(After you have read this excellent article – you might also read
this – www.crushlimbraw.com – and
notice some similarities. Remember, I started that website in August, 2015 –
CL)
Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our
culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was
safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even
blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home
with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.
Where did it all go? How did
that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today – so different
that those who grew up prior to the ’60s feel like it’s a foreign country? Did
it just “happen”?
It
didn’t just “happen.” In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our
culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how
and why is one of the most important parts of our nation’s history – and it is a story almost no one knows. The people
behind it wanted it that way.
What happened, in short, is
that America’s traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from
our Western, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an ideology. We know
that ideology best as “political correctness” or “multi-culturalism.” It really
is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms in an
effort that goes back not to the 1960s, but to World War I. Incredible as it
may seem, just as the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union has faded away,
a new cultural Marxism has become the ruling ideology of America’s elites. The
No. 1 goal of that cultural Marxism, since its creation, has been the
destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion.
To understand anything, we
have to know its history. To understand who stole our culture, we need to take
a look at the history of “political correctness.”
Early
Marxist theory
Before World War I, Marxist
theory said that if Europe ever erupted in war, the working classes in every
European country would rise in revolt, overthrow their governments and create a
new Communist Europe. But when war broke out in the summer of 1914, that didn’t
happen. Instead, the workers in every European country lined up by the millions
to fight their country’s enemies. Finally, in 1917, a Communist revolution did
occur, in Russia. But attempts to spread that revolution to other countries
failed because the workers did not support it.
After World War I ended in
1918, Marxist theorists had to ask themselves the question: What went wrong? As
good Marxists, they could not admit Marxist theory had been incorrect. Instead,
two leading Marxist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in
Hungary (Lukacs was considered the most brilliant Marxist thinker since Marx
himself) independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western
culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its
true, Marxist class interests, that a Communist revolution was impossible in
the West, until both could be destroyed. That objective, established as
cultural Marxism’s goal right at the beginning, has never changed.
A
new strategy
Gramsci famously laid out a
strategy for destroying Christianity and Western culture, one that has proven
all too successful. Instead of calling for a Communist revolution up front, as
in Russia, he said Marxists in the West should take political power last, after
a “long march through the institutions” – the schools, the media, even the
churches, every institution that could influence the culture. That “long march
through the institutions” is what America has experienced, especially since the
1960s. Fortunately, Mussolini recognized the danger Gramsci posed and jailed
him. His influence remained small until the 1960s, when his works, especially
the “Prison Notebooks,” were rediscovered.
Georg Lukacs proved more
influential. In 1918, he became deputy commissar for culture in the short-lived
Bela Kun Bolshevik regime in Hungary. There, asking, “Who will save us from
Western civilization?” he instituted what he called “cultural terrorism.” One
of its main components was introducing sex education into Hungarian schools.
Lukacs realized that if he could destroy the country’s traditional sexual
morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying its traditional
culture and Christian faith.
Far from rallying to Lukacs’
“cultural terrorism,” the Hungarian working class was so outraged by it that
when Romania invaded Hungary, the workers would not fight for the Bela Kun
government, and it fell. Lukacs disappeared, but not for long. In 1923, he
turned up at a “Marxist Study Week” in Germany, a program sponsored by a young
Marxist named Felix Weil who had inherited millions. Weil and the others who
attended that study week were fascinated by Lukacs’ cultural perspective on
Marxism.
The
Frankfurt School
Weil responded by using some
of his money to set up a new think tank at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt,
Germany. Originally it was to be called the “Institute for Marxism.” But the
cultural Marxists realized they could be far more effective if they concealed
their real nature and objectives. They convinced Weil to give the new institute
a neutral-sounding name, the “Institute for Social Research.” Soon known simply
as the “Frankfurt School,” the Institute for Social Research would become the
place where political correctness, as we now know it, was developed. The basic
answer to the question “Who stole our culture?” is the cultural Marxists of the
Frankfurt School.
At first, the Institute
worked mainly on conventional Marxist issues such as the labor movement. But in
1930, that changed dramatically. That year, the Institute was taken over by a
new director, a brilliant young Marxist intellectual named Max Horkheimer.
Horkheimer had been strongly influenced by Georg Lukacs. He immediately set to
work to turn the Frankfurt School into the place where Lukacs’ pioneering work
on cultural Marxism could be developed further into a full-blown ideology.
To that end, he brought some
new members into the Frankfurt School. Perhaps the most important was Theodor
Adorno, who would become Horkheimer’s most creative collaborator. Other new
members included two psychologists, Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, who were
noted promoters of feminism and matriarchy, and a young graduate student named
Herbert Marcuse.
Advances
in cultural Marxism
With the help of this new
blood, Horkheimer made three major advances in the development of cultural
Marxism. First, he broke with Marx’s view that culture was merely part of
society’s “superstructure,” which was determined by economic factors. He said
that on the contrary, culture was an independent and very important factor in
shaping a society.
Second, again contrary to
Marx, he announced that in the future, the working class would not be the agent
of revolution. He left open the question of who would play that role – a
question Marcuse answered in the 1950s.
Third, Horkheimer and the
other Frankfurt School members decided that the key to destroying Western
culture was to cross Marx with Freud. They argued that just as workers were
oppressed under capitalism, so under Western culture, everyone lived in a
constant state of psychological repression. “Liberating” everyone from that
repression became one of cultural Marxism’s main goals. Even more important,
they realized that psychology offered them a far more powerful tool than
philosophy for destroying Western culture: psychological conditioning.
Today, when Hollywood’s
cultural Marxists want to “normalize” something like homosexuality (thus
“liberating” us from “repression”), they put on television show after
television show where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual. That
is how psychological conditioning works; people absorb the lessons the cultural
Marxists want them to learn without even knowing they are being taught.
The Frankfurt School was well
on the way to creating political correctness. Then suddenly, fate intervened.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, where the
Frankfurt School was located. Since the Frankfurt School was Marxist, and the
Nazis hated Marxism, and since almost all its members were Jewish, it decided
to leave Germany. In 1934, the Frankfurt School, including its leading members
from Germany, was re-established in New York City with help from Columbia
University. Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western culture
in Germany to doing so in the United States. It would prove all too successful.
New
developments
Taking advantage of American
hospitality, the Frankfurt School soon resumed its intellectual work to create
cultural Marxism. To its earlier achievements in Germany, it added these new
developments.
Critical
Theory
To serve its purpose of
“negating” Western culture, the Frankfurt School developed a powerful tool it called
“Critical Theory.” What was the theory? The theory was to criticize. By
subjecting every traditional institution, starting with family, to endless,
unremitting criticism (the Frankfurt School was careful never to define what it
was for, only what it was against), it hoped to bring them down. Critical
Theory is the basis for the “studies” departments that now inhabit American
colleges and universities. Not surprisingly, those departments are the home
turf of academic political correctness.
Studies
in prejudice
The Frankfurt School sought
to define traditional attitudes on every issue as “prejudice” in a series of
academic studies that culminated in Adorno’s immensely influential book, “The
Authoritarian Personality,” published in 1950. They invented a bogus “F-scale”
that purported to tie traditional beliefs on sexual morals, relations between
men and women and questions touching on the family to support for fascism.
Today, the favorite term the politically correct use for anyone who disagrees
with them is “fascist.”
Domination
The Frankfurt School again
departed from orthodox Marxism, which argued that all of history was determined
by who owned the means of production. Instead, they said history was determined
by which groups, defined as men, women, races, religions, etc., had power or
“dominance” over other groups. Certain groups, especially white males, were
labeled “oppressors,” while other groups were defined as “victims.” Victims
were automatically good, oppressors bad, just by what group they came from,
regardless of individual behavior.
Though Marxists, the members
of the Frankfurt School also drew from Nietzsche (someone else they admired for
his defiance of traditional morals was the Marquis de Sade). They incorporated
into their cultural Marxism what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of all
values.” What that means, in plain English, is that all the old sins become
virtues, and all the old virtues become sins. Homosexuality is a fine and good
thing, but anyone who thinks men and women should have different social roles
is an evil “fascist.” That is what political correctness now teaches children
in public schools all across America. (The Frankfurt School wrote about
American public education. It said it did not matter if school children learned
any skills or any facts. All that mattered was that they graduate from the
schools with the right “attitudes” on certain questions.)
Media
and entertainment
Led by Adorno, the Frankfurt
School initially opposed the culture industry, which they thought “commodified”
culture. Then, they started to listen to Walter Benjamin, a close friend of
Horkheimer and Adorno, who argued that cultural Marxism could make powerful use
of tools like radio, film and later television to psychologically condition the
public. Benjamin’s view prevailed, and Horkheimer and Adorno spent the World
War II years in Hollywood. It is no accident that the entertainment industry is
now cultural Marxism’s most powerful weapon.
The
growth of Marxism in the United States
After World War II and the
defeat of the Nazis, Horkheimer, Adorno and most of the other members of the
Frankfurt School returned to Germany, where the Institute re-established itself
in Frankfurt with the help of the American occupation authorities. Cultural
Marxism in time became the unofficial but all-pervasive ideology of the Federal
Republic of Germany.
But hell had not forgotten
the United States. Herbert Marcuse remained here, and he set about translating
the very difficult academic writings of other members of the Frankfurt School
into simpler terms Americans could easily grasp. His book “Eros and
Civilization” used the Frankfurt School’s crossing of Marx with Freud to argue
that if we would only “liberate non-procreative eros” through “polymorphous
perversity,” we could create a new paradise where there would be only play and
no work. “Eros and Civilization” became one of the main texts of the New Left
in the 1960s.
Marcuse
also widened the Frankfurt School’s intellectual work. In the early 1930s,
Horkheimer had left open the question of who would replace the working class as
the agent of Marxist revolution. In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question,
saying it would be a coalition of students, blacks, feminist women and
homosexuals – the core of the student rebellion of the 1960s, and the sacred
“victims groups” of political correctness today. Marcuse further took one of
political correctness’s favorite words, “tolerance,” and gave it a new meaning.
He defined “liberating tolerance” as tolerance for all ideas and movements
coming from the left, and intolerance for all
ideas and movements coming from the right. When you hear the cultural Marxists
today call for “tolerance,” they mean Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance” (just as
when they call for “diversity,” they mean uniformity of belief in their ideology).
The student rebellion of the
1960s, driven largely by opposition to the draft for the Vietnam War, gave
Marcuse a historic opportunity. As perhaps its most famous “guru,” he injected
the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation. Of
course, they did not understand what it really was. As was true from the
Institute’s beginning, Marcuse and the few other people “in the know” did not
advertise that political correctness and multi-culturalism were a form of
Marxism. But the effect was devastating: a whole generation of Americans,
especially the university-educated elite, absorbed cultural Marxism as their
own, accepting a poisonous ideology that sought to destroy America’s
traditional culture and Christian faith. That generation, which runs every
elite institution in America, now wages a ceaseless war on all traditional
beliefs and institutions. They have largely won that war. Most of America’s
traditional culture lies in ruins.
A
counter-strategy
Now you know who stole our
culture. The question is, what are we, as Christians and as cultural
conservatives, going to do about it?
We can choose between two strategies. The first is to try to retake the
existing institutions – the public schools, the universities, the media, the
entertainment industry and most of the mainline churches – from the cultural
Marxists. They expect us to try to do that, they are ready for it, and we would
find ourselves, with but small voice and few resources compared to theirs,
making a frontal assault against prepared defensive positions. Any soldier can
tell you what that almost always leads to: defeat.
There is another, more
promising strategy. We can separate ourselves and our families from the
institutions the cultural Marxists control and build new institutions for
ourselves, institutions that reflect and will help us recover our traditional
Western culture.
Several years ago, my
colleague Paul Weyrich wrote an open letter to the conservative movement
suggesting this strategy. While most other conservative (really Republican)
leaders demurred, his letter resonated powerfully with grass-roots
conservatives. Many of them are already part of a movement to secede from the
corrupt, dominant culture and create parallel institutions: the homeschooling
movement. Similar movements are beginning to offer sound alternatives in other
aspects of life, including movements to promote small, often organic family
farms and to develop community markets for those farms’ products. If Brave New
World’s motto is “Think globally, act locally,” ours should be “Think locally,
act locally.”
Thus, our strategy for undoing what cultural Marxism has done to
America has a certain parallel to its own strategy, as Gramsci laid it out so
long ago. Gramsci called for Marxists to undertake a “long march through the
institutions.” Our counter-strategy would be a long march to create our own
institutions. It will not happen quickly, or easily. It will be the work of
generations – as was theirs. They were patient, because they knew the
“inevitable forces of history” were on their side. Can we not be equally
patient, and persevering, knowing that the Maker of history is on ours?
William
S. Lind has a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and an M.A., also in
History, from Princeton University. He serves as director of the Center for
Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington,
D.C., and as a vestryman at St. James Anglican Church in his hometown of
Cleveland, Ohio.
Copyright © 2017 William S. Lind
