Notes on After Liberalism

The philosophical origins of “draining the swamp.”

Introduction:
● Book written in response to Dole’s loss in 1996(RIP).
● “Despite overwhelming public sentiment in favor of balancing
budgets and shrinking government, as Gallup Polls revealed in
Spring 1996, 53 percent of Americans opposed the cutting of social
programs and 54 percent were against a significant reduction in
military spending.”
● As a result the GOP, running on a small government platform, lost to
Clinton who won the elderly/female vote with big margins, taking states like
Florida and Arizona.
● Similar situation in Europe, where right-populist parties move to the center
and run on cultural rather than economic issues(see the transformation of
the Freiheitliche Partei in Austria and Front National in France.).
● “Throughout this century but most noticeably in the last fifty years,
this book argues, democratic practice has entailed less and less
vigorous self government, while becoming progressively dissociated
from any specific cultural or ethnic heritage. Democratic citizenship
has come to mean eligibility for social services and welfare benefits.
It also imposes varying degrees of loyalty to what Jurgen Habermas
calls “constitutional patriotism”: the acceptance of legal procedures
and of democratic socialization, presumably to be carried out by
social experts. Liberalism has also lost any meaningful connection to
what it once signified. By now it is hard to find in contemporary
liberal thinking much of what it stood for at the beginning of the
century, save for talk about expressive and “lifestyle” freedoms
(freedoms that nineteenth-century liberals might have had trouble in
any case recognizing as rights). Our own liberal statements are no
longer centered on the merits of distributed powers, the need to
protect traditional civil society from an encroaching state, or
bourgeois moral standards.”
● The regime is characterized as “managerial judicial” - i.e. rule by the
undemocratic courts, and the administrative state bureaucracy.
● Common critique of liberalism is that it is value-neutral, has no concept of
the political. Gottfried disputes this, claiming modern liberalism has clear
socially revolutionary priorities.
● “Though most Americans in nationwide polls favor restrictions on
abortions beyond the first trimester, the federal government has
charted its own course here, by guaranteeing a right to ninth-month
(partial-birth) abortions. In the last two years, moreover, courts have
stepped in to thwart the results of statewide referenda in California
and Colorado dealing with immigration, governmentally-enforced
minority quotas, and gay rights.”
● In short, egalitarian social engineering and the destruction of 19th century
bourgeois values(this insight taken from Kondylis, I am sure).
● “It is no longer plausible to depict the American national government
as first and foremost an earnest or bumbling balancer of interests”
● The point of the book, in a Seinfeld quip: “What is the deal… with liberal
democracy? It’s not liberal, and it's not democratic…”
● Ends on a downer note. Back to the subject of the defeat of Dole, the rule
of public administrators seems that it could last a long time given the power
of the state, as well as its ability to materially satisfy its subjects with
CONSOOMING goods. At the time of the 1990s this was true, but I find it
less true now, as the economic flaws of modern liberalism have revealed
themselves, and the international liberal project has hollowed out its host
nation.
● He asks questions of the regime: “Does it recognize an inviolable
sphere of social freedom from which public administrators are to be
kept from meddling? Or, do administrators and judges define as
social freedom whatever they wish to privilege at a given time?
Moreover, is being administered and socialized by a custodial class
the defining aspect of democracy? Though this may be the closest
that our own society can come to self-rule, nonetheless one may be
justified in asking whether administrators should be the prime actors
in a democratic society. It may be the case that most people have
little interest in ruling themselves or in practicing liberties that are
unacceptable to a political elite. All this may be true, but it does not
gainsay the need to question the claims being made about a “liberal
democratic” regime that may in fact contain less and less of either
characteristic.”
Chapter 1:

In Search of a Liberal Essence

● Chapter 1 establishes the distinction between classical and modern
liberalism. The vestiges of old liberalism remain for the “self image” of the
current regime, but “the continuity is… contrived.”
● Impossible to define liberalism, as it lacks a fixed meaning, and has been
used polemically to refer to everything opposed to naughty “antiliberalism.”
● This liberal parricide results from the advent of mass democracy, the
bourgeoisie’s being overtaken by the lower classes and the ensuing
“democratization” of government and social institutions. Sam Francis adds
the revolution of mass and scale to this formula.
● Unlike older forms of republicanism, Western liberal democracy is not
fixed/tailored to a cultural or national context(although aspects of western
society were crucial preconditions for the rise of the current regime).
● People lie about liberals in the past(see this with selective quoting of the
constitution as well). Locke is misquoted and used to argue for universal
democratic rights.
● “No man in civil society can be exempted from the laws of it” to mean
what Locke never intended. This statement is made to reflect a
“liberal universalism” that goes from teaching that “each citizen must
play by rules that apply equally to all” to a variety of modern
democratic practices, from state subsidized universal education to
universal suffrage.”
● Public administration is both managerial and therapeutic(this observation is
Gottfried’s grand addition to Paleocon power analysis. More detail in
multiculturalism and the politics of guilt.)
● Public administration is “a form of rule that took over not only economic
planning but also the task of socializing citizens.”
● They claim to be realizing neutral, liberal scientific objectives in
reorganizing society, but their true goal is to combat and overcome
“bourgeois modernity,” which is “the political and moral culture that came
out of the 19th century western world.”
● Their social goals will always overpower their willingness to be scientific
and neutral.
● Trust THE SCIENCE(i.e consensus), not the scientific process.
Chapter 2:

Liberalism vs. Democracy

● This chapter is concerned with the tensions between liberalism and
modern mass democracy, the process of the parricide so to speak.
● Gottfried reveals the aristocratic liberal tradition - Carlsbad has a good
article on this.
● They feared “social violence” and disorder in the wake of democratization.
● European liberals were split over the advent of mass democracy.
● Guizot, Fitzjames Stephen, Lecky
● “The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not
see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river
god.” - Fitzjames Stephen
● Good liberals(like Mill) vs Bad liberals(like Pareto) who could be tempted
by fascism.
● Gottfried views the evolution of liberalism not as a destined process, but
the reaction to several unique historical developments.
● He introduces Schumpeter’s pessimistic economic forecast “that the
middle-class concept of freedom encouraged the expression of critical
opposition. This tolerance undermined the belief system of an older liberal
society and prepared the way for social democracy.”
● Gottfried drops the Kondylis bomb, focusing on two insights of “Der
Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensform. Die liberale Moderne
und die massendemokratische Postmoderne.”
● Modern democracies “disassociate citizenship from cultural and ethnic
identities.”
● The modern democrat’s cultural identity is shaped by a mass consumer
economy.
● Modern mass-democratic culture is “hostile to the older liberal universe.”
● Adherence to tradition is seen as an act of Fascistic domination.
● SIDE NOTE: reminds me of Adorno’s project -> “He rejected any attempt,
under the aegis of the USA, to reconstruct a 19th-century culture because
any such attempt would either be false, or would simply set in motion the
very same dynamic that had produced fascism, reasoning possibly inspired
by Nietzsche's thought experiment of the eternal recurrence.”
● Postmodernism is a cultural strategy to subvert the 19th century liberal
order.
● The enlightenment use of critical rationalism as a weapon against
conservative opponents has been flipped on the classical liberals.
● Follows Kondylis’s habit of portraying ideologies as reacting against what
came before, and what comes next.
● Liberalism is disprivileged in the name of “materialism, atheism and
pluralism” or on behalf of “openness, skepticism and material equality.”
● Mass democratic modern liberalism was only possible in the wake of
“Industrialization, agricultural modernization, an urban working class, the
disappearance of a family-based craft economy, and the operation of
assembly-line production.”
● Imperial Rome, despite its nomadised proletarii population, could not
produce modern political ideologies due to the lack of mass
production/consumption.
● “Earlier societies had to deal with perpetual scarcity and with the
need to share limited resources in a communal setting. The modern
West, by contrast, provides more and more material gratification to
socially isolated individuals. Its politics are therefore predicated on
hedonism and individual self actualization, values that give an ethical
dimension to a consumer economy.”
● Material equality is a new value of modern liberals, unlike classical liberals
who merely proposed “formal or legal” equality.
● This consumerism and mass satisfaction is what prevents successful
appeals to austerity and “republican simplicity” from working in the modern
era. Bringing it back to the introduction of the book, this is why the GOP’s
small government pitch failed. They were using classically liberal rhetoric in
a modern liberal material situation.
● “All of these revolutionary democratic or socialist appeals to public
virtue hark back to republican models that Kondylis views as
incompatible with mass democracy. What distinguishes the latter
from the former, in his opinion, is the prevalence of hedonism
associated with mass production and mass consumption. This ethos
express itself as a ceaseless desire for consumption combined with
resentment against those who have more access to pleasure.”
● Take note, common good conservatives(national conservatives, FedCaths
etc etc)!
● Classical liberalism is a fundamentally bourgeois ideology, stemming from
the power of the western middle class.
● Fascinating when you realize much Trump support comes from the middle
american radical under assault by mass democracy, squeezed by the elites
and the lower classes who benefit from the federal trough and denigrate
bourgeois culture(we know culture to be the animating force of Right-Wing
Populism under trump, see Scott Greer’s articles).
● We can interpret Right-Populism as a “rearguard struggle
[Nachhutgefecht]” against the culture and economics of globalism,
technocracy and liquid modernity.
● All of this is realized when you CONTEXTUALIZE ideologies, which is the
great strength of historicists as well as writers like Kondylis, who once went
after Russell Kirk for presenting conservatism as an ideological
tradition/disposition, rather than something crafted to protect a particular
order.
● “It is claimed that the infinite variety of human perceptions, beliefs,
ideologies, i.e. world-views, are nothing more than an effort to give
personal interests a normative form and an objective character,
deriving from a "decision" on what means should be used, who
should be a friend and who a foe, in the big "Hobbesian" struggle for
what is the most primitive and common goal of all humans –
self-preservation. Therefore, personal and/or group world-views and
ideologies in general are used as a weapon in everyday struggle for
the purpose of power claims and self-preservation. Social and
historical being and becoming consist of transitory existences –
regardless of whether they invoke Reason and ethics or not – seeking
power (in any one or more of its countless forms). That is how
Nature's (and society's) creatures are, and they cannot do otherwise.”
- Comments on Kondylis’s Power and Decision on Wikipedia.
● Back to the text, Gottfried pulls quotes from Weber, Pareto, Guizot and
many more thinkers who fear democracy inevitably leading to socialism -
violent trade union politics that threaten property.
● In response to the communist threat(here Gottfried is drawing on his
favorite Ernst Nolte thesis), Italy’s middle classes alliy with the emergency
solution of Fascism.
● Pareto’s interactions with the Duce’s regime are the case study here. He
did not foresee the destructive alliance with the genocidal Nazis, and
 wanted Lion warriors to take charge from Foxes - “parliamentary schemers
and finessing plutocrats”.
● “Pareto believed that the fascists and their socialist enemies were
harnessing the same democratic enthusiasm that a now declining
liberal society had given up trying to oppose. He felt that the fascists
would have to coexist with social democracy but hoped they would
do so on their own terms.”
● We close with commentaries on JS Mill’s plans for a popular regime.
● He wanted to construct a rationalist elite class that would socialize the
masses into his utilitarian ethic.
● “All enlightened citizens would eventually accept the utilitarian
notion that the Good is that which maximizes general happiness. But,
as Cowling perceives, the “highest end” that men here were imagined
to pursue in quest of pleasure was whatever Mill and his confreres
desired for themselves. They never doubted that their own social
preferences would come to prevail in a democratic age.”
● Critics failed to grasp Mill’s authoritarian side, but also the seductive quality
of his vision.
● Mill predicted the dominance of social planners before all of them, even
Toqueville.
● Only Weber came close:
● “Unlike those liberals who trembled over the fate of property and
parliamentary civility, Weber associated democratic life with the “iron
cage of bureaucracy.” Like Pareto, he was willing to entrust
democratic government to plebiscitary leaders, not because of the
fear of anarchy but because of his dread of bureaucratic despotism.
In an oft-quoted letter from Weber to the sociologist of elites Robert
Michels at the end of the First World War, Weber questions the
intelligence or honesty of those who exalt the “will of the people.” He
goes on to admit that “genuine wills of the people have ceased to
exist for me; they are fictitious. All ideas aiming at abolishing the
dominance of man over man are ‘Utopian.” In 1918 Weber observed
even more incisively: “In large states everywhere, modern democracy
is becoming a bureaucratized democracy. And it must be so; for it is
replacing the aristocratic or other titular officials by a paid civil
service. It is the same everywhere, it is the same within parties too. It
is inevitable.””
Chapter 3:

Public Administration and Liberal Democracy

● Concerning the development of public administration, from a neutral
bureaucracy dealing with poverty and disorder to something that actively
worked to resocialize traditional communities into pluralist democrats
● The introduction of the welfare state was essential to this change
● Quantitative leap in state control made qualitative
● Public admin and liberal democracy are not inescapably linked.
● As Tocqueville said, much of the French administrative state originated
with the monarchs.
● Hegel idealized public administration in the Philosophy of Right(formative
influence on Paul Gottfried for historicist reasons.) as a representative of
the “generality” without the stain of “social or material particularity.”
● Fascists and socialists led the way with the managerial revolution, both
celebrated as modernizers by the elite.
● Post-war, this administrative state grew larger and started to spread.
● Blurred the lines between public and private industry.
● The administrative state started to sell itself as an instrument of equity.
● Liberal democracy is strong as it can appropriate elements from liberalism
and democracy.
● From democracy they have large scale elections with minimal voting
restrictions(less and less by the day) and the value of equality
● From liberalism they have the competition of political parties while
administrators work behind the scenes.
● The liberal notion of freedom appeals to the movement from an antisocial
view of freedom to a social view of the common good.
● Administration conducts itself scientifically, and seeks to mechanically
reengineer humans into good little democratic pluralists, egalitarians and
humanists.
● Some decry the focus on the ideological aspect of liberalism.
● “The corporate argument” from Sam Francis, James Burnham, C Wright
Mills and Gramsci see the system either as capitalist bureaucracy
corrupting the state or liberal ideology as post hoc justification - the ruling
class asserting cultural hegemony. Either way, the starting point of the
system is the system’s form.
● Gottfried reasserts the centrality of the liberal ideology as something not
necessarily resulting from the managerial structure. You can have
managerialism without liberalism(his interest in fascism an example of
exploring an alternative).
● Also much of the liberalism pushed by the state does not reflect the
popular will. You see this with immigration being constantly ramped up
against popular will, or unpopular minority quotas.
● Pluralism as a result weakens the legitimacy of the state by forcing
unpopular opinions on subjects
● Pluralism has led to the growth of state power. Men of the left like Lasch
and Rosanvallon oppose it for this reason, despite their own
egalitarianism, though likely due to their populism and moral conservatism
● It is a top down phenomenon. Unpopular but only in existence still due to
the state and cultural elites forcing it on everyone.
● Classifying some as victims and others as aggressors is the language of
the retributive law, inviting the police power of the state.
● American history is a struggle between freedom and diversity, and diversity
always wins.
● In the end the pluralists expand public administration - seeking “behavior
modification and the creation of a ‘sensitive’ civic culture”
Chapter 4:

Pluralism and Liberal Democracy

● Explores the value of pluralism in a liberal democracy
● Chapter opens with a discussion of debates on the values of the ruling
managerial new class
● Many critiques(Lasch, Fox-Genovese) come from the
communitarian/traditionalist perspective
● Neocons deplore the attack on the family and postmodernism in education
● But the neocon critique falls flat because they fail to see the
political/economic background of such ideas - fiction that wokeness only
holds power due to the control of “verbal and artistic weapons”
● They fail to see that these ideas are only popular due to the backing of
power, and only internationally popular due to the prestige of the US
● Two main new class attitudes: belief in liberal pluralism and the purpose of
the state being social planning and material benefits
● Pluralism will always be globalist for these reasons
● 1. The modern bureaucratic elite is transnational
● 2. Human rights lose their legitimacy if they’re not shared by all the
world(Kondylis said this)
● 3. It is identified with American imperial power, the violent force behind this
global mandate
● This messianic American policy predates the Cold War
● Habermas wants to prevent another Holocaust by destroying a distinct
German identity
● This prescription for German atonement is taken as a governmental model
by the American right
● A universal nation with open borders and changing cultural character
● Progressives sought to run society scientifically. This was a permanent
defining feature, unlike their wavering belief in nationalism and segregation
● Mental health becomes a human right, defined as the private political
opinion of the psychiatrist
● Authoritarian personality as defined by the Frankfurt school to be purged
● Frankfurt school in particular show contempt for the conservatism of the
working classes, a class rife with “authoritarian personalities”
● Adorno diagnosed their racial prejudices as the result of status anxiety
● The Authoritarian Personality itself was part of a series of books written by
Jewish emigres from Nazism sponsored by the American Jewish
Committee(also famously involved in the founding of neoconservative
Commentary Magazine)
● “A leitmotif throughout this series is that liberal democracy is being
endangered by authoritarian prejudice. Two examples of this evil are
racism and anti-Semitism, which most of the authors link to
traditional belief systems and repeatedly to blue-collar Americans.
Somber warnings about misguided workers mark both The
Authoritarian Personality and an address (turned into a book) by S.
M. Lipset, “Working Class Authoritarianism.” Delivered originally
before the social democratic anti-communist Congress for Cultural
Freedom in 1955, Lipset’s remarks about prejudiced union members
seem remarkable for someone then associated with the democratic
Left.26 Lipset’s close friend, the historian Richard Hofstadter, was
also a self-described man of the Left who feared the “paranoid style”
of nonurban Americans and of workers who had not been properly
socialized. In lectures about those he found culturally and politically
alien, Lasch explains, Hofstadter was lavish in his use of therapeutic
terms.”
● “Not all cultures need to be treated with the same respect; some are
presumptive sources of bigotry while others are designated victims
of prejudice. Moreover, the victimized cultures do not have to be real
ones in any anthropological sense. They are only collections of
opinions thought appropriate for victims and useful to multicultural
pluralists. As their critics point out, multicultural pluralists never
choose to represent a diversity that does not express their own
values. Their blacks and their Jews are neither homophobes nor
sexists but living proof of the values that multiculturalists intend to
instill.”
● “Accusations of prejudice, with ominous references to the Holocaust
and Jim Crow laws, have drowned out critical observations about the
economics of increased Third World immigration, particularly from
Mexico.” - how this therapeutic discourse is used to crush dissent
● Certainly in the anglo word, the word “Fascist” is frequently used as a term
of derision to refer to anyone who stands for authority or imposing their will
on others.
● “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.”
● Germans like Habermas idolize American pluralism, a tradition imposed on
Germany by the occupation.
● His constant fear is that Germany could revert to the Rechtsstaat tradition
of a modest government that does not try to resocialize people “Under the
residual impact of the “Lutheran tradition of a state church and its
pessimistic anthropology” and of “a young conservatism whose heritage is
one of compromise with modernity,” Germany’s social liberals “are not
strong enough to rid themselves of the questionable mortgage of German
liberalism.”
● Once again, Mass Democracy conflicts with older bourgeois forms
● “The question that is never addressed in all such defenses of
imposed pluralism is whether it is congruous with self-government.
To whatever extent democracy is about that particular activity, it must
be asked whether pluralism is democratic. Is self-government
compatible with therapeutic crusades against “prejudice,” carried out
by public administrators? All classical democracy was decidedly
antipluralist. As Aristotle notes in the Constitution of Athens, the
great popular advocate Pericles gained public recognition by striking
from the voting lists those who could not trace back their Athenian
descent three generations. Cleansing the Athenian franchise of those
not descended from authorized citizens (astoi) was then considered
to be a democratic act. As classicist Paul Veyne explains, moreover,
openness to new residents has characterized empires, but not
popular government until the present century, and that change,
according to Veyne, may have been due to the fusion of democratic
legitimacy with an imperial structure.95 Modern liberal democracy
behaves like an empire in its absorption of peoples, while appealing
formally to a popular mandate. But that does not mean that, absent a
globalist vision or fluid cultural identity, democracy ceases to exist.
There is no reason to equate democracy, as popular self-government,
with either of these conditions.”
● Calls to mind the words of Schmitt: “Every actual democracy rests on
the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be
treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and
second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of
heterogeneity.”
● French/Canadian/German antiracism/antidiscrimination laws spawn from
this therapeutic impulse
● “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.”
Chapter 5:

Mass Democracy and the Populist Alternative

● The idea of a “populist” alternative to mass democracy sounds like an
oxymoron - Moldbug has commented on something similar(democracy
treated as a good, politicization as a bad) but in the sense that the former
is opposed to the administrative state that developed around the latter, and
champions a reactionary appreciation for the bourgeois values that
produced 19th century liberalism, it makes sense.
● The chapter discusses the initial wave of right wing populist movements
coming out of the 90s. This means Buchanan in the USA, Haider in
Austria, Le Pen the First in France.
● “Consideration is given to recent challenges faced by the managerial
state. Unpopular immigration policies, bureaucratic and judicial
interference in communal practices, and the suppressing of dissent
as “hate crimes” have all aroused opposition to the powers that be.”
● As chapter two makes clear, the administrative therapeutic state was not
what Hegel and Guizot had in mind when sketching out western public
administration
● It was meant to be value-free and respect the “sanctity of property and
family”
● “Furthermore, Guizot, in introducing French public education in 1833,
went out of his way to disavow any Jacobin intent. As one interpreter
explains: for Guizot “instruction was not a means of advancing
human equality. Its purpose was to render cohesive a society which
rests upon the inequality of faculties. It had for an object avoiding the
democratic peril defined as social confusion.”2 By providing every
Frenchman with minimal vocational training and some degree of
shared culture, the liberal July Monarchy hoped to create national
unity and at least a tolerable general living standard. But the pursuit
of this aim was not viewed as inherently democratic. It was an
attempt by the state to ward off the “democratic peril,” seen as an
upsurge of social disorder that would give rise to a revolutionary
dictatorship.”
● Early populism in South America, or the Populist Party in the US,
supported redistributive policies that were anathema to the classical
liberals in power.
● By contrast, modern right-wing populist movements “incorporated large
chunks of the nineteenth-century liberal legacy.”
● They’re not really Fascists, in many ways they are Sargon-style classical
liberals, instinctually
● Even Le Pen defended economic freedom as the starting point for all
freedoms.
● Le Pen and Pat Buchanan challenged establishment parties(the “Gang of
Four” in France) and condemned the politics of western guilt, as well as the
double standards of Jewish/Islamic nationalists advocating multiculturalism
for the west
● “Though tens of millions agree with Buchanan’s stances, at least an
equal number oppose them vehemently.”
● “Like Le Pen, Buchanan looks to a vanishing past for his own
electoral counterrevolutionary army. Whereas Le Pen appeals to a
bourgeois nationalist electorate to effect his counterrevolution,
Buchanan hopes to turn society around with his fellow ethnic
Catholics and with Southern white conservatives. Neither core
constituency, however, can yield the votes necessary to alter national
political life in France or in the United States.”
● “Moreover, the control of social programs by federal administrations
provides for them vast leverage in dealing with populist challenges.
In the battle between President Clinton and a Republican Congress in
1995 over raising premiums for entitlement programs and forcing
public administration to live within its means, Republican majority
opinion in the United States melted away within weeks. Between
October and December 1995, Clinton’s popularity soared, even
among groups who disagreed with him on social questions.”
● “The identitarian politics and appeals to a cultural heritage that
populists favor can only work among those who share a traditional
communal identity. Populists will not likely be able to mount a
majority opposition to the managerial state in any other situation. The
populist movements with the broadest and greatest long-range
strength are regionally based.”
● Haider’s success in Austria is an example of populist success. Also Lega
Nord. They can appeal to a shared culture and historical identity rather
than nebulous ideological/mythological abstractions(which is why both the
Neocons and the Alt-Right fail to motivate people in espousing imaginary,
essentialised democratic values or white values.)
● Gottfried puts forth the Southern League, connected to Lega Nord through
Thomas Fleming, as a regionalist populist organization that could be
successful in America. The failure of the Southern League to gain a mass
following reveals much about the breakdown of culture in America
compared to Italy, as many southerners stay married to the GOP or
supportive of Clinton. Even in recent episodes of Cotto-Gottfried, the idea
of our modern era being the low point of southern identity is a constant
leitmotif.
● Gottfried notes that populism has been most successful in Catholic
countries(at the time). This corresponds with his thesis that what would
come to be called “wokeism” is a post-protestant phenomenon.
● This is because of the “strong family and other institutional ties have
created particularly stubborn resistance to government-directed social
policy and to insulated party politics”
● “Both Christopher Lasch and political sociologist Stanley Rothman
comment on the link between the current American political class and
the breakdown of America’s Protestant bourgeois ethos. Social
constraint, individual responsibility, and deferred gratification once
provided the moral framework for constitutional government. These
qualities were especially critical for a polity that stressed individual
identity and whose religious underpinnings were Protestant and more
individualistic than those of Catholic societies.”
● Lasch believes that cultural renewal and communal freedom are still
possible in the United States because the lower middle class continues to
resist wayward elites. Lasch’s pessimism is short-term, inasmuch as he
looks to working-class decency to renew American society”
● Gottfried challenges their proposed bottom-up solutions - he sees the state
as playing a central role in the degeneration of the protestant ethic.
● “Premodern or early-modern institutions and attitudes” that can resist the
managerial state are more powerful in Southern/Eastern Europe than
America.
● Americans, in general most westerners have been molded into servile
populations who clamor for handouts, and as a result refuse to challenge
the system.
● “A clear weakness of American counterrevolutionary populism,
however, is its inability to find moral or cultural consensus. Contrary
to what populism’s advocates, particularly on the religious Right,
claim, most Americans no longer exhibit either fixed moral habits or
deep communal loyalties. They are footloose, perpetually acquisitive,
and in varying states of transition from nineteenth-century familial
patterns. They do not, by and large, fit the culture which is now
conducive to European Populism.”
● National populism without a rightist intellectual dimension a la Pete Wilson
of California results from the liberal stranglehold on “public administration,
social programs, and the media,” but can be successful.
● “What resonates among Americans is not the identitarian democracy
featured by European populist movements. It is, rather, a
stripped-down populism, which captures concerns about physical
safety and the standard of living. Both California governor Pete
Wilson and Canadian Reform Party leader Preston Manning exemplify
the electoral appeal of this populism. They express the concerns of a
mass democracy with less and less cultural unity but with an
intensifying dislike for administration that seems oblivious to popular
fears. Term limits, crime, indiscriminate immigration, and the effects
of affirmative action are all issues that animate this populism, one
that is giving a new edge to the rhetoric of the two major American
parties.”
● The Trump movement challenges this. Scott Greer has written of its
identitarian dimension, but the Don is not exactly a portrait of 19th century
bourgeois values.
● At the time, these populist movements were crushed. The managerial state
held all the power, and still had the legitimacy derived from a victory in the
cold war.
● “Conceivably the managerial state in its present therapeutic phase
will continue well into the next millennium. Its material and mass
communications assets remain formidable, and while budgetary
problems have arisen in terms of financing entitlement programs, the
dismantling of the welfare state does not seem likely in societies
 where most inhabitants live off as well as support the state. At a time
of unparalleled population movement, multinational economies, and
massive public sectors, administered democracies operate in a
favorable social context.”
● However, the managerial state, which has a liberal, Hobbesian justification,
has the traditional weakness of the social contract state.
● “While it is not being argued that populism as a postliberal
democratic force can only prevail by avoiding divisive moral issues,
this may be increasingly true of North American Anglophone
societies. Without control of public administration, social programs,
and the media, populists must pick their issues with exceeding care.
They will have to focus on what is inoffensive to late modernist
sensibilities but also on what captures electorates that fear violence
and relative deprivation. Those whom populists must attract belong
to a Hobbesian world: driven by the quest for commodity and the fear
of violence, these electorates are capable of, at most, provisional
allegiances. They follow those who dispel their fears and who
convincingly promise to satisfy material needs.”
● “But the convenient state that has resulted from this disposition and
from the ability of some to exploit it has at times acted imprudently. It
has tried to do what it should not, at the cost of its real but modest
mandate. 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.”
Conclusion:
● Gottfried claims he is not contending that the state will collapse in the face
of populist pressure.
● “The arbitrary definitions of liberalism and an intrusive pluralism
notwithstanding, the Western managerial state and its defenders may
well survive their encounters with populist challengers. As long as
public administration is viewed as a material provider, its subjects
may continue to acquiesce in its control of social matters. One
should not mistake intellectual arrogance or a vulnerable ideology for
political weakness.”
● “All that is being contended is that the current dispensation is under
attack because of the gap between its democratic and liberal
self-description and its imposed social policies. The efforts to justify
these policies with archaic terminology or human rights rhetoric no
longer elicit widespread belief.”
● He is skeptical of the potential for cultural reaction.
● “My own bourgeois modernist sympathies, which are easy to guess,
have not led me into self-delusion. I do not perceive any possibility of
moving backward historically, a point repeatedly stated in this study.
Lacking are the social presuppositions and political will for such a
restoration or even for a mere approximation of one. The Whiggish
liberalism of the nineteenth century, which stressed individual moral
responsibility in a politically unreconstructed social space, operated
with the aid of ascribed statuses. The values that liberalism exalted
did not float in a vacuum but were closely related to gender and
social ranks in a still partly aristocratic world. Manners and
constraints were dictated by the demands of gentlemanly and
ladylike behavior, and religion, particularly Protestantism, played a
continuing role in shaping bourgeois character. These by now
commonplace observations must be kept in mind to understand the
difficulty of returning to the moral world of high liberalism from a
postbourgeois managerial society. One simply cannot recreate the
cultural benefits of the past, as one might its architecture or cuisine,
through public projects or ad hoc committees. Values-education in
schools may have positive or negative effects, depending on the
critic’s perspective, but is not likely to yield nineteenth-century ladies
 or gentlemen. Indeed, it is questionable whether value-traditionalists
who speak of a decline in public morals desire to go back in any
meaningful sense to the past. Rather, they seem interested in
controlling predominantly underclass pathologies, such as teenage
pregnancies, and getting adolescent boys to behave less riotously.”
● “Whatever the future holds, Schmitt has been right in… his
interpretive assumptions. One is that liberalism and democracy
belong to different epochs, one to the nineteenth century and the
other to the twentieth.”
● Gottfried also brings in the Friend-Enemy distinction. Managerial modern
liberalism denies these real tensions(in many cases brought on by
multiculturalism) by ascribing “unwelcome dissent to psychic abnormality.”
● “It is worth the effort to look beyond euphemism to see how political
power is exercised. Behind the mission to sensitize and teach
“human rights” lies the largely unacknowledged right to shape and
reshape people’s lives.”
● “Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime must consider first
and foremost the extent of its control—and the relative
powerlessness of its critics.”