Tag Archives: karlmarx

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Daily Broadside | Two U.S. Presidents Embraced Marxist Theory—at the Start of the 20th Century

Daily Verse | Psalm 111:1
I will extol the Lord with all my heart
    in the council of the upright and in the assembly.

July 1 and we’re in the middle of a series of short posts on how the craziness of the Left became what we call “cultural Marxism.” In the last two posts (here and here) I laid out, based on chapter six of Andrew Breitbart’s book, Righteous Indignation, how today’s insanity is rooted in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx.

Rousseau believed that humans are intrinsically good but are corrupted by society. That belief doesn’t square with either the Scriptures or with the Founders’ beliefs about human nature. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51,

“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

Karl Marx, who lived during the 19th century, believed that society itself formed human nature. Both Rousseau and Marx believed that men were not free or equal and that society was to blame. Both envisioned replacing the current society with a new one—Rousseau with a new “social contract” and Marx by destroying the surrounding society and replacing it with communism. Both believed that “communism” was the natural and best organizational structure for a flourishing society.

What’s amazing is that near the turn of 20th century, we elected two presidents who embraced what we call “Progressivism.” As Breitbart puts it, “Progressivism was a strain in American thought that merged the Hegelian dialectic with Marxism, backed by a rosy Rousseau-ian view of humanity and the general will—basically, it was soft Marxism without the class struggle” (RI, p.109).

The first president with this ideology was Teddy Roosevelt, who served from 1901 to 1909; the second was Woodrow Wilson, who held the office from 1913 to 1921. Both loathed the Constitution’s place as our authoritative document for how America’s government should work. Roosevelt said, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!” and Wilson said, “Justly revered as our great constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth clothed in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws” (RI, pp.110-111).

We don’t need no stinkin’ constitution!

Breitbart goes on to write,

“Both Roosevelt and Wilson were far less concerned about the rights of individuals or the value of republicanism; it was the job of Great Leaders to hand down good governance. They thought that great decisions should be made on high by men of high thought, and that the dirty process of democracy just blocked any chance at true change. The philosophy paved the way for FDR, and it echoes all the way down to Obama” (RI, p.111).

Breitbart wrote this in 2011 and died in 2012; therefore, he wouldn’t have known that it now echoes all the way down to the dementia patient currently occupying the White House.

Nevertheless, there were two U.S. presidents in the early 1900s who embraced Marxist ideology, challenging the Founding Fathers’ ideology. I never knew that. Did you?

But that was just the beginning of it. Tomorrow we’ll look at the Frankfurt School, and that’s when this gets really interesting.

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Daily Broadside | Marx Followed Rosseau with a Violent Twist

Daily Verse | Psalm 100:1
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.

It’s Wednesday and the last day of June, meaning we’ve hit the mid-point of 2021. On the downside, it means we’ve survived only one eighth of Resident Biden’s reign—seven more to go (grrr!). On the upside, we’ve completed one quarter on our way to the 2022 mid-terms. Only three quarters to go until we place a check on the junior commies in the White House. So there’s that.

Yesterday I started what will be a short series of posts (inspired by a chapter in Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation) in which I want to explain the source of the insanity currently gripping our country. It’s called cultural Marxism, and it has deep roots reaching back to the Enlightenment (or the Age of Reason) from about 1685-1815. If you missed yesterday’s post, you can read it here: CULTURAL MARXISM GOT ITS START IN THE 1700s.

To quickly recap, Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) posited that human beings are basically good but that “society” corrupted them. The overriding concern of his work was,

“to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs. This concern has two dimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter has greater importance. In the modern world, human beings come to derive their very sense of self from the opinion of others, a fact which Rousseau sees as corrosive of freedom and destructive of individual authenticity. In his mature work, he principally explores two routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political one aimed at constructing political institutions that allow for the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign; the second is a project for child development and education that fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest” (emphasis mine).

In Rousseau’s mind, the solution was a new “social contract” based on the “general will” which embodied the entire will of the people (RI, p.108). The idea of changing society interested Karl Marx (1818–1883), who picked up on Rousseau’s philosophy and made it his own.

Marx saw all of history as a series of “class struggles” but, contrary to Rousseau, believed that human nature was formed by the surrounding society. This led him to believe that if “human nature was to be changed, it could be changed only by destroying the surrounding society” (RI, ibid.).

In addition, Marx incorporated Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic theory into his philosophy. The term “dialectics” means a process of resolving conflict between two opposing sides that results in a “linear evolution or development from less sophisticated definitions or views to more sophisticated ones later.“

For Marx, that meant that “capitalism carried the seeds of its own destruction—capitalism (thesis) would be faced with the wealth gap that capitalism creates (antithesis), and that wealth gap would be solved by socialism/communism (synthesis)” (RI, ibid.).

In sum, Rousseau believed that men and women were basically good, that society corrupted them, and the solution was to form a different kind of society. Marx picked up where Rosseau left off, believing that society corrupted human nature but that the solution was to destroy the surrounding society. In both cases, Rousseau and Marx believed that the current society had to be replaced, and that “communism” was the solution.

You can see the faintest forms taking shape in their philosophical viewpoints that we recognize today. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at how this thinking came to America.