtown College, which as far as I could tell was the only college that would have me. John Lukacs once said to me “If you and I were teaching history at Harvard, it is we who would have to worry about our integrity.” My response was that “happily, we don’t have to worry about that.”

Taki Theodoracopulos

The Paleoconservatives at Takimag.com seem to be taking a courageous turn toward engaging race realism. On May 20, 2009, Takimag published Jared Taylor’s “Whiteout,” on anti-white discrimination, along with Steve Sailer’s “White Pride is Uncool,” about why victims of anti-white discrimination excite little sympathy. They also re-published Paul Gottfried’s respectful essay on white nationalism, “The Limits of Race.” (Also, on May 19, Takimag published “Opening the Conservative Mind,” Gottfried’s positive review of white nationalist Kerry Bolton’s book Thinkers of the Right: Challenging Materialism.)

This is a welcome development, to be encouraged in every way possible. I have long regarded Paleoconservatives (and Paleolibertarians) as good people with good instincts — fellow travelers for 90 percent of the journey.

Where we part ways, though, is the question of what, ultimately, is the most important thing to conserve. For white nationalists, it is our race. For Paleocons, it usually amounts to some sort of abstraction that is universal in its aspirations if not its origins (Christianity, Western Civilization, etc.).

As a white nationalist, I regard whatever is good in Christianity and Western Civilization as products of our race. I am indifferent to their survival if there are no white people around to appreciate and develop them. Indeed, I would gladly sacrifice them if that were necessary to save the race that gave rise to them.

Fortunately, I do not think that such a choice would be necessary. But it is necessary for conservatives to get their priorities straight and defend the most important thing: our race. And to do that, we have to talk about race as race whenever that is possible, not use universalistic abstractions like Christianity or America or Western Civilization as circumlocutions and symbolic proxies.

The ancient Greeks regarded frank and fearless speech as the mark of a true gentleman. Apparently the same is true for the modern ones.

Kevin MacDonald

Paul Gottfried is outside the mainstream of Jewish intellectuals in being associated with paleoconservatives rather than either the left or the neoconservative right. In my eyes, therefore, he is a force for relative good in a world where paleocons like Pat Buchanan have been relegated to the fringes of intellectual debate in the US and have long rap sheets at powerful, well-endowed organizations like the $PLC and the ADL.

Another reason I am predisposed to be positive about Gottfried is that he reviewed Cultural Insurrections respectfully, noting pointedly that there are completely different standards in discussing the activities and influence of other ethnic groups or religions. And he agrees with much of my analysis that Jews have in fact been deeply involved in erecting the culture of critique that now pervades the West.

Inevitably, however, despite a great many good things in Gottfried’s review, my reply must necessarily discuss points of disagreement. . . . More

Kevin MacDonald's CULTURAL INSURRECTIONS

Among those authors considered politically incorrect, and even those considered really politically incorrect, Kevin MacDonald holds a special place of honor or shame. A feature story in the May 9 (Los Angeles) Jewish Journal describes this small-boned, soft-spoken 64-year-old professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach as “the professors anti-Semites love.” Alluding to the fact that university authorities have been trying to force the outspoken MacDonald out of his tenured position, the article complains about “the downside of academic freedom.” We also learn that this clinical psychologist is “considered the foremost anti-Semitic thinker by civil rights experts.” . . . More