The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

by Michael Walsh

  Political correctness, for all its notoriety, has not received the full scrutiny it deserves, in part because, like everything else the Marxists touch, it wears a tarnhelm, a magic helmet—in this case, of kindness, politesse, and sheer righteousness. Busily formulating new lists of what can and cannot be said (lest it offend somebody, somewhere, either now or at some future date), and always in light of the Critical Theory imperative to be perpetually on the attack, political correctness’s commissars resemble no one more than Dickens’s implacable Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, clicking her knitting needles as heads roll into baskets. Common words, common terms, even the names of venerable sports franchises come under fire as they march ever forward toward the sunny uplands of perfect totalitarian utopia.

  All this has sprung from the ordure of Critical Theory, a miasmic gas that chokes the life out of free-ranging rational discourse. When in doubt, PC supplies its adherents with a ready supply of rubrics and bromides, most of which reinforce the central idea that there are some things that simply cannot be said or even thought.

  Let us think of political correctness as Ugarte’s famous “letters of transit” in Casablanca, which cannot be rescinded—or even questioned. The letters are the central McGuffin of the great film—the “buy-in,” as people say in Hollywood, that the audience grants to the filmmakers in order to fully invest itself in the story. Without the letters, there is no story. Ugarte cannot give them to Rick Blaine for safekeeping; Ferrari can’t try to buy them from Rick; Rick cannot provide them to Ilsa and Victor Laszlo to ensure their escape; nor can Ilsa and Victor escape at all. Everyone accepts them uncritically, even the Nazis, despite the fact that they are signed by General Weygand, a Vichy official, whose order could easily have been countermanded by Major Strasser, the German officer. (They are not signed by de Gaulle, as is sometimes misheard; Peter Lorre’s Hungarian accent confuses things. And, in any case, that would make no sense at all.)

  So, in political correctness, the Left has its “letters of transit,” its trump card in the great game it endlessly wages against its enemies. But they are false, counterfeit; no one need pay any attention to them. But by simply declaring whole swatches of argumentation invalid, the Unholy Left seeks to erect a Devil’s Pleasure Palace around itself, a world of illusion peopled with fake monsters and hallucinatory apparitions, an anti-fun-house of horrors whose only purpose, directly antithetical to the United States Constitution, is to stifle opposition and debate.

  The thinkers most responsible for the rise of political correctness were Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, who were among the first to grasp that while economic Marxism could not work, cultural Marxism could. If instead of seizing the means of the production to (someday) be turned over to the proletariat, they could instead occupy culture, wouldn’t the revolution have a far better chance of succeeding? They had been let down by the grubby, unwashed workers of the world, who largely rejected the great gift they had been offered; now they would approach their equals in the intelligentsia, a far more receptive and persuadable audience. As any con man knows, the easiest mark is the one who wants to believe.

  Gramsci therefore targeted mass media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, film (à la Hitler and Lenin), and education, in order to—as Brecht famously later suggested—dissolve the people and elect another. For Gramsci, the proletariat was blinded by its Faustian bands of illusion; what it needed was liberation from the Christian West, something the Left had long been itching for. Lukács, a Hungarian-Jewish aristocrat from a prominent banking family named Löwinger, went a step further, believing that the old order had to be eradicated before a new kind of citizen could sprout up.

  Lukács dreamed of creating a void in the soul of humanity, in a world that supposedly had been abandoned by God, a collectivist world in which there would be no room for the individual—which is to say an ant farm that would admit of no heroic Siegfrieds or supermen. He wrote of the necessity of an Aufhebung der Kultur—an abolition of culture, specifically Judeo-Christian Western culture, although the word “Aufhebung” might be better translated in this instance as the “uprooting.”

  Writing in 1962, in the preface to his Theory of the Novel, and reflecting on his experience of World War I, Lukács underlined his anti-Western sentiments:

  My own deeply personal attitude was one of vehement, global and, especially at the beginning, scarcely articulate rejection of the war and especially of enthusiasm for the war. . . . There was also some probability that the West would defeat Germany; if this led to the downfall of the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, I was once again in favour. But then the question arose: Who was to save us from Western civilisation?

  Who indeed? One unpleasant answer came quickly enough in the form of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which emerged victorious from its pitched street battles with the other party of the Left, the Communists, and then quickly set about eliminating both Jews and Communists, whom it saw as essentially interchangeable. Hitler had little or no love for Western civilization, which he regarded as an anti-Aryan enterprise spearheaded, sequentially, by the Romans, the Church, and the Jews. He idealized the Volk, the German people uncorrupted by the world-manipulating International Jew, exemplified in his eyes by, among others, Lukács and the rest of the Frankfurt School. Still, Lukács lived long enough to have the last laugh. He rode out the war in his beloved Soviet Union and returned to Hungary to help form the postwar Communist government—which, to his death in 1971, he thought could compete with West while maintaining its own socialist terms.

  Today, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, such fantasies seem absurd. To anyone who traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain in the years before its collapse—the sight of the empty shops, the endless lines, the rigid conformity, the blaring loudspeakers summoning the populace to this or that Party occasion highlighted by a long-winded speech from a series of gray functionaries—the idea that anyone would willingly embrace such a soulless hell is laughable. Only those with no experience of Communism admire Communism. Seeking a victory for cultural Marxism in the Warsaw Pact countries, Lukács and his ilk signally failed; having experienced the dictatorship of the proletariat, the suddenly free peoples of what we used to call the “captive nations” opted for fresh bananas and porn, and were thrilled with the trade.

  Why anyone would want to live in the world Lukács and his cohorts envisioned remains an open question. And yet, to an increasing extent, many do. I believe the attraction lies, in part at least, in its very impossibility. The generation that grew up in the United States and Western Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has had a hard time imagining any adverse consequences that might arise from their seemingly noble, benevolent beliefs; they live “within the context of no context,” to borrow the title of a 1980 New Yorker essay by George W.S. Trow. They are unaware of the consequences of fearing no consequences. In the world of Marxist fantasy, the blind man is king.

  Nevertheless, many seem willing to trade liberty for some form of security; and in a bountiful society, there seems no end to the riches that can be squandered in the name of “compassion,” “tolerance,” or “diversity.” It was said of Tammany Hall, the Democratic-gangster political machine that ran New York City for the better part of a century, that it was wise enough never to steal all the money flowing into the city’s treasury. It left just enough for careful administration so the peasants would never realize they were being fleeced even as the sachems showed up at their weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs.

  What saved the Frankfurt School was its transplantation under duress to America. The brutal efficiency of the Nazi regime opened their eyes to the consequences of what they had imagined would have no consequences. Had they proclaimed their destructive anti-American, anti-Western intentions openly—made those the most conspicuous feature of their teachings—they might rightly have been regarded as spies, sappers, and saboteurs, and han
ged. But twinned with another Central European intellectual conceit, Freudian analysis (many of whose tenets synchronized happily with Institut theory), they appeared to be relatively harmless, nutty-professor refugees with funny foreign accents who were seeking shelter in America, pleading tolerance for lofty ideals. What went unnoticed was that the ideals for which they sought tolerance were themselves anything but tolerant. Indeed, they were fundamentally antithetical to the American ethos and experience. America would not have to descend into Hell; Hell had come to America—disguised, naturally, as Heaven, and now lying in wait for the unwary.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE ETERNAL FEMININE

  The assault on the citadels of Western culture had many fronts, but foremost among them was sex—the most powerful engine in human existence, the one that brings us closest to the Godhead, a force of such overwhelming power that it can change the courses of our lives, bringing death or transcendence in its wake. Children are its primary issue, but also transformative insight, bravery, courage, altruism, self-sacrifice; great works of art are born from the union, lives sacrificed and won, everything ventured, worlds gained.

  So no wonder the relationship between the sexes and the hard-won morality attending such congress was one of the focal points of the attack by the Frankfurt School and their fellow travelers in politics, academe, and the media. The “transgressive” assault on Western culture had to start somewhere, and it started with the idea of the nuclear family.

  The first step was to mock it (in the 1960s and ’70s, the idealized “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver” worlds of the pre-hippie era came in for particular scorn), then to accuse it of various crimes against humanity (particularly the newfound charge of “patriarchy”), then to illustrate that there were “really” other sorts of families, just as good, just as loving, just as valid at the traditional two-parent, opposite-sex nest. Finally, the nuclear family was simply dispensed with altogether, as behavior considered acceptable in the underclass, where sexual license had always just barely been suppressed, percolated into the higher culture. The morals of those with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a dysfunctional social-welfare system bubbled upward from the black and white underclasses into the middle classes, who had been induced to feel guilty on behalf of the “underprivileged.” And those considered “marginal” or “disadvantaged” no longer bore any responsibility for their destructive personal choices and behavior. It is no accident that the new social acceptance of out-of-wedlock pregnancies coincided with the rise of both bastardy and the abortion culture, the growing demand for contraception, and, later on, gay rights. Once Pandora’s Box was opened, all sort of things flew out, some of them at first seemingly contradictory, but all related by the very fact of their confinement in the box. The box had stayed closed for a reason, but under pressure from Critical Theory, it had to be opened.

  Many have observed, the historian Arnold Toynbee prominently among them, that society begins to crumble when the morals of the underclass become mainstream. Toynbee noted that when self-expression begins to substitute for disciplined creativity, civilization has a problem. Critical Theory’s obsessive compulsion with its genitals is not the sign of a mature culture but a childish one. Discussing the chapter “Schism in the Soul” from Toynbee’s Study of History, Charles Murray wrote in the Wall Street Journal, in 2001:

  He observes that one of the consistent symptoms of disintegration is that the elites—Toynbee’s “dominant minority”—begin to imitate those at the bottom of society. His argument goes like this:

  The growth phase of a civilization is led by a creative minority with a strong, self-confident sense of style, virtue, and purpose. The uncreative majority follows along through mimesis, “a mechanical and superficial imitation of the great and inspired originals.” In a disintegrating civilization, the creative minority has degenerated into elites that are no longer confident, no longer setting the example. Among other reactions are a “lapse into truancy” (a rejection, in effect, of the obligations of citizenship), and a “surrender to a sense of promiscuity” (vulgarizations of manners, the arts, and language) that “are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of “proletarianization.” That sounds very much like what has been happening in the U.S. Truancy and promiscuity, in Toynbee’s sense, are not new in America. But until a few decades ago they were publicly despised and largely confined to the bottom layer of Toynbee’s proletariat—the group we used to call “low-class” or “trash,” and which we now call the underclass. Today, those behaviors have been transmuted into a code that the elites sometimes imitate, sometimes placate, and fear to challenge. Meanwhile, they no longer have a code of their own in which they have confidence.

  In his 1964 opera Der junge Lord, the German composer Hans Werner Henze parodied—in this context, “aped” is apposite—precisely this phenomenon. A wealthy, eccentric English nobleman arrives in a small German town with an entourage of slaves and wild animals and succeeds in passing off an ape as his nephew, “Lord Barrett,” whose simian behavior charms the impressionable townsfolk until his costume falls apart and everyone can see him for the glorified chimp that he is. (Interestingly, Henze was a committed Communist, although “limousine liberal” or “champagne Socialist” might be a more apt description of him. Having fled Germany—West Germany, not Nazi Germany—for its perceived conservatism and intolerance of homosexuality, he lived la dolce vita in Italy.)

  In the end, however, the sexual behavior of ancient cultures (the Greeks) or other primates (bonobo chimps) is not relevant to the problems we face today. No culture until ours has so willingly abjured procreation, so enthusiastically practiced abortion, so demonized (an apt word) those who demurred, and so refused to understand the demographic “consequences of no consequences.” If procreation is only an afterthought or an optional lifestyle choice, our Ponzi-schemed social-welfare programs, such as Social Security, which depends on future generations to make it function, will collapse. Indeed, we could be looking at the demolition of the entire “social safety net”—though one would think radicals would want to save this, if we are to believe them when they express grave concern for humanity.

  “Who will save us from Western culture?” The good news for the Left is that they have been saved—by Western culture itself, which succored them in the breasts of academe and nurtured them in what the late Andrew Breitbart memorably described as the “Democrat-Media Complex.” This is the tight, rotating network of college gigs, media jobs, and government “service” that rewards intellectual conformity to the leftist narrative, even as many of its adherents live their private lives according to conservative principles, raising small nuclear families within the two-parent structure and ensuring their children’s safety by living in economically segregated, sometimes gated, communities.

  Meanwhile, beyond the borders of Potomac, Maryland, Bel Air in Los Angeles, or the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the citizenry is subject to whatever laws its betters choose to make—and the more the laws, the better, so that, in the words of Harvey Silverglate, just about everyone unknowingly commits “three felonies a day” (the title of his 2009 book) while simply going about his daily business. And to prevent future generations from rising up against what they must eventually perceive as tyranny, anti-procreationists and abortion “providers” are busily erasing the next generation in the name of “women’s rights.” Few cultures, if any, have been as gleefully self-righteous about the moral righteousness, the transcendence, of their suicide as the West.

  Thus, like Rosemary’s baby in the iconic movie of that title, the culture of death was born in a country that had formerly welcomed babies and children. Up until the 1960s and ’70s, and prior to Roe v. Wade, American culture had prized babies as a necessity in a muscular, growing, culturally confident republic. Fittingly, in Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror film, Death, in the form of Rosem
ary’s baby, arrived in the intellectual precincts of the nation’s greatest city, New York. In order to make its anti-life, anti-procreation argument work, the Marxist squid had to exude great quantities of ink—most of which landed on the pages of the house organ of Leftism, the New York Times—to obscure its true purpose. The Malthusian myth of overpopulation was trotted out once more. Leftists love zero-sum games and “scientific” prophecies of certain doom: “climate change,” “diminishing resources,” “peak oil,” etc. It would be a crime to bring a child into this terrifying world, they warned, and subject him to a shrunken future. Overpopulation was an omnipresent theme of the period. Even the movies got into the act—Logan’s Run, Soylent Green. The world would soon be crawling with mewling, starving people, and the most merciful thing would be to kill them and maybe even eat them. Thus was the leftist suicide cult born.

  It’s crucial to remember how quickly this transformation was accomplished. The cultural revolution of the late ’60s took place during a period marked by widespread dislocation. The Tet Offensive, LBJ’s abdication, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy’s murder—all occurred in the first six months of 1968. Still to come that year were the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Chicago riots at the Democratic convention in August, and the launch of Apollo 8. By the mid 1970s, there was no going back. After Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), porn shops and peep shows popped up across the land, Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy” began its cultural ascendancy, and the sexual revolution got well and truly under way.

  But what, precisely, was the problem that the Left sought so desperately to fix? What required the destruction of the preexisting system of cultural and social mores? The answer—despite the earlier battering by the Fabian Socialists in 1880s England, by the Bloomsbury Group of Virginia Woolf and her compatriots, by Margaret Sanger’s “progressive” eugenics movement of the 1920s—was nothing.