Daniel J. Flynn

     Over the course of this century, individuals’ ordering of their own lives has dissipated. From people making their own choices concerning themselves a century ago, to that ability being eroded successively by government at all levels—local, state, federal, and now, international—people are losing control. 

    In constant 1999 dollars, the per-capita combined federal, state, and local tax burden has risen from less than $400 dollars at the dawn of the century to well over $10,000 at its dusk. Government now forces people to enter into its retirement program and at times mandates that certain segments of society be a part of its health care system. The cost of the federal government now exceeds $1 trillion, with American citizens having to work on-average until May 11 this year just to pay their local, state, and federal taxes. 

    Through ad campaigns, laws, and the education system, the federal government frowns on some behavior that poses no harm to others, i.e., smoking and gun ownership, and promotes other behavior that certainly causes great harm to a great number of people, i.e., promiscuous sex and sodomy. 

    Even on matters pertaining to sovereignty, the trend is away from national control and toward control by elites. Judges inform localities that they must provide welfare benefits, schooling, and other services to illegal aliens. American troops are forced to fight under foreign command. The UN votes itself money from the coffers of the U.S. treasury and when the Congress allots it a lesser amount the international body claims remarkably that the U.S. owes it a debt! Well-known Clinton administration figures are even vocal about their goals against their own country. Just before joining the administration, Strobe Talbott wrote in Time of his hope that “within the next hundred years...nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.”

    Paul Gottfried’s After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State examines these trends and finds that the elites have already achieved their two basic aims: redistributing income and sensitizing the public’s social attitudes. 

    A political science professor at Elizabethtown College, the author begins by declaring ours a post-liberal age. Liberalism has meant many things to many different people over the last hundred years. To Frederich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, “liberalism” meant an economy free from the burdens of excessive government. To Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, “liberalism” sought to free people through excessive government. Gottfried notes that “liberalism lacks a univocal meaning and” to embark on any discussion about our present state of affairs “it should be replaced by a timelier term of reference.” 

    Gottfried professes that we now live in a “managerial state” that seeks to implement many socialistic goals. After Liberalism notes that “it may even be made to appear that socialism is vanishing because direct government ownership of the means of production has lost its mantra-like appeal among self-declared socialists…. But what has taken its place in liberal democracies is a more enduring form of collectivism, the perceived growth of public administration as an instrument of equity.” 

    This drive for equity comes in two forms. The first is economic equity. The political science professor blames this on the expansion of suffrage. “Within decades of the time that a universal male franchise was introduced in England, France, Germany, and other industrial nations,” he contends, “voters behaved as some nineteenth-century liberals said they would. They supported socialist parties organized with a democratic franchise and drove older, established parties in the direction of redistributionist policies.” 

    Although Gottfried is right to contend that Western democracies voted themselves government retirement and health-care programs, he is on shakier grounds when he infers that many of the problems of runaway government can be attributed to the expansion of democracy. In America, recent conservative gains have been primarily achieved through the ballot box. Late seventies tax-revolt referendums in California and Massachusetts culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan and the reduction of taxes. California propositions 187 and 209 eroding welfare for illegal immigration and affirmative action, respectively, came through the popular vote as well. The greatest gains for liberalism have come by way of anti-democratic means. Forcing the states to legalize abortion or mandating that the federal government become involved with the schools came via the courts. Environmental and other regulations are imposed by bureaucratic fiat. The whole notion of a centralized state that takes power from the hands of the many and place it in the hands of a detached few is anti-democratic. While men of the right may have bashed democracy with great frequency in the past, the ballot box has been the greatest ally of conservatism in recent years. 

    The second component of the managerial state’s enforced equity is cultural equity. “For almost half a century the defense of liberal democratic pluralism has been tied to therapeutic politics. Having reduced inherited moral truths to individual value-choices, the pluralists are now in a position to proclaim their value preferences in terms of experimental science or as inescapable paths toward modernization…condemning stubborn dissenters as pathological.” 

    One might view the current verbal assault on presidential candidate Pat Buchanan’s latest book as an example of this. Buchanan’s suggestion that it might have been wise for Hitler and Stalin to fight it out and deplete each other’s armies rather than risk the West by attacking either has been met not with rational debate but with familiar cries of “fascist,” “Nazi,” and “anti-semite.” Alan Dershowitz—attorney for Claus von Bulow and O.J. Simpson—even goes so far to suggest that America should condemn Buchanan for supposedly defending murderers! The message from the guardians of the managerial state is clear: put forward a contrarian interpretation of the handed-down version of history and your character will be attacked and your mental health will be questioned.

    While in America this type of socialization primarily takes place within the stifling climate of public debate or within the schools, Gottfried notes that this conformity of opinion is codified in many other countries. The implicit warning is that such intolerance of “intolerance” will be made law here next. In France, a newspaper columnist who called for restrictions on immigration was fined for violating “anti-racist” laws. In Canada, “homophobic” speech is banned from the airwaves and the newsstand. In France, Germany, and elsewhere, questioning various aspects of the Holocaust can land you in jail, leading Gottfried to opine that “activists who wish to preserve the memory of the Holocaust have drawn a worthwhile lesson from Nazi tyranny.” 

    After Liberalism is an insightful look at how freedom has been seized by bureaucratic elites seeking control over the day-to-day affairs of individuals. While some of Gottfried’s conclusions may be worth challenging—namely that democracy itself is to blame for many of these problems—the book is destined to be read in conservative circles for years to come. 

    Gottfried concludes, “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”