It’s Friday! Whenever I say that, I hear a rejoinder in my head, “… but Sunday’s comin’!” The entire phrase is from Tony Campolo, who became known for preaching a Good Friday sermon that noted the crushing hopelessness the disciples felt as Jesus lay in the tomb. But he’d end each segment of his sermon with, “It’s Friday … but Sunday’s comin’!” And by the end of it, his audience would be cheering and fired up with the hope that Friday wasn’t the end of the story. Sunday was.
The video isn’t the sermon or even the best rendition of the phrase, but it gives you a taste of what it was like to listen to it.
When we look at the state of our world, it’s easy to believe it’s Friday and always will be. I’m not naturally a pessimist, but neither am I an unadulterated optimist. I think of myself as a realist: “Yep, it’s bad and the truth is that it will never truly be Sunday until Jesus returns.”
So, will the situation on the ground here in the U.S. improve? I don’t know.
“Improve” depends on who you’re talking to. To the regressive Left, “improve” apparently means to do away with law and order, police, prisoners, guns, free speech, the Constitution, American history, American culture, white people, fair elections, civility, capitalism, borders, the nuclear family, male and female, the suburbs, individual responsibility, religion, math, grammar, Mount Rushmore and common sense (also known as “reason”).
As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, the desire to destroy what we know as the United States of America is almost entirely due to Marxist philosophy. I’ve occasionally traced the source of its presence in the U.S. and know that it is rooted in Rousseau’s philosophy. But I came across an article yesterday that is so helpful for understanding why half our country is acting the way it is, that I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
Author and former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, Sebastian Gorka, lays out in summary fashion how Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s worldview metastasized until it embedded itself in America’s soil in his essay, From Alinsky to AOC: Will Communism Finally Win in America?
It’s a long, but worthwhile, read because it helps the reader understand the animating philosophy behind the rise of the extreme Left. If you want to understand why these peacefully rioting cherubs don’t love this country like you do, this article will introduce you to the key players in the historical drama.
Let me briefly sketch it out for you. The French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), taught that mankind in his natural state was inherently good, and believed that the civilizing influence of organized society limited man’s natural instincts and corrupted the natural state of equality that defined mankind’s origins. To recapture our goodness, he advocated moving away from individual rights toward the communal good.
From there, the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) developed his collectivist ideology, which required the individual to subordinate his individuality for the sake of the common interest. Marx incorporated fellow German Hegel’s (1770 – 1831) concept of mankind’s “inevitability” toward perfection, but he rejected any transcendent element (i.e. God) in that progression. That left him with a materialism that consisted of an ongoing conflict in society between the bourgeoisie (the ruling class who owned the means of production) and the proletariat (the wage earners whose only value was how much they could produce).
Gorka goes on to trace how Marxist thought was advanced by Italian Antonio Francesco Gramsci (pictured left, 1891 – 1937), Hungarian György Lukacs (1885 – 1971), and German philosopher Max Horkheimer (1895 – 1973) who, along with other Marxists, developed his deconstructive “critical theory.” Gorka writes,
According to this “theory” that now dominates the social sciences across America and most of the Judeo-Christian world, the current state of affairs must be relentlessly challenged on all fronts. Because power is in the hands of those who do not deserve it, all standing relationships and all dominant concepts must be criticized and dismantled, even language itself, until modern society lies deconstructed, in pieces, and incapable of defending itself from being rebuilt along Marxist lines.
Gorka moves on to say that “Horkheimer recruited fellow-travelers whose names are now revered by leftist radicals—philosophers who hated the traditions of the West like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Erich Fromm—each committed to the belief that all of our [Western] civilization’s legacy institutions must be repeatedly attacked until they collapse, starting with the family unit and ending with the nation-state itself.”
You may remember hearing that one of the founders of the Black Lives MatterTM organization is a self-described “trained Marxist.” In fact, one of their goals, in true Marxist fashion, is the abolition of the nuclear family. On BLM’s website they tell us straight up that,
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
Gorka also cites Andrew Breitbart, who, “as usual, expressed this approach eloquently when, in his autobiography, Righteous Indignation, he described Marcuse’s mission as one ‘to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece.'”
There is much, much more in Gorka’s article, including tying the development of these philosophies directly to what we are witnessing today in the likes of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and, of course, BLM). When you’re done with it, you’ll better understand why we are experiencing the upheaval we are.
The bottom line is this: Marxist ideology, based on a clearly false estimation of the human condition, morphed into cultural Marxism, which pits not the moneyed class and the working class against each other, but “victim groups” against each other: men against women, whites against non-whites, teachers against the administration, urban poor against suburban middle class, and so on.
We see it all around us, looking like Friday. The rejection of what we know and the violence accompanying it could leave us hopeless. But Sunday’s comin’!
The big question is, What do we do about it until Sunday?