“Since the end of WW II American society has been suffering decomposition and deconstruction. Consider what we have come to in seven decades. The distinctiveness of marriage has been abolished (Baird v. Eisentadt); prayer and Bible reading in schools has been stamped out (Abington, Schemp, et al.); the mother’s womb has become the most dangerous place for a baby (Roe v. Wade, et al.); the rights (but not the duties) of fathers and parents of minor girls have been voided (Planned Parenthood v. Danforth); divorce has become easier than marrying; the Ten commandments have been banned from public view; and now the natural distinction between male and female is being abolished. (Goodridge, Lawrence, etc.). The Pledge of Allegiance is forbidden; the Boy Scouts are under attack; and Christmas carols are banned. Pornography is everywhere.
The structure of American society is being demolished brick by brick. Within a few short years, Americans will have reached the ‘liberty’ desired by Jean-Jacques Rosseau, the abolition of every particular dependency. This is what Hannah Arendt called the ‘atomistic mass,’ a precondition for the establishment of totalitarianism.”
Dr. Harold O. J. Brown
Powers, Principalities, Spiritual Forces:Charging Towards the Dies Irae
Now people can believe that this all happened by sheer happenstance and coincidence if they desire. There is truth in the idea that cultural wreckage doesn’t have to be minutely orchestrated and conspired towards when a people as a whole no longer recite to themselves why they do the things that they do, or what the meaning is in their traditions. When people forget why those who went before believed it was a good idea to be married before having babies then naturally they are going to be more prone to believe the new elites who tell them that marriage is an option. When people forget why those who went before them thought that killing their offspring was a bad idea naturally they are going to be more inclined to believe the new school that teaches that choice is what matters most. When people forget why their culture was the way it was — when they forget why the boundary markers were placed where they were, then they are going to be much more sanguine about removing the boundary markers and placing them elsewhere. Still, despite that observation remaining completely true, that doesn’t mean that along the way cultural gatekeepers didn’t have a particular agenda they were consciously pursuing that has led us to this time and this place.
Legion are the corrupt schools of thought that have led us to this place. One could name Dewey’s Instrumentalism. One could name legal positivism. One could name existentialism. One could name analytic Psychology. All of these have contributed to the slide that Dr. Brown mentions. One that doesn’t get a great deal of play time that perhaps is as important as all those named is the Frankfurt school of thought.
The Frankfurt school originated in post-WWII Germany and was dedicated to examining why Marxist theory failed. Marxist theory had believed that the proletariat would rise up and throw off the oppression of the Bourgeois and yet the working class during WW I marched off and savagely fought one another in defiance of Marxist class theory. This failure pushed some men into asking the question ‘why.’
Two men, working independently of one another happened upon the same answer. According to Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs and Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the reason that the proletariat failed to coalesce together was the baleful influence of Western Culture. Lukacs and Gramsci determined that if key components of Marxist utopian teleology were to be arrived at then Western culture, largely shaped as it was by Christian categories, would have to be undone. While Marx had insisted that every thing must be interpreted through economics and an oppressed class, Lukacs and Gramsci realized that every thing must be interpreted through culture and oppressed interest groups.
While traditional Marxist appealed to Marx’s later writings, the school that became known as ‘cultural Marxism’ or ‘neo-Marxism’ appealed to Marx’s earlier writings. This Frankfurt school, beginning in 1923 dedicated itself to reinterpreting Marx from economic categories into cultural categories. Led by such luminaries as Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno (Gramsci was rotting away in a Mussolini jail) the Frankfurt school set themselves to the task of ‘de-Christianizing’ the West. What should not be missed here is that these men realized that success lies in waging a successful theological war. While they may not have put it in such terms, in realizing that Western Culture must be overturned before Marxist goals could be realized they were, in essence, recognizing that the Theology that made the West must be crushed if their New World Order was to be realized. Theodore Adorno reveals this mindset in his book, “The Authoritarian Personality.” In that book, Adorno lists parenthood, pride in one’s family, traditional Christianity, adherence to traditional gender roles towards sex, and the love of one’s own nation as pathological phenomena.
In order to achieve this undoing of the West with its pathological phenomena of parenthood, pride in one’s family, Christianity, adherence to traditional gender roles towards sex, and the love of one’s own nation one insight that they happened upon was the necessity to do a ‘long march through the institutions’ of the West. By this, they showed that they understood that a culture is largely a reflection of and a product of the institutions that provide the infrastructure that holds a society together. Their plan was to infiltrate and capture the cultural institutions that held Western Society together (Law, Education, Family, Arts, Churches, Economics, Journalism, etc.) thus assuring the eclipse of Christianity and therefore the West.
With the advent of National Socialism in Germany, things got uncomfortable for these academics and their think tank with the consequence that they packed up and moved to New York City until the end of WWII. The school picked up new lights in men like Psychologist Erich Fromm and sociologist Wilhelm Reich and it set about the business of writing and publishing. Now in order to be true to its Marxist base, the school needed to find a replacement for Marx’s proletariat working class by which the heavy lifting of revolution could be accomplished. Rushing in to fill that gap came the disaffected, the cultural outcasts, and those who had marginalized themselves in terms of Western Christian Culture. The new proletariat would be comprised of the natural enemies of Western Christian culture and who would gain by that Western culture being overthrown. In Biblical language what cultural Marxism intended to do by making the new proletariat the disaffected was to make the head the tail and the tail the head. The Sexual pervert, the bra-burning feminist, and those who perceived themselves as being victims and who nourished that perception and who believed that they were owed because of their long-suffering oppression would be the ‘New Man’ used for the New World Cultural Marxist order takeover.
Of course, egalitarianism became a central part of the technique to overthrow Western Christian culture. Egalitarianism, with its doctrinaire insistence that all cultures are equal, very quickly begins to morph into a kind of cultural relativism where the only sin that obtains is to insist that one culture is better or worse than another culture. This bled into religion since religion is what births culture among varying people groups. If all cultures are equal, it is a short step to affirming that all religions are equal.
Books began to be published. Theodor Adorno’s ‘Authoritarian Personality,’ mentioned above, basically argued that anybody who belonged to Western Culture and reflected Western Culture was suffering from a kind of Psychological disease that needed to be cured. Eros and Civilization fell from the pen of Herbert Marcuse which combines Marx with Freud and argues that a liberated Eros will lead to a more satisfactory culture. In short, once all the high octane intellectual mumbo jumbo is interpreted what Marcuse argues for is lots of sex with lots of people in lots of non-marriage settings. Also, a new social theory called ‘Critical Theory’ was constructed by the Frankfurt School. Critical Theory was dedicated to destructive criticism of the current Western social order with the purpose of fomenting a non-violent social revolution in America. At its heart, Critical Theory is dedicated to bringing an end to the perceived oppression of Western Culture. Critical Theory is not intended to offer a viable alternative since a truly free culture without oppression cannot be envisioned given the existence of Western Culture. Critical theory is a negative tool intended only to rapaciously critique the faults of Western Culture. Eventually one begins to be able to connect the dots between the Critical Theory of Horkheimer and the Frankfurt school and the Deconstructionism so prevalent in Western Universities today. Critical Theory saw the hands of Western oppression in every text and labored to point out how the putative oppressors were advantaged by whatever Critical Theory was critiquing. Critical Theory dismissed any ideas of objectivity in that which was being critiqued and saw instead only advantages of power and position of favored groups over the new proletariat (the perverts, the angry feminists, the victim classes). This has led to the disappearance of the author in Literature classes in Universities in the West.
Sub-movements have spun off this Cultural Marxism. Political correctness is the political speech wing of the movement. Cultural Marxism has created an environment where speaking against the new proletariat is the same kind of crime that speaking against the working class was in the old Soviet Union. To be charged with Racism, Sexism, or homophobia today is the equivalent of speaking against the party in Stalin’s USSR. Certain speech codes are implemented and refusal to abide by these codes labels one as insensitive, or intolerant. Another sub-movement is multi-culturalism. Since the desired end of Cultural Marxism is the death of the West then the advocacy of all other cultures to be equally esteemed by Westerners serves not to lift these other cultures up but rather serves to pull Western culture down. Finally, in my opinion, the desire for illegal immigration at the very least serves the ends of Cultural Marxism. The best way to end Western Culture is by injecting a new non-Western citizenry into nations shaped by Western Culture. This would be consistent with Bertolt Brecht’s pithy observation,
In many respects, Cultural Marxism is to Christianity and Christians what National Socialism was to the Jewish Religion and to Jews. Just as German National Socialist sought a Third Reich absent of Jewish presence so Cultural Marxism seeks a New World Order absent of any traditional and historic Christian presence. Their success thus far is seen in the beginning quote. In 70 short years they have, along with other anti-Christ dogmas, poisoned the West to the point that Western Man is in danger of no longer knowing who he is (a person comprised of body and soul) or where he came from (the hand of the creator God) or where he is going (Kingdom of heaven).
The West will not last 70 more years of Gramsci’s ‘long march through our institutions.’