WEBVTT NOTE The Therapeutic Welfare State 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.440 Before I begin, perhaps I could add something to Professor Lorenzo's eloquent diatribe against Lincoln. 2 00:00:10.440 --> 00:00:16.080 I discovered after speaking to Lew Rockwell that I have been mentioned in the weekly standard 3 00:00:16.080 --> 00:00:25.400 as one of two recalcitrant historians who has refused to bend his knees before the Lincoln icon, 4 00:00:25.400 --> 00:00:34.400 Despite what seems to be the overwhelming support of the Lincoln cult and what is called sometimes the American right or scholarly right, 5 00:00:34.400 --> 00:00:40.760 I am one of two historians who do not consider Lincoln to have been the greatest American president. 6 00:00:40.760 --> 00:00:47.920 I think I actually inflicted upon Lincoln the further indignity of saying he was a below average president, 7 00:00:47.920 --> 00:00:51.760 rather than depict him as a thoroughgoing miscreant and villain. 8 00:00:51.760 --> 00:01:02.260 I 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. 9 00:01:02.260 --> 00:01:09.760 I think Professor Lorenzo may be correct. He was much worse than being below average. He was an utter disaster. 10 00:01:09.760 --> 00:01:19.260 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, 11 00:01:19.260 --> 00:01:31.260 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. 12 00:01:31.260 --> 00:01:41.260 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. 13 00:01:41.260 --> 00:01:56.260 And 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. 14 00:01:56.260 --> 00:02:04.260 Among contemporary welfare states, the United States stands out as the least socialist. 15 00:02:04.260 --> 00:02:13.260 Unlike European countries, well over half of our workforce draws at least half of their salaries from a relatively private sector. 16 00:02:13.260 --> 00:02:25.260 Major American industries are not nationalized and the tax burden facing most American workers has remained less than 50% of their gross earnings. 17 00:02:25.260 --> 00:02:32.260 About 70% of GMP does not go as taxes into the public sector. 18 00:02:32.260 --> 00:02:40.260 While the percentage of GMP earmarked for the federal government has even declined slightly in the last 20 years. 19 00:02:40.260 --> 00:02:46.260 Reading Robert Higgs' study of the expanding U.S. federal state, Crisis and Leviathan, 20 00:02:46.260 --> 00:02:55.260 and working with, then looking at some of the National Bureau of Statistics data which Higgs draws for his study, 21 00:02:55.260 --> 00:03:00.840 I was struck by how modestly our state has taken from its citizens relative to other, 22 00:03:00.840 --> 00:03:04.780 euphemistically called, industrial democracies. 23 00:03:04.780 --> 00:03:10.580 Public administration at all levels, including the armed forces, takes as a percentage of 24 00:03:10.580 --> 00:03:16.300 GMP less than half of what Scandinavians, Germans or if they actually pay their taxes 25 00:03:16.300 --> 00:03:20.220 Italians fork out to their political class. 26 00:03:20.220 --> 00:03:26.420 If these standards of comparison were all we had to measure our index of freedom, it would 27 00:03:26.420 --> 00:03:29.860 seem that we Americans were doing well indeed. 28 00:03:29.860 --> 00:03:34.560 Though habituated to bloated entitlements and capricious governance, we have proved 29 00:03:34.560 --> 00:03:38.780 Goethe right when he observed America du Hastes Bessel. 30 00:03:38.780 --> 00:03:45.540 Our administration is leaner than its European counterparts, and our people more in control 31 00:03:45.540 --> 00:03:47.280 of their earnings. 32 00:03:47.280 --> 00:03:52.520 But this is not the whole of the story, nor am I offering an impersonation of Ben Wattenberg, 33 00:03:52.520 --> 00:03:58.800 Michael Novak or other purveyors of empty happy talk. Though the U.S. as a redistributionist 34 00:03:58.800 --> 00:04:04.880 state has lagged behind other governments, in one respect it has created the authoritative 35 00:04:04.880 --> 00:04:11.000 model for the rest of the world. Our welfare state since mid-century has become increasingly 36 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:14.760 are slowly preoccupied with behavior modification. 37 00:04:14.760 --> 00:04:20.520 Our administered democracy and its media priesthood are interested less in expropriating productive 38 00:04:20.520 --> 00:04:25.460 means than they are in re-socializing subject population. 39 00:04:25.460 --> 00:04:31.160 And they pursue this reconstructionist project by invoking a crisis that, as the state and 40 00:04:31.160 --> 00:04:38.080 media define it, gets steadily worse, a surging outburst of prejudice, insensitivity, which 41 00:04:38.080 --> 00:04:41.760 which must be perpetually contained and punished. 42 00:04:41.760 --> 00:04:47.240 One can trace the intellectual foundations of what became the American therapeutic state 43 00:04:47.240 --> 00:04:53.200 through a series of works. For example, Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, first published 44 00:04:53.200 --> 00:05:00.440 in 1944, and the Studies in Prejudice series initiated with the authoritarian personality 45 00:05:00.440 --> 00:05:07.920 in 1950. Such works and derivative ones treat prejudice in the United States in the first 46 00:05:07.920 --> 00:05:22.920 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. 47 00:05:22.920 --> 00:05:32.920 In these special pleas, presented or tricked out as clinical analysis, public administrators are charged with making society less prejudiced. 48 00:05:32.920 --> 00:05:38.920 We can accomplish this mandate, or so we are told, by allowing the state to re-educate everyone. 49 00:05:38.920 --> 00:05:43.920 Moreover, the understanding of democracy and liberalism, contained herein, 50 00:05:43.920 --> 00:05:49.920 is the one that has prevailed in our time, accepting the will of enlightened administrators 51 00:05:49.920 --> 00:05:53.920 and expressing their standard of sensitivity. 52 00:05:53.920 --> 00:05:57.920 That such notions have become non-controversial for Americans, 53 00:05:57.920 --> 00:06:05.920 and that opposition to them is today limited to gatherings of what are perceived as the political fever swamps 54 00:06:05.920 --> 00:06:10.920 can be attributed to various causes, though not to the ones most commonly given. 55 00:06:10.920 --> 00:06:16.920 Americans do not have a particularly egregious record of dealing with alien minorities, 56 00:06:16.920 --> 00:06:22.920 nor did our treatment of blacks necessarily lead to the victimological and behavioral excesses 57 00:06:52.920 --> 00:06:58.920 were exposed by Jesse Jackson, the Justice Department in ABC News. 58 00:06:58.920 --> 00:07:03.920 It is not, after all, quite clear whom or what they said that suggested prejudice, 59 00:07:03.920 --> 00:07:07.920 whether they were anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-whatever else. 60 00:07:07.920 --> 00:07:11.920 It was never actually made clear, and from what we know, 61 00:07:11.920 --> 00:07:16.920 none of these things were actually said on these tapes. 62 00:07:16.920 --> 00:07:26.920 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. 63 00:07:26.920 --> 00:07:37.920 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. 64 00:07:37.920 --> 00:07:53.920 Women, for example, have benefited far more than blacks or Hispanics as recipients of affirmative action and in winning money in so-called discrimination suits. 65 00:07:53.920 --> 00:08:04.920 The therapeutic state about which I intend to write represents a fusion of two tendencies, both strong in our society. 66 00:08:04.920 --> 00:08:12.920 a therapeutic culture based on ascribing victimhood to perceived or real underachievers 67 00:08:12.920 --> 00:08:20.920 who are then to be compensated by having administrators raise their self-esteem or lower everybody else's 68 00:08:20.920 --> 00:08:26.920 and the irresistible growth, the hitherto irresistible growth of the American welfare state 69 00:08:26.920 --> 00:08:29.920 but not in a purely socialist direction. 70 00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:46.920 The 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. 71 00:08:46.920 --> 00:09:03.920 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. 72 00:09:03.920 --> 00:09:12.920 One reason for this difference is the more deeply ingrained classical liberal tradition on this side of the Atlantic. 73 00:09:12.920 --> 00:09:22.920 Unlike Europeans, Americans have both a liberal and a Protestant sectarian culture, which stressed individual merit and individual achievement. 74 00:09:22.920 --> 00:09:29.920 Our original regime was conceived in a tax revolt, and until the passage of an amendment in 1913, 75 00:09:29.920 --> 00:09:37.920 the federal government was specifically prohibited by the Constitution from levying a capitation or income tax. 76 00:09:37.920 --> 00:09:43.560 Though this liberal founding, this classical liberal founding, came to have less and less 77 00:09:43.560 --> 00:09:50.320 to do with America as an administered mass democracy, it did have certain residual effects. 78 00:09:50.320 --> 00:09:56.160 The United States did not move as doggedly toward a collectivist economy or socialist 79 00:09:56.160 --> 00:10:04.160 state as other industrialized or industrializing countries, e.g. Sweden with its deeply authoritarian 80 00:10:04.160 --> 00:10:10.440 in the past or France with its état dirigiste, its very strong central state coming out of 81 00:10:10.440 --> 00:10:15.600 the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution both. Rather, the U.S. chose its own path 82 00:10:15.600 --> 00:10:20.560 towards serfdom, which is suggested in my book after liberalism is today becoming the 83 00:10:20.560 --> 00:10:27.120 dominant model of political collectivism and which involves more thought control than economic 84 00:10:27.120 --> 00:10:32.120 management. It actually involves both, but I would argue that the thought control is 85 00:10:32.120 --> 00:10:38.420 is greater than elsewhere, and the economic management may in fact be less than one finds 86 00:10:38.420 --> 00:10:44.740 in other industrial societies. In this American therapeutic model of the welfare state, entitlement 87 00:10:44.740 --> 00:10:50.680 programs and income redistribution are not ends in themselves, but preconditions for 88 00:10:50.680 --> 00:10:57.140 re-socializing the public. Though this re-socialization goal was always an aspect of social democratic 89 00:10:57.140 --> 00:11:06.940 Planning. In practice, and over the long haul, it signified less in Europe than in the United 90 00:11:06.940 --> 00:11:14.700 States. Until recently, European socialism was fixed on social class inequality and in 91 00:11:14.700 --> 00:11:23.820 remedying this problem by nationalizing production and by making citizens materially more equal. 92 00:11:23.820 --> 00:11:30.380 Probably perhaps since the 1960s has European socialism become interested in the kinds of 93 00:11:30.380 --> 00:11:35.420 behavior modification which are really basic to the American welfare state and I would 94 00:11:35.420 --> 00:11:44.420 argue in many ways as part of an imitation of an American hegemonic model. 95 00:11:44.420 --> 00:11:51.620 Having read the tracks of English Fabians, of German socialists and others, I do not 96 00:11:51.620 --> 00:11:57.340 cannot find any of these therapeutic themes present as opposed to discussions of economic 97 00:11:57.340 --> 00:12:04.820 efficiency or inefficiency and discussions or laments about the rickety bones and tooth 98 00:12:04.820 --> 00:12:12.140 decay of the European working class, raising health standards, introducing eugenics, very 99 00:12:12.140 --> 00:12:20.300 important for European socialists, planning marriage, reproduction to produce a more genetically 100 00:12:20.300 --> 00:12:27.300 for a Really Fit Population, Making Democracy Scientific and Rational to Public Administration, 101 00:12:27.300 --> 00:12:32.800 Removing Class Barriers, Helping Women to Enter the Workforce, were all recurrent plans 102 00:12:32.800 --> 00:12:37.820 of European Social Democrats. They can be found in the statements of socialist parties 103 00:12:37.820 --> 00:12:44.180 in publications and were advanced by such socialists as L.T. Habhaus, August Bebel, 104 00:12:44.180 --> 00:12:50.380 Pietro Neni, Arthur Beveridge, Jules Gued, and in Sweden, Gunnar and Alvin Myrdal, 105 00:12:50.380 --> 00:12:57.820 noticeably absent from such sources are demands for special esteem for underachievers, 106 00:12:57.820 --> 00:13:03.580 compensatory respect for lifestyles long despised by Judeo-Christian morality, 107 00:13:03.580 --> 00:13:06.980 or government plans for making the subjects of therapeutic states 108 00:13:06.980 --> 00:13:12.020 sufficiently sensitive to groups and individuals designated as victims. 109 00:13:12.020 --> 00:13:18.100 Nor were European Social Democrats or labor movements particularly eager to throw open 110 00:13:18.100 --> 00:13:24.200 national borders to alien, uneducated minorities. However, loudly, leftists proclaimed their 111 00:13:24.200 --> 00:13:31.060 devotion to internationalism. Anti-immigrationism has a long and predictable history among the 112 00:13:31.060 --> 00:13:38.540 working class and its representatives. From the Third Republic in France to the 1924 Immigration 113 00:13:38.540 --> 00:13:44.240 Act in the U.S., which received the enthusiastic support of Samuel Gompers in the American 114 00:13:44.240 --> 00:13:46.460 Federation of Labor. 115 00:13:46.460 --> 00:13:51.940 Note that I am not suggesting that social democrats and earlier welfare state types 116 00:13:51.940 --> 00:13:55.320 had nothing to do with therapeutic politics. 117 00:13:55.320 --> 00:14:00.380 To the contrary, their assaults on the liberal bourgeois order, their reckless empowerment 118 00:14:00.380 --> 00:14:05.580 of public administrators, and their praise of social engineering all contributed to building 119 00:14:05.580 --> 00:14:10.380 Building a state that snatches our minds as well as our income. 120 00:14:10.380 --> 00:14:18.380 And even a cursory study of progressive intellectuals in the U.S. at the turn of the century indicates 121 00:14:18.380 --> 00:14:23.220 that social and family planning were much on the minds of early 20th century American 122 00:14:23.220 --> 00:14:30.380 social democrats, also a public education as an indispensable tool to achieve their end. 123 00:14:30.380 --> 00:14:35.660 And what distinguished these people from the therapeutic epigones and from the people who 124 00:14:35.660 --> 00:14:43.020 have taken over the United States today, our government, is at least a vestigial dedication 125 00:14:43.020 --> 00:14:49.660 to a private sector in which citizens would live in self-chosen groups and think and express 126 00:14:49.660 --> 00:14:52.360 their thoughts, their private thoughts. 127 00:14:52.360 --> 00:14:58.740 For Dewey, John Dewey, for example, the pluralistic society he envisaged would continue to make 128 00:14:58.740 --> 00:15:04.540 make distinctions between the state and private human association. 129 00:15:04.540 --> 00:15:10.560 Though in Dewey's case, as a sympathetic biographer Robert Westbrook observes, there was insufficient 130 00:15:10.560 --> 00:15:15.360 understanding of the intrusiveness of modern public administration. 131 00:15:15.360 --> 00:15:22.160 Like 19th century liberals, the social democrat Dewey did view society as the vital part and 132 00:15:22.160 --> 00:15:25.060 primary source of human education. 133 00:15:25.060 --> 00:15:26.820 He thought this was a good thing. 134 00:15:26.820 --> 00:15:34.700 You actually believe there should be limits as to how far the state should be able to go in reconstructing social relations. 135 00:15:34.700 --> 00:15:42.620 With a therapeutic state, however, any demarcation between the public and private spheres were eventually erased. 136 00:15:42.620 --> 00:15:48.260 Far more, I would argue, than the situation in many post-war communist states, 137 00:15:48.260 --> 00:15:56.100 which at least did not try to reconstruct gender identities or to turn sexual impulses toward homoeroticism. 138 00:15:56.100 --> 00:16:01.780 Now federal guidelines for value instruction in public schools from the U.S. Department 139 00:16:01.780 --> 00:16:09.440 of Education clumsily and deliberately do both. The Department of Education, since 1991, 140 00:16:09.440 --> 00:16:16.060 has required that a suitable non-hostile environment be created for blacks and women at all institutions 141 00:16:16.060 --> 00:16:22.500 receiving direct or indirect government subsidies. And in 1994, a black federal bureaucrat in 142 00:16:22.500 --> 00:16:27.220 The U.S. Department of Education threatened Wesleyan University, University of Connecticut 143 00:16:27.220 --> 00:16:32.500 and several other universities with government action, unless they adopted her plan for a 144 00:16:32.500 --> 00:16:37.020 multicultural curriculum, a decision that had been made by other institutions of higher 145 00:16:37.020 --> 00:16:41.340 learning, leaned on by the same multicultural bureaucrat. 146 00:16:41.340 --> 00:16:46.340 The University of Texas Professor of Law, Lino Graglia, who has been much in the news lately, 147 00:16:46.340 --> 00:16:53.260 has written extensively on affirmative action as a cudgel for beating educators and employers 148 00:16:53.260 --> 00:16:59.840 into acceptance of government-imposed, victimological studies and multicultural curricula. According 149 00:16:59.840 --> 00:17:04.840 to Gralje, who has studied the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and other agencies 150 00:17:04.840 --> 00:17:10.300 intended to advance designated minorities and nondiscrimination, affirmative action 151 00:17:10.300 --> 00:17:16.540 is no longer primarily about jobs and admission slots, but about constructing environments 152 00:17:16.540 --> 00:17:22.260 in the workplace, in the academy and everywhere else, which minority spokespersons and public 153 00:17:22.260 --> 00:17:28.900 administrators prescribe. Failure to do so allegedly shows insensitivity, which requires 154 00:17:28.900 --> 00:17:32.820 government intervention against the offending parties. 155 00:17:32.820 --> 00:17:39.820 In a provocative book published back in 1985, the political philosopher Nicholas Capaldi 156 00:17:40.460 --> 00:17:46.460 compares the managerial state in its therapeutic mode to interwar Italian fascism. 157 00:17:46.460 --> 00:17:51.620 I should say just inter-Italian, it's redundant, all Italian fascism until the Second World 158 00:17:51.620 --> 00:17:56.860 War's interwar. Capaldi argues that like the fascists, the Italian fascists, modern managerial 159 00:17:56.860 --> 00:18:03.260 Legal Democrats exercise political power without genuine regard for legality. Legal 160 00:18:03.260 --> 00:18:08.980 rationales are confected to justify the fiats of public administration, which are accorded 161 00:18:08.980 --> 00:18:14.980 a moral dignity by virtue of their enactment. The state, as an instrument of the collective 162 00:18:14.980 --> 00:18:19.900 will, determines what is good or bad, and they even invert what had been declared good 163 00:18:19.900 --> 00:18:26.560 the day before. For example, solemnly prohibiting racial or gender discriminations on Tuesday 164 00:18:26.560 --> 00:18:32.840 and then on Wednesday turning around and imposing such discrimination in the name of non-discrimination. 165 00:18:32.840 --> 00:18:38.400 When this happens, those constitutional phrases or congressional acts which had been invoked 166 00:18:38.400 --> 00:18:42.920 in the first instance are declared to mean exactly the opposite and continue to mean 167 00:18:42.920 --> 00:18:46.420 that until the state decides they mean something else. 168 00:18:46.420 --> 00:18:51.680 Vocapaldy is on to something, in my opinion, and liking our sensitizing liberals to fascist 169 00:18:51.680 --> 00:18:55.920 theorists, several distinctions should be noted. 170 00:18:55.920 --> 00:19:02.400 For one thing, Italian fascists, whose political theories Capaldi brings up, were morally conventional 171 00:19:02.400 --> 00:19:03.400 authoritarians. 172 00:19:03.400 --> 00:19:09.280 They had no desire to reconstruct gender roles or to de- or recode the family. 173 00:19:09.280 --> 00:19:14.840 They coexisted for many years with a powerful Catholic Church, which the fascist state concluded 174 00:19:14.840 --> 00:19:18.120 the latter and packed with in 1929. 175 00:19:18.120 --> 00:19:23.140 Unlike the contemporary therapeutic state, moreover, Italian fascists talked honestly 176 00:19:23.140 --> 00:19:24.140 about power. 177 00:19:24.140 --> 00:19:32.140 They did not pretend to be making individuals feel comfortable after being physically, mentally or culturally challenged. 178 00:19:32.140 --> 00:19:45.140 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, 179 00:19:45.140 --> 00:19:52.140 I learned that the auditor had brought me thither to assist me with my finances, quote, so we could get it all behind. 180 00:19:52.140 --> 00:20:10.140 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. 181 00:20:10.140 --> 00:20:16.140 Never would any decent fascist have spewed such hypocritical gibberish. 182 00:20:16.140 --> 00:20:29.140 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. 183 00:20:29.140 --> 00:20:41.140 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. 184 00:20:41.140 --> 00:20:53.140 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. 185 00:20:53.140 --> 00:21:01.140 The last thing the therapeutic state wants to talk about is power, which it links to fascism and white male hegemony. 186 00:21:01.140 --> 00:21:09.140 Thus it beats us up and shakes us down as a form of healing, or to create the resources to expand its curative activities. 187 00:21:09.140 --> 00:21:17.020 There is no reason from this perspective to retain the anachronistic distinction between public and private institutions. 188 00:21:17.020 --> 00:21:24.780 The therapeutic state does not exercise power, so it sees it, or encroach on anything that should be kept out of its reach. 189 00:21:24.780 --> 00:21:32.620 It goes forth to heal. It goes forth to sensitize. It goes forth to make all of us feel comfortable with each other. 190 00:21:32.620 --> 00:21:40.220 The only one who would oppose these activities is somebody who intends to oppress or harass with impunity. 191 00:21:40.220 --> 00:21:46.660 In an updated rephrasing of St. Paul's admonition to heed authority as a divine instrument for the common good, 192 00:21:46.660 --> 00:21:52.500 one is now urged to cooperate with therapeutic managers in their role as providential healers, 193 00:21:52.500 --> 00:21:59.420 who, after all, should oppose them by claiming to have his life unduly interfered with, 194 00:21:59.420 --> 00:22:03.100 save for those who stand under the judgment of prejudice. 195 00:22:03.100 --> 00:22:07.420 And as a further caricature of the primitive church, the therapeutic search state, 196 00:22:07.420 --> 00:22:12.540 searches out our hearts to determine whether we have fallen short of its standards 197 00:22:12.540 --> 00:22:16.540 of non-discriminatory perfection. 198 00:22:16.540 --> 00:22:21.740 I believe that it is probably a mistake, you know, to argue that all of this starts sometime 199 00:22:21.740 --> 00:22:28.060 in the late 60s or early 1970s, that these were not problems that we had to face before. 200 00:22:28.060 --> 00:22:37.060 And I entirely agree that the civil rights movement acted as a time bomb. 201 00:22:37.060 --> 00:22:44.900 And I also believe that Jeffrey Tucker was right in several penetrating essays that he wrote in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 202 00:22:44.900 --> 00:22:48.140 One, actually, I discovered the two of us collaborated on. 203 00:22:48.140 --> 00:22:54.980 And Jeffrey is correct to say that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was already fraught with the damage 204 00:22:54.980 --> 00:22:59.700 that would later be afflicted by anti-discrimination agencies. 205 00:22:59.700 --> 00:23:03.460 The power given then to a free-wheeling congressional commission 206 00:23:03.460 --> 00:23:07.940 and its bureaucratic ramifications to policemen's thoughts and intentions 207 00:23:07.940 --> 00:23:12.900 developed ineluctably into the therapeutic state under which we now live. 208 00:23:12.900 --> 00:23:17.780 It was less important, Tucker observes, that the Civil Rights Act 209 00:23:17.780 --> 00:23:20.580 banned racial and gender discrimination 210 00:23:20.580 --> 00:23:24.980 and the fact that it claimed to have this power for a congressional agency 211 00:23:24.980 --> 00:23:28.980 that is really unconstitutional or extra-constitutional 212 00:23:28.980 --> 00:23:33.140 and even more importantly that it placed itself in a position 213 00:23:33.140 --> 00:23:38.740 where it was allowed to judge our actions by making judgments about our intentions. 214 00:23:38.740 --> 00:23:42.420 By the late 60s and not by historical accident, 215 00:23:42.420 --> 00:23:47.460 the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission created by the Civil Rights Act 216 00:23:47.460 --> 00:23:50.100 imposed quotas outright. 217 00:23:50.100 --> 00:23:53.900 By then, moreover, the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies 218 00:23:53.900 --> 00:24:00.220 were pushing the private sector into adopting their notions of gender and racial relations. 219 00:24:00.220 --> 00:24:04.340 For example, as when the IRS withdrew the tax-exempt status 220 00:24:04.340 --> 00:24:09.580 of educational institutions that did not actively encourage interracial dating. 221 00:24:09.580 --> 00:24:15.260 If you remember, this was the famous Bob Jones case that broke out in the early 1980s. 222 00:24:15.260 --> 00:24:19.100 Bob Jones did not deny blacks the right to attend their universities. 223 00:24:19.100 --> 00:24:24.020 They did not even categorically disallow interracial dating. 224 00:24:24.020 --> 00:24:26.660 They simply insisted on parental permission. 225 00:24:26.660 --> 00:24:30.700 This, however, was used as an excuse to remove their tax-exempt status. 226 00:24:30.700 --> 00:24:37.180 When Reagan tried, too timidly in my opinion, to restore that tax-exempt status, 227 00:24:37.180 --> 00:24:44.820 he was then brow-beaten by the media and he immediately told the Justice Department 228 00:24:44.820 --> 00:24:50.020 or whatever was the appropriate department to once again remove the tax-exempt status, 229 00:24:50.020 --> 00:24:56.900 maybe it was the IRS which was told to remove the tax-exempt status from Bob Jones. 230 00:24:56.900 --> 00:25:04.660 This I think was really part of the political climate by the 1980s, but the IRS had begun 231 00:25:04.660 --> 00:25:11.700 to engage in social policy as early as the 1960s in terms of racial relations. 232 00:25:11.700 --> 00:25:17.140 As Chilton Williamson points out in the immigration mystique, moreover, by the mid-60s, all kinds 233 00:25:17.140 --> 00:25:23.740 of globalist imperatives had come together in a restatement of the American civil religion. 234 00:25:23.740 --> 00:25:27.700 Immigration expansion, the removal of any trace of effective state as opposed to federal 235 00:25:27.700 --> 00:25:34.300 control over the franchise, federally enforced equality, and a human rights mission abroad 236 00:25:34.300 --> 00:25:39.140 were all part of a Cold War liberal creed that became the only respectable American 237 00:25:39.140 --> 00:25:44.980 and Patriotism. Anti-communism by then had been safely ensconced in this Americanism 238 00:25:44.980 --> 00:25:51.380 of porous borders, crusades against prejudice and human rights litmus test. And as an instance 239 00:25:51.380 --> 00:25:57.660 of historical irony, the anti-communism identified with Hubert Humphrey, Arthur Schlesinger, 240 00:25:57.660 --> 00:26:04.440 Christian Century and the early ADA migrated by the 80s to the European left, including 241 00:26:04.440 --> 00:26:06.800 including the communist parties of Europe. 242 00:26:06.800 --> 00:26:13.160 In Italy and France, the communists have abandoned Marxist Leninism for garden-variety social 243 00:26:13.160 --> 00:26:21.160 democracy, but above all, for support of hate speech laws directed against real and fictitious 244 00:26:21.160 --> 00:26:27.400 bigots, but anyone, for example, accused of opposing further third world immigration is 245 00:26:27.400 --> 00:26:32.760 now subject to criminal prosecution in France, Italy and Germany. 246 00:26:32.760 --> 00:26:37.400 Like the American political spectrum and American public administration, Euro-Marxism has come 247 00:26:37.400 --> 00:26:43.560 to exemplify the therapeutic state religion. As long as entitlements hold out and the media 248 00:26:43.560 --> 00:26:50.560 monolith continues to hold sway, this new phase of the welfare state will likely continue. 249 00:26:51.120 --> 00:26:57.600 It will be presented as a global democratic alternative to socialism and communism, while 250 00:26:57.600 --> 00:27:04.600 while bogus conservatives and bogus liberals come together to celebrate this age of consensus 251 00:27:04.960 --> 00:27:11.960 and finally tune sensitivities as the end of history. Thank you.