Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (15 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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,”
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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.”
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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.”

Marcuse was widely accepted in the 1960s by the student movement—so much so that students in Paris during the 1968 uprising marched with banners reading “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.”

But he still wasn’t winning in America. Marcuse had a big, big problem: America’s founding ideology is still far sexier than that of
the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility. Even if Marcuse was promising unending sex, drugs, and rock and roll, most Americans were more interested in living in liberty with their families, in a society that values virtue and hard work rather than promiscuity and decadence.

So Marcuse had to find a way to defy the opposition. He found it in what he termed “repressive tolerance.” In 1965, Marcuse wrote an essay by that name in which he argued that tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish—and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down. “[T]he realization of the objective of tolerance,” he wrote, “would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” America was experiencing a “repressive tolerance” under which dissenting viewpoints were stifled; what it needed was “partisan tolerance.”
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In other words, if you disagreed with Marcuse, you should be forcefully shut up, according to Marcuse. This made political debate very convenient for him and his allies. This totalitarianism is now standard practice on college campuses, in the media, and in Hollywood—the very places that the Frankfurt School sought to control.

The First Amendment—the same instrument that allowed the Frankfurt School to land on our shores and express their pernicious ideas in freedom—was now curtailed by those who had benefitted from it. Marcuse called for a tyranny of the minority, since the tyranny of the majority could not be overcome without a total shutdown.

There’s another name for Marcuse’s “partisan tolerance”: Political Correctness.

In fact, the term “political correctness” came from one of Marcuse’s buddies: Mao Tse-tung. Mao used the term to differentiate
between those who had “scientifically correct” views and those who did not; those who did were termed “politically correct.” In 1963, just two years before Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance,” Mao came out with an essay entitled “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?”
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In that essay, he argued that the Marxist society determines correct ideas, and all incorrect ideas must be put out of their misery. Mao thought it. Marcuse thought it. And his ideological heirs thought it and still think it. Hello, neighbor!

And so Marxism came stealthily to our shores, squatted here, planted its roots, and grew like a weed—all before we even noticed it. It happened at the university level and at the governmental level and at the media level. We didn’t notice because we couldn’t read the rhetorical garbage these jokers were spewing, and we didn’t think it was important—“Our Constitution survived a revolution and a Civil War and two World Wars. Why should we worry about a few German eggheads?” Especially since America was economically thriving under such “oppression.”

The foundations of the Complex had been built. But we still couldn’t see the Complex itself—the Complex was hidden under paragraphs of obscure text and in college curricula at places like Tulane University, under the unlikely auspices of “American Studies.” Talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It all seemed so benign, and we figured that if college students went off and had sex and did drugs and engaged in teenage rebellious decadence, oh well, they’d eventually come back to the Constitution, just the way their parents had.

We slept while the other side armed, and while we snoozed they secretly stole away our defensive weaponry—our allegiance to the Constitution and to freedom of speech and opinion.

It was only when they fired the first shots over our bow that we noticed we were unarmed, and that they had weaponized the cloudy bacteria of their philosophy into full-bore ideological anthrax, ready to deploy on a moment’s notice.

The line was becoming clear. Marx and Hegel had paved the way for the Progressives, who in turn had paved the way for the Frankfurt School, who had then attacked the American way of life by pushing “cultural Marxism” through “critical theory.” The Frankfurt School thinkers had come up with the rationale for radical environmentalism, artistic communism, psychological deconstruction of their opponents, and multiculturalism. Most of all, they had come up with the concept of “repressive tolerance,” aka political correctness.

They had penetrated the academies—my American Studies program at Tulane had far more Adorno and Gramsci and Horkheimer and Marcuse than Twain or Jefferson or Lincoln. There was some trickle-down intellectualism going on—all the college students who worked through these programs and took swigs from the Frankfurt School bottle labeled “Drink Me” shrank mentally and ended up as parts of the Complex. But that didn’t explain how American society as a whole was taken over by this stuff. I just couldn’t understand it: how did Frankfurt School philosophy, which is obviously complicated, highfalutin stuff, become a mass psychosis? How did it trick so many millions of people?