Protesters attempt to pull down the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square near the White House on June 22, 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Commentary
Decades in preparation, the future United States of America that the international left intends to fashion is near at hand.
Since the arrival of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers, cranks, crackpots, and creeps on our shores in the 1930s, the Enlightenment foundations of our nation have been under constant attack.
Wielding their pseudo-intellectual doctrine of Critical Theory as a battering ram, men like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich saw it as their duty to undermine every legal and social American institution, from the family, to traditional sexuality, to academe, pop culture, government, and even the military. Nothing was safe from their iniquitous inquisition.
At first, they seemed vaguely ridiculous, a bunch of nutty professors with Dr. Strangelove accents. But don’t be fooled.
Reich, a Freudian psychiatrist who often treated his patients in the nude, invented the “sexual revolution,” later popularized by Hugh Hefner in the pages of Playboy. His quack theories about sexuality were called “a fraud of the first magnitude” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and he died, intermittently psychotic, in federal prison in 1957.
Adorno, who had been a “modern music” composer and critic back in Germany, moved to Los Angeles and hated everything about it, including the weather.
Worst of all was Marcuse—whose pomposity was gleefully skewered by Joel and Ethan Coen in their 2016 comedy, “Hail, Caesar!”—a social destabilizer who first penetrated the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, forerunner of the CIA), then corrupted generations of American college students at Columbia University (where the expat Frankfurters first found refuge), Harvard, Brandeis, and finally the University of California at San Diego.
It was Marcuse who invented the theory of “repressive tolerance,” which might best be described as tolerance for me, but not for thee: “The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.”
What he didn’t mention was that tolerance toward such inimical aberrations as Marxism would only last until it triumphed, after which “tolerance” would be abolished.
(For more on Critical Theory, and the Frankfurt School and their wholly deleterious effects on American and Western civilization, please see my 2015 book, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” and its 2018 sequel, “The Fiery Angel.”)
And so we’re experiencing now the full fruition of the Frankfurt School’s cultural revolution and what the German communist Rudi Dutschke, referencing Mao, famously called “the long march through the institutions.”
What the Soviet Union failed to do economically and militarily during its losing 20th-century confrontation with the West, cultural Marxism has come close to realizing: the collapse of Western Civilization via the destruction of what the Russian communists used to refer to as the “principal enemy”—the United States.
Setting Kindling Ablaze
Having drilled several generations of students in Marxist cant—whenever you hear words like “systemic,” “struggle,” “structural,” “change,” “fundamental transformation,” et al., you know you’re dealing with Marxists—the tinder was laid, and all the new left needed was a match.
The election of Donald Trump four years ago at first shocked and then galvanized them, birthing the “resistance” and unleashing the “Russian collusion” hoax, the Ukrainian impeachment charade (Lt. Col. Vindman, anybody?) and, with the death of an ex-con named George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in late May, an unchained Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, along with its largely white auxiliaries (and Marcuse’s bastard children), Antifa.
Presto; the national media now marches in Stalinist lockstep with the shibboleths of BLM, beginning with the demonstrably false accusation that cops are targeting young black males for extinction.
In a trice, riots have broken out, monuments to American heroes, including some of the Founding Fathers, have been pulled down a la Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, and whole areas of American cities are suddenly occupied by violent anarchists. How quickly the illegal COVID-19 lockdowns were forgotten in the name of “social justice”—and yet how long their unconstitutional effects have lingered.
It is as if somebody had given the signal, and suddenly, in “blue” cities across the land, not only BLM and the Antifa punks have risen to show their true colors, but the politicians who run those cities as well.
The white mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, has been content to watch her city burn, its downtown illegally designated as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” or, latterly, the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest”—although she now says it will be taken back by the authorities.
Meanwhile, the black mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, seems indifferent to the weekly death toll of young black Americans, murdered by other young black Americans. On June 22 alone, 41 Chicagoans were shot, six of them fatally. Apparently their lives don’t matter, as they serve no political purpose.
‘White Supremacy’
Make no mistake: This assault has been planned and coordinated for years to strike America where she is weakest: in her innate sense of rightness and fair play. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement was heavily penetrated by the Soviets, who cynically felt they could manipulate American emotions while appealing to the better angels of our nature. But how quickly we have moved from King’s plea that we judge a man by “the content of his character” and back to “the color of his skin.”
Marxists see the world in categorical terms: You are not an individual (individuals are too difficult to control), but a member of a group (mobs are easy), subgroup, or even many subgroups (hence the proliferation of sexual categories from the genuine 2 to 46, by one recent count). Meanwhile, the enemy remains the same: the white, probably Christian, male.
Accordingly—and with astonishing rapidity—Western civilization from Aquinas to Mozart to Ronald Reagan now effectively equals “white supremacy,” and therefore must be destroyed.
Monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, and even Teddy Roosevelt have fallen or been marked for removal. Never mind that Roosevelt was the first president to host a black man, the great Booker T. Washington, at a dinner party in the White House (an event memorialized in Scott Joplin’s now-lost ragtime opera, “A Guest of Honor.” Joplin, who was black, also saluted Roosevelt in his rag, “The Strenuous Life,” after Roosevelt’s 1899 speech of the same name). He must go.
Which is also why statues of both Robert E. Lee, who led the principal Confederate force, the army of Northern Virginia, and the man Abraham Lincoln selected to crush him, the Ohio-born heartlander Ulysses S. Grant, are both being pulled down. It doesn’t matter that they were antitheses in life. What matters is that they are both significant figures from the past of a country that in the left’s eyes has no future, because it doesn’t deserve one.
‘Critical Theory’
Don’t look for logic in the Marxists’ selection of targets. “Critical Theory” seeks to undermine our self-knowledge and cultural self-confidence by insisting that everything is a “construct,” a plot by the “privileged” against the “oppressed.”
It holds that there is no received tenet of civilization that shouldn’t be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School), attacked, and destroyed. Our cultural totems, values, and taboos are declared either arbitrary, or the result of a long-ago “conspiracy,” steadfastly maintained down through the ages.
But where is the pushback? Republicans, the heirs to Lincoln and Grant, have fled the field. Led by the feckless former House speaker and failed vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, the Republicans ceded the lower chamber to the Democrats in 2018.
Partly as a result, President Donald Trump is in the fight of his life. Should he lose to the semi-animated hologram of a gibbering Joe Biden, and the Democrats recapture the Senate (very possible), who will be left to defend the nation?
Something to think about as we head into campaign season.
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