Mostly, the Constitution was standing in the way of the grand Hegelian synthesis of government power in the name of socialism. Wilson felt that true democracy and socialism were not just compatible—they were indistinguishable. All individual rights were subject to the rights of the state: “Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.”5
Both Roosevelt and Wilson were far less concerned about the rights of individuals or the value of republicanism; it was the job of Great Leaders to hand down good governance. They thought that great decisions should be made on high by men of high thought, and that the dirty process of democracy just blocked any chance at true change. This philosophy paved the way for FDR, and it echoes all the way down to Obama.
Fortunately for America, after World War I, Wilson was extremely unpopular, and Wilson’s exit led off a decade of constitutional retrenchment.
But in Europe, dirty business was afoot.
Despite the fact that Marxism made headway in terms of policy in the United States and other Western European countries in the early part of the twentieth century, orthodox Marxists had a major problem by the end of the 1910s: the actual worldwide Marxist revolution really hadn’t ignited. Not only hadn’t it happened, workers had spent the better part of five years murdering each other en masse in World War I. Marx’s dialectical prophecy had been proved false.
But just because Marx’s dialectic materialism had been proved false, and just because soon the new Soviet Union would be slaughtering its own citizens at record rates, didn’t mean that the Marxist intellectuals were going to give up on worldwide revolution.
That was where Antonio Gramsci and Gyorgy Lukacs came in.
Gramsci was an Italian socialist who saw tearing down society as the necessary precondition for the eventual victory of global Marxism. Marxism simply hadn’t won because men were weak. And men were weak because they were the products of a capitalist society. “Man is above all else mind, consciousness,” Gramsci wrote in 1916. “That is, he is a product of history, not of nature. There is no other way of explaining why socialism has not come into existence already.”6
Lukacs built on Gramsci, deciding that Marx’s dialectic materialism wasn’t really a prophetic tool for predicting the future—it was a tool for tearing down society itself. Simply destroying the status quo in the minds of the people would bring Marxism.
Lukacs’s view was so influential that for a time, he actually became deputy commissar of culture in Hungary, where he proceeded to push a radical sex-ed program encouraging free love and rejection of Judeo-Christian morality. In that role, he tried to live out his ideology of destruction: “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution…. A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”7 Fortunately, the people of Hungary weren’t nuts, so they dumped him.
That left Lukacs unemployed. But not for long.
Felix Weil was a young radical from Frankfurt, Germany, and a devotee of Marx. He, like Lukacs, saw the problems of implementing socialism—namely, that nobody really liked it very much. But like most of today’s leftie college students who live off their parents’ money while preaching the downfall of the capitalist system, he was rich. So he used his granddaddy’s money to fund the Institute for Social Research, which was really a precursor to John Podesta’s “Center for American Progress”—funded by Hungarian-born George Soros.
To staff this new institute, which quickly became known as the Frankfurt School, Weil brought in, along with Lukacs, a Marxist philosopher named Max Horkheimer. Lukacs didn’t last long, but Horkheimer did. At the Frankfurt School, he coined a term that would embody the whole corrupt philosophy of his fellow travelers’ mission to destroy society and culture using the Marxist dialectic: critical theory.
Critical theory was exactly the material we were taught at Tulane. It was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc.); it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established social rules and norms.
Critical theory, says Horkheimer, is “suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as those are understood in the present order.”8 So if you liked ice cream better than cake, or thought a hammer might be more useful than a screwdriver in a particular situation, you were speaking on behalf of the status quo. The real idea behind all of this was to make society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless. Critical theory does not create; it only destroys, as Horkheimer himself openly stated, “Above all… critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself.”9 No wonder my thought upon graduating was that getting a job was selling out.
When Horkheimer took over the institute in 1930, he filled it up with fellow devotees of critical theory like Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. Each agreed with the central idea of critical theory, namely that all of society had to be criticized ad nauseam, all social institutions leveled, all traditional concepts decimated. Marcuse later summed it up well: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society…. What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”10
Again, where am I going with all of this philosophical jabberwocky? Well, all of these boring and bleating philosophers might have faded into oblivion as so many Marxist theorists have, but the rise of Adolf Hitler prevented that. With Hitler’s rise, they had to flee (virtually all of them—Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, Fromm—were of Jewish descent). And they had no place to go.
Except the United States.
The United States’ tradition of freedom and liberty, its openness to outside ideas, and our highest value, freedom of speech, ended up making all America vulnerable to those who would exploit those ideals. We welcomed the Frankfurt School. We accepted them with open arms. They took full advantage. They walked right into our cultural institutions, and as they started to put in place their leadership, their language, and their lexicon, too many chose to ignore them. And the most dangerous thing you can do with a driven leftist intellectual clique is to ignore it.
We always feel that our incredible traditions of freedom and liberty will convert those who show up on our shores, that they will appreciate the way of life we have created—isn’t that why they wanted to come here in the first place? We can’t imagine anyone coming here, experiencing the true wonder that is living in this country, and wanting to destroy that. But that’s exactly what the Frankfurt School wanted to do.
These were not happy people looking for a new lease on life. When they moved to California, they simply couldn’t deal with the change of scenery—there was cognitive dissonance. Horkheimer and Adorno and depressive allies like Bertolt Brecht moved into a house in Santa Monica on Twenty-sixth Street, coincidentally, the epicenter of my childhood. They had moved to heaven on earth from Nazi Germany and apparently could not handle the fun, the sun, and the roaring good times. Ingratitude is not strong enough a word to describe these hideous malcontents.
If only they had had IKEA furniture, this would have made for a fantastic season of The Real World.
Brecht and his ilk were the Kurt Cobains of their day: massively depressed, nihilistic people who wore full suits in eighty-degree weather while living in a house by the beach. As Adam Cohen wrote in the New York Times, these were “dyspeptic critics of American culture. Several landed in Southern California where they were disturbed by the consumer culture and the gospel of relentless cheeriness. Depressive by nature, they focused on the disappointments and venality that surrounded them and how unnecessary it all was. It could be paradise, Theodor Adorno complained, but it was only California.”11
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Adorno was wrong. It was paradise. To the rest of the world, America’s vision was a vision of paradise. And these Marxists were here to try to destroy the best lifestyle man had ever created.
If I could go back in a time machine, I would go back to kick these malcontents in their shins.
Members of the Frankfurt School had some American allies—men who had accepted the Roosevelt/Wilson synthesis of Hegel and Marx, and who were now looking for the next step. The Frankfurt School had been sending mailers out to prominent fellow-traveler sociologists in the United States for some years and creating connections with them.
Meanwhile, Columbia University’s Sociology department was dying. They needed new blood, and they liked what they saw in the Frankfurt School.
All the Frankfurt School had to do was to get into the country, and they’d take their place in the hallowed halls of American academia. Fortunately for them, there was an organization called the Institute of International Education, specifically devoted to helping fleeing scholars from Germany. The man who held the post of assistant secretary of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars was one Edward R. Murrow, who helped ship in many of the Frankfurt School’s greatest minds. Later, Senator Joe McCarthy would try to pillory Murrow in revenge for Murrow’s coverage of the McCarthy hearings by citing Murrow’s involvement with the Institute of International Education, but by then McCarthy was finished.
In any case, once in the country, the Frankfurt School was almost immediately accepted at Columbia University. It was a marriage made in hell.
With their tentacles affixed to the institutions of American higher education, the Frankfurt School philosophy began eking its way into every crevice of American culture. Horkheimer’s “critical theory” became a staple of Philosophy, History, and English courses across the country. Horkheimer himself took his show on the road, from Columbia to Los Angeles to the University of Chicago.
Meanwhile, Erich Fromm, one of the Frankfurt School’s main thinkers, was pushing cultural Marxism through psychology by blaming Western tradition for the rise of Nazism and the rejection of Marxism.12
This was a fiction, of course, convenient rewriting of science to meet a political agenda. Marxism is just as totalitarian as Nazism, so it would make sense that those who love communism quickly fell in love with Nazism in Germany, and those who resisted communism would resist Nazism. But Fromm had a convenient answer to protect the Marxists: Marxists had not gone Nazi; resisters to Marxism had gone Nazi! How did Fromm know this? Because those who submit to Marxism love freedom, while those who fight Marxism are secretly repressed. Soldiers are authoritarian because they take orders. Small businessmen are authoritarian in their unconscious desire to submit to “economic laws.”13 Leftists today still call their opponents Nazis on the basis of this flawed and inane psychoanalysis.
Early on, Fromm embraced the ideas of Frankfurt School fellow Wilhelm Reich, who felt that psychological problems largely stemmed from sexual repression, and said that sexual liberation from societal mores could cure large numbers of people. Reich (whose psychoanalysis included disrobing his patients and then touching them) helped place the foundations of modern feminism, arguing that “the repression of the sexual needs creates a general weakening of intellect and emotional functioning; in particular, it makes people lack independence, will-power and critical faculties.” Marriage, he wrote, ruins lives: “Marital misery, to the extent to which it does not exhaust itself in the marital conflicts, is poured out over the children.”14
Fromm also expanded on the parenting ideas of Lukacs and John Dewey, who rejected parental authority, telling parents to stand by and let their children reinvent the wheel through experience. Fromm’s philosophy was imbibed by a young socialist student named Benjamin Spock, who would go on to shape a generation of parents with his child-rearing book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which helped launch the self-esteem movement.15
At the same time, Frankfurt School scholar Theodor Adorno was sliding Marxism into the American consciousness by attacking popular trends in the world of art. First teaching at Columbia and then later at Princeton, he argued that television and movies were problematic because they appealed to the masses—but television and the movies weren’t catering to the public tastes, they were shaping them, Adorno argued. Popular art and culture had destroyed true art, which is always used for revolutionary purposes, he said.16 All popular art therefore had to be criticized as a symptom of the capitalist system. All art had to be torn down. Performance art and modern art found their philosophical foundation in Adorno. The long line stretching from Piss Christ to Karen Finley smearing herself with feces to Susan Sarandon celebrating being hit with transsexual projectile vomit all had its roots with Adorno.
This nihilistic influence in art, reinforcing the destruction of cultural norms, means that many grown adults have never experienced an epoch in which the transcendent and the innately beautiful have been celebrated as the artistic ideal. And it all started because a Rat Pack of Nazi-fleeing depressives couldn’t appreciate leaving the world’s most oppressive place for the world’s most spectacularly free and beautiful place.
Santa Monica. Google it. It takes a sincerely deranged soul to want to deconstruct the good life and the optimistic citizenry in order to create mass intellectual and spiritual misery. But that’s exactly what they did. And as they constructed their philosophical dystopia, all the pieces of the modern leftist puzzle began falling into place.
But all of these major contributors to the Frankfurt School of thought paled in comparison to Herbert Marcuse, the founder of the “New Left.” Marcuse was a former student of future Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, the father of “deconstruction,” a process by which every thought or writing from the past had to be examined and torn down as an outgrowth of its social milieu. Heidegger wasn’t shy about his intentions; he longed for the moment “when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when the moribund semblance of culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness.”17
Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School in 1933 and quickly became a leader of the movement. After he moved to the United States and became a citizen, he was hired by FDR’s Office of War Information to create anti-Nazi propaganda, despite his Marxism. He also worked in the Office of Strategic Services (the pre-CIA OSS), and the State Department, where he worked to prevent the United States from pushing Germany away from democratic socialism. He taught at Columbia, then Harvard, then Brandeis, and then finally at the University of California in San Diego.
He really hit his stride in 1955, however, with the publication of Eros and Civilization. The book essentially made Wilhelm Reich’s case that sexual liberation was the best counter to the psychological ills of society. Marcuse preferred a society of “polymorphous perversity,”18 which is just what it sounds like—people having sex every which way, with whatever.
It wasn’t so much the freshness of Marcuse’s message that made the difference (it wasn’t a fresh message) as his timing—the kids brought up with Fromm and Freud and Spock were coming of age. The misplaced guilt of the Greatest Generation brought forth a new generation free to embrace Marcuse. While similar philosophies of sex had failed in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, by the 1950s the men and women who had suffered through the Great Depression and fought in World War II were determined to raise privileged kids who would never have to actually fight for their country or work for their food. The result was a group of kids ready and able to participate in the sexual revolution promised by the Frankfurt School. Marcuse excused sexual promiscuity as the fulfillment of the need for the people to rise up against Western civilization and to free themselves of the sexual repression it created. Not a hard sell for teenagers.
It was no wonder that in a very real sense, his followers believed they were doing something special when they made love, not war (a slogan attributed to Marcuse himself)—they were using their sexual
energy to bind the world together rather than destroy it, as sexual repression would do. While Marcuse may not have been the most important intellectual force behind the Frankfurt School, he was its most devious and effective marketer. The advertising adage “Sex sells” was applied to selling a generation on the idea that their parents’ values and ideals were repressive and evil. (Where geographically did Marcuse come to this nihilistic understanding? The picturesque cliffs of La Jolla, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.)
Marcuse carried his “critical theory” in another destructive direction as well: while repeating the Marxist trope that the workers of the world would eventually unite—he saw the third world’s “anti-colonial” movements as evidence that Marx was right—he recognized that in the United States there would be no such uprising by the working class. He therefore needed a different set of interest groups to tear down capitalism using his critical theory. And he found those groups in the racial, ethnic, and sexual groups that hated the old order. These victimized interest groups rightly opposed all the beauties of Western civilization “with all the defiance, and the hatred, and the joy of rebellious victims, defining their own humanity against the definitions of the masters.”19
Marcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all “victim groups” in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse’s theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer’s critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement—Gender Studies, LGBT/“Queer” Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these “Blank Studies” brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies—except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are “exploitative” and “bad.”
Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 11