Daily Verse | Psalm 119:9
How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word.

Monday and July 5. I don’t blog on the weekends (yet!) so I missed being able to contribute something to the Independence Day celebrations. May I suggest this as an after-event chaser:

Beautiful, isn’t it? Love her range and enthusiasm! I also note that she’s not a little white girl, showing that people of all races can sing our national anthem with passion if they love their country. Perhaps you remember non-white singer Whitney Houston’s rendition that still brings a tear to my eye: Whitney Houston sings the National Anthem — Star Spangled Banner.

I want to continue tracing the development of cultural Marxism here in the United States. I believe we need to understand what has led us to this point in our history and how it happened so that we can carefully think about how we unwind it (if we can). Here are all the previous posts:

1. DAILY BROADSIDE | CULTURAL MARXISM GOT ITS START IN THE 1700S
2. DAILY BROADSIDE | MARX FOLLOWED ROUSSEAU WITH A VIOLENT TWIST
3. DAILY BROADSIDE | TWO U.S. PRESIDENTS EMBRACED MARXIST THEORY—AT THE START OF THE 20TH CENTURY
4. DAILY BROADSIDE | CULTURAL MARXISTS ARRIVE ON AMERICA’S SHORES

I ended the last post with Max Horkheimer who coined the term “critical theory,” which Andrew Breitbart explains is, “an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo.” Yet as badly influential as Horkheimer was, it was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who founded the “New Left,” who was truly revolutionary in his attacks on America.

Marcuse was a former student of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, the father of “deconstruction”—a process that examined the past with a critical eye in order to tear it down. Marcuse became a U.S. citizen, taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis and the University of California in San Diego. He also wrote Eros and Civilization, “making the case that sexual liberation was the best counter to the psychological ills of society. Marcuse preferred a society of “polymorphous perversity,” which is just what it sounds like—people having sex every which way, with whatever” (RI, pp.119-120).

We’ll find that at the core of almost all the attempts to undermine American values, tradition and culture is a sexual perversity aimed at “escaping” the Judeo-Christian value system. Breitbart writes:

“Marcuse excused sexual promiscuity as the fulfillment of the need for people to rise up against Western civilization and to free themselves from the sexual repression it created” (RI, p.120).

This was “critical theory” in action: criticizing the time-tested sexual standards established in American culture and enticing the next generations to abandon them as repressive. The slogan, “Make love, not war” was attributed to Marcuse, and “[w]hile Marcuse may not have been the most important intellectual force behind the Frankfurt School, he was its most devious and effective marketer. The advertising adage “Sex sells” was applied to selling a generation on the idea that their parents’ values and ideals were repressive and evil” (emphasis mine; RI, p.120).

But where Marcuse left a deep and terrible scar on the American landscape was in shifting focus from “workers of the world unite” to finding a different set of victim groups. Again, here’s what Breitbart says:

[Marcuse] recognized that in the United States there would be no such uprising by the working class. He therefore needed a different set of interest groups to tear down capitalism using his critical theory. And he found those groups in the racial, ethnic, and sexual groups that hated the old order. These victimized interest groups rightly opposed all the beauties of Western civilization ‘with all the defiance, and the hatred, and the joy of rebellious victims, defining their own humanity against the definitions of the masters.’

“Marcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and ‘multiculturalism’ as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all ‘victim groups’ in opposition to the society at large” (RI, p.121).

And now we begin to see the direct ties to what we are experiencing today. The devious and seductive planning of Marcuse has been largely successful in breaking apart our society.

But he had one other destructive seed he planted and that was the concept of “repressive tolerance.” According to Marcuse, “tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish—and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down.” Here’s how twisted his idea was:

“‘[T]he realization of the objective of tolerance,’ he wrote, ‘would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.’ America was experiencing a ‘repressive tolerance’ under which dissenting viewpoints were stifled; what it needed was ‘partisan tolerance'” (RI, p.122).

In other words, defy the current order. All of it.

That takes some brass, no?

There’s another word for what he called partisan tolerance: political correctness. Political correctness was a term used by Chinese communist leader, Mao Tse-tung, in a 1963 essay in which “he argued that the Marxist society determines correct ideas, and all incorrect ideas must be put out of their misery.”

It was now that the foundations for the Marxist takeover had been laid. Critical theory and political correctness had infected a generation of students and we were quickly approaching the 1970s. It was then that Saul Alinsky published his book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals and the New Left had a playbook that took theory and made it practical.

We’ll look at that important development in tomorrow’s post.