Who
stole our culture?
Posted: May 24, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor’s note: This
column is an excerpt from Dr. Ted Baehr and Pat Boone’s new book “The Culture-wise Family: Upholding Christian
Values in a Mass Media World.” In the book, entertainment expert
Dr. Ted Baehr and legendary musician Pat Boone urge people to make wise choices
for themselves and their families so they can protect their children from toxic
messages in the culture.
The
following is Chapter 10, written by historian Williams S. Lind.
By William S.
Lind
Sometime
during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in
the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good
educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home
middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows
reflected sound, traditional values.
Where did it
all go? How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today
– so different that those who grew up prior to the ’60s feel like it’s a
foreign country? Did it just “happen”?
It didn’t
just “happen.” In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our
culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how
and why is one of the most important parts of our nation’s history – and it
is a story almost no one knows. The people behind it wanted it that way.
What
happened, in short, is that America’s traditional culture, which had grown up
over generations from our Western, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an
ideology. We know that ideology best as “political correctness” or
“multi-culturalism.” It really is cultural Marxism, Marxism
translated from economic into cultural terms in an effort that goes back not to
the 1960s, but to World War I. Incredible as it may seem, just as the old
economic Marxism of the Soviet Union has faded away, a new cultural Marxism has
become the ruling ideology of America’s elites. The No. 1 goal of that cultural
Marxism, since its creation, has been the destruction of Western culture and
the Christian religion.
To
understand anything, we have to know its history. To understand who stole our
culture, we need to take a look at the history of “political
correctness.”
Early
Marxist theory
Before World
War I, Marxist theory said that if Europe ever erupted in war, the working
classes in every European country would rise in revolt, overthrow their governments
and create a new Communist Europe. But when war broke out in the summer of
1914, that didn’t happen. Instead, the workers in every European country lined
up by the millions to fight their country’s enemies. Finally, in 1917, a
Communist revolution did occur, in Russia. But attempts to spread that
revolution to other countries failed because the workers did not support it.
After World
War I ended in 1918, Marxist theorists had to ask themselves the question: What
went wrong? As good Marxists, they could not admit Marxist theory had been
incorrect. Instead, two leading Marxist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci in Italy
and Georg Lukacs in Hungary (Lukacs was considered the most brilliant Marxist
thinker since Marx himself) independently came up with the same answer. They
said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working
class to its true, Marxist class interests, that a Communist revolution was
impossible in the West, until both could be destroyed. That objective,
established as cultural Marxism’s goal right at the beginning, has never
changed.
A new
strategy
Gramsci
famously laid out a strategy for destroying Christianity and Western culture,
one that has proven all too successful. Instead of calling for a Communist
revolution up front, as in Russia, he said Marxists in the West should take
political power last, after a “long march through the institutions” –
the schools, the media, even the churches, every institution that could
influence the culture. That “long march through the institutions” is
what America has experienced, especially since the 1960s. Fortunately,
Mussolini recognized the danger Gramsci posed and jailed him. His influence
remained small until the 1960s, when his works, especially the “Prison
Notebooks,” were rediscovered.
Georg Lukacs
proved more influential. In 1918, he became deputy commissar for culture in the
short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik regime in Hungary. There, asking, “Who will
save us from Western civilization?” he instituted what he called
“cultural terrorism.” One of its main components was introducing sex
education into Hungarian schools. Lukacs realized that if he could destroy the
country’s traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward
destroying its traditional culture and Christian faith.
Far from
rallying to Lukacs’ “cultural terrorism,” the Hungarian working class
was so outraged by it that when Romania invaded Hungary, the workers would not
fight for the Bela Kun government, and it fell. Lukacs disappeared, but not for
long. In 1923, he turned up at a “Marxist Study Week” in Germany, a
program sponsored by a young Marxist named Felix Weil who had inherited
millions. Weil and the others who attended that study week were fascinated by
Lukacs’ cultural perspective on Marxism.
The
Frankfurt School
Weil
responded by using some of his money to set up a new think tank at Frankfurt
University in Frankfurt, Germany. Originally it was to be called the
“Institute for Marxism.” But the cultural Marxists realized they
could be far more effective if they concealed their real nature and objectives.
They convinced Weil to give the new institute a neutral-sounding name, the
“Institute for Social Research.” Soon known simply as the
“Frankfurt School,” the Institute for Social Research would become
the place where political correctness, as we now know it, was developed. The
basic answer to the question “Who stole our culture?” is the cultural
Marxists of the Frankfurt School.
At first,
the Institute worked mainly on conventional Marxist issues such as the labor
movement. But in 1930, that changed dramatically. That year, the Institute was
taken over by a new director, a brilliant young Marxist intellectual named Max
Horkheimer. Horkheimer had been strongly influenced by Georg Lukacs. He immediately
set to work to turn the Frankfurt School into the place where Lukacs’
pioneering work on cultural Marxism could be developed further into a
full-blown ideology.
To that end,
he brought some new members into the Frankfurt School. Perhaps the most important
was Theodor Adorno, who would become Horkheimer’s most creative collaborator.
Other new members included two psychologists, Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, who
were noted promoters of feminism and matriarchy, and a young graduate student
named Herbert Marcuse.
Advances
in cultural Marxism
With the
help of this new blood, Horkheimer made three major advances in the development
of cultural Marxism. First, he broke with Marx’s view that culture was merely
part of society’s “superstructure,” which was determined by economic
factors. He said that on the contrary, culture was an independent and very
important factor in shaping a society.
Second,
again contrary to Marx, he announced that in the future, the working class
would not be the agent of revolution. He left open the question of who would
play that role – a question Marcuse answered in the 1950s.
Third,
Horkheimer and the other Frankfurt School members decided that the key to
destroying Western culture was to cross Marx with Freud. They argued that just
as workers were oppressed under capitalism, so under Western culture, everyone
lived in a constant state of psychological repression. “Liberating”
everyone from that repression became one of cultural Marxism’s main goals. Even
more important, they realized that psychology offered them a far more powerful
tool than philosophy for destroying Western culture: psychological
conditioning.
Today, when
Hollywood’s cultural Marxists want to “normalize” something like
homosexuality (thus “liberating” us from “repression”),
they put on television show after television show where the only normal-seeming
white male is a homosexual. That is how psychological conditioning works;
people absorb the lessons the cultural Marxists want them to learn without even
knowing they are being taught.
The
Frankfurt School was well on the way to creating political correctness. Then
suddenly, fate intervened. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to
power in Germany, where the Frankfurt School was located. Since the Frankfurt
School was Marxist, and the Nazis hated Marxism, and since almost all its
members were Jewish, it decided to leave Germany. In 1934, the Frankfurt
School, including its leading members from Germany, was re-established in New
York City with help from Columbia University. Soon, its focus shifted from
destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to doing so in the United
States. It would prove all too successful.
New
developments
Taking
advantage of American hospitality, the Frankfurt School soon resumed its
intellectual work to create cultural Marxism. To its earlier achievements in
Germany, it added these new developments.
Critical
Theory
To serve its
purpose of “negating” Western culture, the Frankfurt School developed
a powerful tool it called “Critical Theory.” What was the theory? The
theory was to criticize. By subjecting every traditional institution, starting
with family, to endless, unremitting criticism (the Frankfurt School was
careful never to define what it was for, only what it was against), it hoped to
bring them down. Critical Theory is the basis for the “studies”
departments that now inhabit American colleges and universities. Not
surprisingly, those departments are the home turf of academic political
correctness.
Studies
in prejudice
The
Frankfurt School sought to define traditional attitudes on every issue as
“prejudice” in a series of academic studies that culminated in
Adorno’s immensely influential book, “The Authoritarian Personality,”
published in 1950. They invented a bogus “F-scale” that purported to
tie traditional beliefs on sexual morals, relations between men and women and
questions touching on the family to support for fascism. Today, the favorite
term the politically correct use for anyone who disagrees with them is “fascist.”
Domination
The
Frankfurt School again departed from orthodox Marxism, which argued that all of
history was determined by who owned the means of production. Instead, they said
history was determined by which groups, defined as men, women, races,
religions, etc., had power or “dominance” over other groups. Certain
groups, especially white males, were labeled “oppressors,” while
other groups were defined as “victims.” Victims were automatically
good, oppressors bad, just by what group they came from, regardless of
individual behavior.
Though
Marxists, the members of the Frankfurt School also drew from Nietzsche (someone
else they admired for his defiance of traditional morals was the Marquis de
Sade). They incorporated into their cultural Marxism what Nietzsche called the
“transvaluation of all values.” What that means, in plain English, is
that all the old sins become virtues, and all the old virtues become sins.
Homosexuality is a fine and good thing, but anyone who thinks men and women
should have different social roles is an evil “fascist.” That is what
political correctness now teaches children in public schools all across
America. (The Frankfurt School wrote about American public education. It said
it did not matter if school children learned any skills or any facts. All that
mattered was that they graduate from the schools with the right
“attitudes” on certain questions.)
Media and
entertainment
Led by
Adorno, the Frankfurt School initially opposed the culture industry, which they
thought “commodified” culture. Then, they started to listen to Walter
Benjamin, a close friend of Horkheimer and Adorno, who argued that cultural
Marxism could make powerful use of tools like radio, film and later television
to psychologically condition the public. Benjamin’s view prevailed, and
Horkheimer and Adorno spent the World War II years in Hollywood. It is no
accident that the entertainment industry is now cultural Marxism’s most
powerful weapon.
The
growth of Marxism in the United States
After World
War II and the defeat of the Nazis, Horkheimer, Adorno and most of the other
members of the Frankfurt School returned to Germany, where the Institute
re-established itself in Frankfurt with the help of the American occupation
authorities. Cultural Marxism in time became the unofficial but all-pervasive
ideology of the Federal Republic of Germany.
But hell had
not forgotten the United States. Herbert Marcuse remained here, and he set
about translating the very difficult academic writings of other members of the
Frankfurt School into simpler terms Americans could easily grasp. His book
“Eros and Civilization” used the Frankfurt School’s crossing of Marx
with Freud to argue that if we would only “liberate non-procreative
eros” through “polymorphous perversity,” we could create a new
paradise where there would be only play and no work. “Eros and
Civilization” became one of the main texts of the New Left in the 1960s.
Marcuse also
widened the Frankfurt School’s intellectual work. In the early 1930s,
Horkheimer had left open the question of who would replace the working class as
the agent of Marxist revolution. In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question,
saying it would be a coalition of students, blacks, feminist women and
homosexuals – the core of the student rebellion of the 1960s, and the sacred
“victims groups” of political correctness today. Marcuse further took
one of political correctness’s favorite words, “tolerance,” and gave
it a new meaning. He defined “liberating tolerance” as tolerance for
all ideas and movements coming from the left, and intolerance for all
ideas and movements coming from the right. When you hear the cultural Marxists
today call for “tolerance,” they mean Marcuse’s “liberating
tolerance” (just as when they call for “diversity,” they mean
uniformity of belief in their ideology).
The student
rebellion of the 1960s, driven largely by opposition to the draft for the
Vietnam War, gave Marcuse a historic opportunity. As perhaps its most famous
“guru,” he injected the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the
baby boom generation. Of course, they did not understand what it really was. As
was true from the Institute’s beginning, Marcuse and the few other people
“in the know” did not advertise that political correctness and
multi-culturalism were a form of Marxism. But the effect was devastating: a
whole generation of Americans, especially the university-educated elite,
absorbed cultural Marxism as their own, accepting a poisonous ideology that
sought to destroy America’s traditional culture and Christian faith. That
generation, which runs every elite institution in America, now wages a
ceaseless war on all traditional beliefs and institutions. They have largely
won that war. Most of America’s traditional culture lies in ruins.
A
counter-strategy
Now you know
who stole our culture. The question is, what are we, as Christians and as
cultural conservatives, going to do about it?
We can
choose between two strategies. The first is to try to retake the existing
institutions – the public schools, the universities, the media, the
entertainment industry and most of the mainline churches – from the cultural
Marxists. They expect us to try to do that, they are ready for it, and we would
find ourselves, with but small voice and few resources compared to theirs,
making a frontal assault against prepared defensive positions. Any soldier can
tell you what that almost always leads to: defeat.
There is
another, more promising strategy. We can separate ourselves and our families
from the institutions the cultural Marxists control and build new institutions
for ourselves, institutions that reflect and will help us recover our
traditional Western culture.
Several
years ago, my colleague Paul Weyrich wrote an open letter to the conservative
movement suggesting this strategy. While most other conservative (really
Republican) leaders demurred, his letter resonated powerfully with grass-roots
conservatives. Many of them are already part of a movement to secede from the
corrupt, dominant culture and create parallel institutions: the homeschooling
movement. Similar movements are beginning to offer sound alternatives in other
aspects of life, including movements to promote small, often organic family
farms and to develop community markets for those farms’ products. If Brave New
World’s motto is “Think globally, act locally,” ours should be
“Think locally, act locally.”
Thus, our
strategy for undoing what cultural Marxism has done to America has a certain
parallel to its own strategy, as Gramsci laid it out so long ago. Gramsci
called for Marxists to undertake a “long march through the
institutions.” Our counter-strategy would be a long march to create our
own institutions. It will not happen quickly, or easily. It will be the work of
generations – as was theirs. They were patient, because they knew the
“inevitable forces of history” were on their side. Can we not be
equally patient, and persevering, knowing that the Maker of history is on ours?
William
S. Lind has a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and an M.A., also in
History, from Princeton University. He serves as director of the Center for
Cultural Conservatism of the Free
Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C., and as a vestryman at St. James
Anglican Church in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.
