The historian Ludwell H. Johnson III argued that “the job of the historian is not to pass judgment, but to try to understand.” By trying to understand the past, historians enrich our cultural heritage and help us to build on the achievements of our predecessors while, hopefully, avoiding their mistakes. History is, of course, a vital component of understanding the world in which we live today and the goals to which we should strive. But many of the debates now styled as “historical” are not about history at all—although they may seem to concern historical facts, the selected facts are those that can be used to induce guilt. In his 2002 book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Paul Gottfried explains how guilt serves as the weapon of the “therapeutic state.” The therapeutic state identifies our iniquities and informs us of how to make expiation and transform ourselves into model citizens. Gottfried gives the example of the role of the state in “modifying social behavior,” and “socializing ‘citizens’ through publicly controlled education and wars against discrimination.”

The function served by guilt, in assisting the efforts of the state to re-educate citizens, is to persuade people that they are indeed truly wicked and can only be redeemed through state interventions. Guilt plays a key role in persuading people that the “thought police” who restrict individual liberty are not the sinister tyrants depicted by George Orwell, but are really just there to help everyone avoid being as sinful as their forebears. History is mined for examples of collective guilt for the sins of the past. Gottfried observes that “such sins include, but are not exhausted by, sexism, homophobia, slavery, and a by now multifunctional Holocaust, guilt for which has been ascribed to Jewish indifference as well as to Christian malice.” Gottfried observes that the correction of these sins has resulted in widespread cultural acceptance of extensive restrictions on liberty:

Today in most Western countries, public speech and written publications that unsettle ethnic and racial minorities have undergone the process of criminalization. Among Americans the outlawing of environments and behaviors believed to offend women, gays, and other “minorities” has achieved the same repressive result as the numerous laws enacted against “crimes of opinion” in Europe. …

Why did the right to secede subsequently devolve almost entirely into moralizing about guilt and punishment for slavery? The reason why slavery in the American South became the source of “forever guilt”—even as slavery in the American North was almost entirely memory-holed—was because it continued to serve a useful political purpose. If people are no longer interested in the slave plantations of New England, parts of which are 96 percent white and have almost completely forgotten that they were ever slave states, it is pointless trying to guilt-trip them over it. But people are constantly reminded about the slave plantations of the South. 56 percent of black people still live in the South, and it is therefore in the South that guilt over slavery is most politically evocative. In this context collective guilt from a time long gone by, which holds an entire people responsible for events in the past, still yields political fruit for the guilt-trippers. Describing the nature of collective guilt, Rothbard wrote:

Note that this guilt is never confined to the specific individuals, say, who enslaved or murdered or raped people. (There are, I dare say, very few enslavers left in America today—say a Southern slaveholder aged 150?) Effectiveness in inducing guilt comes precisely because the guilt is not specific but collective, extending throughout the world and apparently for all time.

The guilt-trippers are determined that nobody will ever be able to speak of the Old South without being swarmed by the sorts of admonitions described by Rothbard: “to give due public lip-service to a long list of solemnly avowed guilts... Guilt is everywhere, all-pervasive, and brought to us by the same scoundrels who once promised us easy liberation.” The best response to the politics of guilt is to be equally determined in rejecting all forms of collective guilt, to resist all attempts to induce moral guilt for events of the past. As Rothbard advises in “Guilt Sanctified”:

As in all other aspects of our rotten culture, the only way to save the day is to raise the banner high and engage in a frontal and all-out onslaught against the Left Guilt-inducers. In such an onslaught lies the only hope of taking back our lives and our culture from these malignant pests and tyrants.