Daily Verse | Psalm 112:1
Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who finds great delight in his commands.

Friday and as we head into the weekend, take some time to celebrate America’s founding on July 4, 1776, when we declared our independence from Great Britain. While the current version of America is a wreck compared to what the Founding Fathers envisioned, it’s greatness is still there. We should be glad that we’ve all had the undeserved privilege of living here. I love this country—always have, always will—and refuse to submit to her critics.

Speaking of critics, today is the fourth in a series of short posts I’m doing on the development of cultural Marxism in the United States, based on Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation. The first three are here, here and here.

In summary, we started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau who believed men were essentially good but that society was a corrupting influence that limited their freedom, and the answer was a new “social contract.” Rousseau was followed by Karl Marx, who thought human nature was formed by society and that the workers were exploited by the owners, limiting their economic freedom and creating inequality. The answer was to tear down society so that communism would naturally take its place, and he predicted (influenced by G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectic theory) that capitalism would eventually fail in favor of socialism.

Surprisingly, two U.S. presidents—Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—embraced Marxist theory, putting it on equal footing with the vision of the Founding Fathers. Fortunately, their policies didn’t get too far, but they opened the door for later politicians to challenge the necessity of the U.S. Constitution. That brings us to the 1920s.

The next stage in the development of cultural Marxism is when those evil seeds were firmly planted in the United States. To get there took a few years.

It started in the early 1900s with Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian socialist and founding member of the Communist Party of Italy. He believed socialism hadn’t yet come into existence in force because capitalism produced “cultural hegemony” through its dominant ideological position in its cultural institutions to maintain power.

“He argued that capitalist power needed to be challenged by building a counter-hegemony. By this he meant that, as part of the war of position, the organic intellectuals and others within the working-class, need to develop alternative values and an alternative ideology in contrast to bourgeois ideology … He believed that a final war of manoeuvre was only possible, in the developed and advanced capitalist societies, when the war of position had been won by the organic intellectuals and the working-class building a counter-hegemony.”

(This is what we know today as “the long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by the German Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke after studying Gramsci’s philosophy. It meant that to bring about socialism, socialists had to embed themselves in a capitalist society’s cultural institutions and work from the inside out to transform its values.)

After Gramsci came György Lukács (1885–1971), a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. He built on Gramsci’s views, believing that Marx’s dialectic materialism wasn’t really a tool for predicting the future as much as it was a tool for tearing down society itself. Here’s how Breitbart describes Lukacs:

“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” (RI, p.112).

While Lukács’s political ambitions were short-lived, he eventually landed a role in the Frankfurt School, a German institute funded by a rich socialist activist, Felix Weil. Along with Lukács, Weil brought in Max Horkheimer (1895–1973). And Horkheimer lit the fuse. 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” (emphasis mine; RI, p.113).

It’s important here that I quote Breitbart at length:

“Critical theory … 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” (emphasis mine; RI, p.113).

Sound familiar?

“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'” (emphasis mine; RI, pp.113-114).

Again, does any of this ring some bells?

Horkheimer took over the Frankfurt School in 1930 and brought in “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” (RI, p.114).

They would have stayed in Germany except for a little problem called Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power caused them to flee to the United States (almost all of the Frankfurt School scholars were of Jewish heritage). And when they landed here, they found easy access to our cultural institutions because of our tradition of freedom and liberty. They exploited our freedoms to inject their poisonous ideology directly in the veins of our society and culture. The Frankfurt School was almost immediately accepted at Columbia University and

“With the 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 … Erich Fromm … was pushing cultural Marxism through psychology by blaming Western tradition for the rise of Nazism and the rejection of Marxism … Theodor Adorno was sliding Marxism into the American consciousness by attacking popular trends in the world of art” (RI, pp.116-118).

But as bad as Fromm and Horkheimer were, the worst of them all was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who founded the “New Left” for breaking down American society. We’ll pick up with him on Monday.

Have a great weekend, and may God bless America!