Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (14 page)

This is what Marx meant in his famous statement in
The Communist Manifesto
: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” In the final conflict, the workers would win and a communist synthesis would be established. Happy day!

This all sounds confusing and would make anyone with common sense stop and say, “Wait a minute—explain that one slowly, and tell me why it isn’t intellectual babble.” Unfortunately, there’s only one problem: important people in America believed it.

Let me continue with this brief history lesson.

President Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore. Even though Teddy was a Republican, he was no conservative—he was a “Progressive.” 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.

There was only one problem, of course—here in America, we have something they didn’t have in Germany or even Britain: a Constitution that protects individual liberty. But that didn’t stop Teddy. Progressivism, you see, was active. And that was the thing about Teddy—he always had to keep himself busy and powerful. Like an early-twentieth-century Barack Obama, Teddy slammed those who disagreed with him, characterizing typical American self-reliance as selfishness. Collectivism was the new cool.

Those who stand for Progressivism, said Teddy, “stand for the forward movement… for the uplift and betterment, who have faith in the people.” Ends, not means, matter: “We of today who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired. Our aim is to secure the real and not the nominal rule of the people.”
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That’s scary stuff—the business of government is all about means, which is why the Constitution is mostly a document describing how things get done, not what things should get done. Once a president starts ignoring means to get to ends, we’ve got a serious constitutional problem on our hands.

Teddy was a serious constitutional problem. His Progressivism
had practical consequences. In his 1910 speech “The New Nationalism,” he compared wealth inequalities with the Civil War and said that individual rights had to take a backseat to the common interest.
²

In that same speech, Teddy went over the Niagara Falls of Progressive ideology in a wooden barrel—he actually said that people couldn’t be permitted to make money unless it was of benefit to the community for them to do so. “We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community,” he said. This was Marx in action. With a president behind Marx, his ideals were now competing on equal footing with the Founding Fathers’.

Teddy’s Progressivism had its most dramatic effects in shaping a new view of the Constitution. He summed up his thoughts about the Constitution in one line: “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”
³

Teddy’s ideological heir didn’t make it to the White House until 1912. His name was Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was the proto-egghead, a political science professor and Princeton dean who frowned upon democracy. Our American egalitarianism was beginning to be replaced by elites who knew better than the masses. Wilson had imbibed the best of European philosophy (namely, Hegel and his heirs) while studying at Johns Hopkins University, which was the first American university to mirror the German university model. Unsurprisingly, he rejected the idea of government by the people, and he rejected the old-fashioned notion that founding principles of free enterprise and private property should be protected by checks and balances on the growth of government. Government, he said, was a living
thing, and it needed the freedom to do its magical work. Because government had stuff to do, the Constitution was a waste of time for Wilson. It held the people back. “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.”
⁴

Mostly, the Constitution was standing in the way of the grand Hegelian synthesis of government power in the name of socialism. Wilson felt that true democracy and socialism were not just compatible—they were indistinguishable. All individual rights were subject to the rights of the state: “
Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals
.”
⁵

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. This philosophy paved the way for FDR, and it echoes all the way down to Obama.

Fortunately for America, after World War I, Wilson was extremely unpopular, and Wilson’s exit led off a decade of constitutional retrenchment.

But in Europe, dirty business was afoot.

Despite the fact that Marxism made headway in terms of policy in the United States and other Western European countries in the early part of the twentieth century, orthodox Marxists had a major problem by the end of the 1910s: the actual worldwide Marxist revolution really hadn’t ignited. Not only hadn’t it happened, workers
had spent the better part of five years murdering each other en masse in World War I. Marx’s dialectical prophecy had been proved false.

But just because Marx’s dialectic materialism had been proved false, and just because soon the new Soviet Union would be slaughtering its own citizens at record rates, didn’t mean that the Marxist intellectuals were going to give up on worldwide revolution.

That was where Antonio Gramsci and Gyorgy Lukacs came in.

Gramsci was an Italian socialist who saw tearing down society as the necessary precondition for the eventual victory of global Marxism. Marxism simply hadn’t won because men were weak. And men were weak because they were the products of a capitalist society. “Man is above all else mind, consciousness,” Gramsci wrote in 1916. “That is, he is a product of history, not of nature. There is no other way of explaining why socialism has not come into existence already.”
⁶

Lukacs built on Gramsci, deciding that Marx’s dialectic materialism wasn’t really a prophetic tool for predicting the future—it was a tool for tearing down society itself. Simply destroying the status quo in the minds of the people would bring Marxism.

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.”
⁷
Fortunately, the people of Hungary weren’t nuts, so they dumped him.

That left Lukacs unemployed. But not for long.

Felix Weil was a young radical from Frankfurt, Germany, and a devotee of Marx. He, like Lukacs, saw the problems of implementing socialism—namely, that nobody really liked it very much. But like most of today’s leftie college students who live off their parents’ money while preaching the downfall of the capitalist system, he was rich. So he used his granddaddy’s money to fund the Institute for Social Research, which was really a precursor to John Podesta’s “Center for American Progress”—funded by Hungarian-born George Soros.

To staff this new institute, which quickly became known as the Frankfurt School, Weil brought in, along with Lukacs, a Marxist philosopher named Max Horkheimer. Lukacs didn’t last long, but Horkheimer did. At the Frankfurt School, 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.

Critical theory was exactly the material we were taught at Tulane. It 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.

Critical theory, says Horkheimer, is “suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as those are understood in the present order.”
⁸
So if you liked ice cream better than cake, or thought a hammer might be more useful than a screwdriver in a particular situation, you were speaking on behalf of the status quo. 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.”
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No wonder my thought upon graduating was that getting a job was selling out.

When Horkheimer took over the institute in 1930, he filled it up with 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. Marcuse later summed it up well: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society…. What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”
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Again, where am I going with all of this philosophical jabberwocky? Well, all of these boring and bleating philosophers might have faded into oblivion as so many Marxist theorists have, but the rise of Adolf Hitler prevented that. With Hitler’s rise, they had to flee (virtually all of them—Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, Fromm—were of Jewish descent). And they had no place to go.

Except the United States.

The United States’ tradition of freedom and liberty, its openness to outside ideas, and our highest value, freedom of speech, ended up making all America vulnerable to those who would exploit those ideals. We welcomed the Frankfurt School. We accepted them with open arms. They took full advantage. They walked right into our cultural institutions, and as they started to put in place their leadership, their language, and their lexicon, too many chose to ignore them. And the most dangerous thing you can do with a driven leftist intellectual clique is to ignore it.

We always feel that our incredible traditions of freedom and liberty will convert those who show up on our shores, that they will appreciate the way of life we have created—isn’t that why they wanted to come here in the first place? We can’t imagine anyone coming here, experiencing the true wonder that is living in this country, and wanting to destroy that. But that’s exactly what the Frankfurt School wanted to do.

These were not happy people looking for a new lease on life. When they moved to California, they simply couldn’t deal with the change of scenery—there was cognitive dissonance. Horkheimer and Adorno and depressive allies like Bertolt Brecht moved into a house in Santa Monica on Twenty-sixth Street, coincidentally, the epicenter of my childhood. They had moved to heaven on earth from Nazi Germany and apparently could not handle the fun, the sun, and the roaring good times. Ingratitude is not strong enough a word to describe these hideous malcontents.

If only they had had IKEA furniture, this would have made for a fantastic season of
The Real World
.

Brecht and his ilk were the Kurt Cobains of their day: massively depressed, nihilistic people who wore full suits in eighty-degree weather while living in a house by the beach. As Adam Cohen wrote in the
New York Times
, these were “dyspeptic critics of American culture. Several landed in Southern California where they were disturbed by the consumer culture and the gospel of relentless cheeriness. Depressive by nature, they focused on the disappointments and venality that surrounded them and how unnecessary it all was. It could be paradise, Theodor Adorno complained, but it was only California.”
¹¹

Adorno was wrong. It was paradise. To the rest of the world,
America’s vision was a vision of paradise. And these Marxists were here to try to destroy the best lifestyle man had ever created.

If I could go back in a time machine, I would go back to kick these malcontents in their shins.

Members of the Frankfurt School had some American allies—men who had accepted the Roosevelt/Wilson synthesis of Hegel and Marx, and who were now looking for the next step. The Frankfurt School had been sending mailers out to prominent fellow-traveler sociologists in the United States for some years and creating connections with them.

Meanwhile, Columbia University’s Sociology department was dying. They needed new blood, and they liked what they saw in the Frankfurt School.

All the Frankfurt School had to do was to get into the country, and they’d take their place in the hallowed halls of American academia. Fortunately for them, there was an organization called the Institute of International Education, specifically devoted to helping fleeing scholars from Germany. The man who held the post of assistant secretary of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars was one Edward R. Murrow, who helped ship in many of the Frankfurt School’s greatest minds. Later, Senator Joe McCarthy would try to pillory Murrow in revenge for Murrow’s coverage of the McCarthy hearings by citing Murrow’s involvement with the Institute of International Education, but by then McCarthy was finished.