Daily Verse | Psalm 97:10
Let those who love the Lord hate evil,
for he guards the lives of his faithful ones
and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.

Happy Tuesday, my friends. It’s good to be back in the digital saddle after a couple of weeks away from the keyboard. A hearty “THANK YOU!” to my friend, Bruce Gust, at muscularchristianity.com, who admirably filled in for me during my absence. His writing adds a different flavor to daveolsson.com and I’m hoping we’ll hear more from him in the future.

One of the things I’ve learned while blogging is that a lot of my discretionary time is eaten up every evening, which leaves me less time for doing something else that I love—reading. What I love about reading is learning, because learning enlarges knowledge, understanding and imagination.

Parenthetically, that’s why tyrannical regimes always burn books or, in our day, get them cancelled on Amazon. Can’t have the peasants thinking for themselves, can we? Independent thinking poses a threat to the experts with the guns. I encourage anyone with young kids to regularly read to them and, as they get older, to give them books to read on their own and then to discuss what they learned in their reading. Get them thinking independently!

That’s why I made it a point to bring several books with me while vacationing, including a couple of novels, a commentary on the Gospel of John, two political books and three sociology books. No, I didn’t read them all—there was sleeping and beaching to do!—but Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation proved to be the most potent for me.

CULTURAL MARXISM

In chapter six Breitbart traces, in the most lucid and easy-to-follow explanation I’ve ever read, the roots and evolution of cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism encompasses everything that seems upside-down in America these days, from the anarchy of Antifa to the 1619 Project to BLM to transgenderism—(hey, by the way, did you see that SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that struck down a school board’s transgender bathroom ban, effectively making transgender bathroom use the law of the land? Newly minted justice Amy Comey Barrett sided with the libs. Great to have such a staunch Catholic on the court in whom the “dogma lives loudly”!)—to Critical Race Theory (CRT) to tearing down statues to cancel culture to fake personal pronouns to open borders to … you name it, it’s all of a piece.

I knew that cultural Marxism came out of the German Frankfurt School in the mid-1940s, but this chapter, called “Breakthrough,” put all of the pieces together, from the philosophical foundations to the practical outworking that we are experiencing today.

Over the next couple of days, I want to outline it for you, too. I expect that most of us who pay attention to the news are shocked by the flood of insanity that we witness night after night, day after day, from coast to coast. If you want to know why it’s happening, we need to understand what is happening, where it came from, and what, if anything, we might be able to do about it.

So I’ll start with the philosophical underpinnings of cultural Marxism and quote Breitbart where it makes sense (and throughout this series of posts).

THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF CULTURAL MARXISM

This is where it all starts. You’ve heard the phrase, “ideas have consequences”? They do indeed, and the ideas that gave birth to cultural Marxism have reverberated down through the centuries. And, I might add, they are straight from the pit of hell.

The seeds of cultural Marxism are found in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the Swiss-born philosopher, political theorist, composer, novelist, botanist and pioneer of the autobiography. His view of humanity and thus the foundation of his philosophy is that “human beings are good by nature but are rendered corrupt by society.” Rousseau also believed that modern society destroyed the natural state of communism that originally existed in human communities.

Although born in Geneva, Switzerland—the home of John Calvin—Rousseau’s belief that humans are naturally good flies in the face of what the Bible teaches: that mankind is born corrupted and evil.

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
    not even one.”

— Romans 3:10-12

On the other hand, our Founders knew the truth about human nature. Writes Breitbart:

“To sum up, the Founders’ view was this: human nature is variable and requires training in virtue; no government should be given too much power, or the people comprising that government will use the power in the worst ways possible; individual freedom, when used within the boundaries of morality, is the highest good” (p. 107).

Rousseau believed that there needed to be a new “social contract” in which the “general will” of the people prevailed. Modern society itself was the problem. Re-ordering modern society was the solution. Sound familiar?

We’ll look at the next phase of development tomorrow.