Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy (review)

Paul Edward Gottfried has produced a neoconservative book on the relationship between multiculturalism and the welfare state. Gottfried's main argument is that the welfare state has become a therapeutic, consciousness-raising system overly concerned with sensitizing the public's social attitudes. For Gottfried, welfare-state democracy is reinforced through the politics of late twentieth-century liberal Christianity, which promotes metaphysical guilt. The result is a "managerial government" held hostage to minorities, the so-called "designated victims" of the current social regime. While the book has its points of lucidity, his argument comes with a visible anxiety about the possibility that the "racial others" of multiculturalism will devour the "present regime." In so doing, this book takes its place alongside Lothrop Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color and, more recently, David Brimelow's Alien Nation, encouraging racial panics about the demographic character of the United States.

To be fair, it is not changing demographics that fuel this book, but a meditation about the changing nature of the welfare state. Gottfried begins by introducing the idea of the "therapeutic state." He understands therapeutic state as a welfare state that monitors gender, racial, and sexual discrimination. For Gottfried, this attempt to legislate against forms of discrimination obfuscates and even risks eradicating a core culture that existed "before the Sixties." In writing of the political powers of a managerial regime, Gottfried deploys Richard Rorty in order to better articulate his critique of the therapeutic state. Thus, "instead of the racist, sexist, and violently homophobic society that existed "before the Sixties," we now have tolerance thanks to "the hundreds of thousands of teachers who have done their best to make their students understand the humiliation which previous generations of Americans have inflicted on their fellow-Americans" (2). Gottfried identifies the legacy of the Sixties as the problematic that threatens the United States' "core culture," and points a finger at academia and its authorities for promoting "progressive social attitudes" that warrant the emergence of the therapeutic state.

Following Gottfried's brief introduction, the book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1, "The Death of Socialism," sets up the analysis of Western managerial government by examining the transformation of a managerial state into a therapeutic state. More importantly, Gottfried offers a critique of the state's commitment to individuals and its resolve to grant "disadvantaged victims" emancipation from an oppressive past. Such politics, according to Gottfried, require the extension of statist forms of behavior control. This newly inaugurated therapeutic state is held up as a positive institution because of its commitment to and its solidarity toward individuals.

Gottfried extends his analysis of the welfare state in chapter 2, "Religious Foundations of the Managerial Therapeutic State," by providing a detailed look into the liberal Protestant character of the managerial state, which has, according to Gottfried, transformed its liberal consciousness into the politics of sensitivity. Gottfried further calls the reader's attention to the growing decline of membership among Protestant denominations, suggesting that as fewer people attend church the desire for the therapeutic state has increased. Consequently, Gottfried argues that the emergence of "managerial therapeutic regimes" is the result of a peculiar fusion of politics and religion: "Basic for American religious life is the fusion of a victim-centered feminism with the Protestant framework of sin and redemption" (56). Thus, it is the norm of sensitivity, and more importantly, the "therapeutic state's" enthusiastic response to feminist, gay, and lesbian demands for protection against discrimination, aligned with the politics of remorse, that become the foci of Gottfried's critique. Gottfried further discusses how such a regime promotes a victim's self-esteem, and the way in which this practice together with cultural and historical illiteracy creates the theology of guilt fueling the therapeutic state. He concludes the chapter by accusing liberal Protestantism of perpetuating a religious worldview that promotes political...