Where does all this stuff that you’ve
heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement,
the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands,
all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our
history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write,
and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word,
a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly
in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded
them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because
it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop
where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this
situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but
it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What
is it?
We call it “Political
Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally
in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious.
In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the
disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia,
in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is
not funny. PC is deadly serious.
If we look at it analytically, if we
look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political
Correctness is cultural
Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.
It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the
peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets
of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very
obvious.
>>> First of
all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature
of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college
campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas,
where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines
set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the
local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted “victims” groups
that PC revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble. Within
the small legal system of the college, they face formal charges – some
star-chamber proceeding – and punishment. That is a little look into the
future that Political Correctness intends for the nation as a whole.
Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian
because the essence of an ideology (I would note that conservatism correctly
understood is not an ideology) is to take some philosophy and say on the
basis of this philosophy certain things must be true – such as the whole
of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women.
Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become
forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced
to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie,
they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, “Wait a minute.
This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true,” the power of the state must
be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why ideology invariably
creates a totalitarian state.
>>> Second,
the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has
a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all
of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural
Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined
by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power
over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed,
is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.
>>> Third,
just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and
peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and
capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness
certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist
women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups
are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless
of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically
to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic
Marxism.
>>> Fourth,
both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical
Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated
the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural
Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things
like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications
is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t
as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative
action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White
owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for
a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle
tool for both forms of Marxism.
>>> And finally,
both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they
want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural
Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text,
removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find,
for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women,
or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply
become grist for the mill, which proves that “all history is about which
groups have power over which other groups.” So the parallels are very evident
between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet
Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.
But the parallels are not accidents.
The parallels did not come from nothing.
The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history
that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group
of academics who have studied this. And the history goes back, as I said,
to World War I, as do so many of the pathologies that are today bringing
our society, and indeed our culture, down.
Marxist theory said that when the general
European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class
throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their governments – the bourgeois
governments – because the workers had more in common with each other across
the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and
the ruling class in their own country. Well, 1914 came and it didn’t happen.
Throughout Europe, workers rallied to their flag and happily marched off
to fight each other. The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist
Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there
are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something
was wrong.
Marxists knew by definition it couldn’t
be the theory. In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it
looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread
and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the
Spartacist
uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the
Munich
Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.
So the Marxists’ had a problem. And
two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio
Gramsci in Italy and Georg
Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true
class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western
culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded
by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was
considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said
in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized
that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture:
Western civilization itself.
Lukacs gets a chance to put his ideas
into practice, because when the home grown Bolshevik
Bela Kun government is established in Hungary in 1919, he becomes deputy
commissar for culture, and the first thing he did was introduce sex education
into the Hungarian schools. This ensured that the workers would not support
the Bela Kun government, because the Hungarian people looked at this aghast,
workers as well as everyone else. But he had already made the connection
that today many of us are still surprised by, that we would consider the
“latest thing.”
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is
established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic
into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today,
and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s.
This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German
trader by the name of Felix
Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed
by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the
First
Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German
thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism. And
he says, “What we need is a think-tank.”
Washington is full of think tanks and
we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. Weil
endowed an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established
in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for
Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it
was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last
thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form
of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social
Research.
Weil is very clear about his goals.
In 1971, he wrote to Martin
Jay the author of a principle book on the Frankfurt
School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally,
and he said, “I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due
to its contributions to Marxism.” Well, he was successful. The first director
of the Institute, Carl
Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according
to Martin Jay, “by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as
a scientific methodology.” Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle
at the Institute, and that never changed.
The initial work at the Institute was
rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max
Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very
much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School
are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking,
but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they
are doing and says, “Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this.”
Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that
he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of
Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined
it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, “If it can be said that in
the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily
with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure,”
– and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School,
I’m not reading from a critic here – “in the years after 1930 its primary
interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist
formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question
by Critical Theory.”
The stuff we’ve been hearing about this
morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay
studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are
branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does
is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called
Critical
Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, “What
is the theory?” The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way
to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down
an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be
done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their
definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression
– the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their
theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in
individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory
is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism
possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down.
And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society
is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative
of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around
this time are Theodore
Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich
Fromm and Herbert
Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to
Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly
Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,”
that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create.
Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on
the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute.
So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the
early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections
of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were
derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part
socially determined.” Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.
Another example is the emphasis we now
see on environmentalism. “Materialism as far back as Hobbes
had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature.” That was
Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. “The theme of man’s
domination of nature,” according to Jay, ” was to become a central concern
of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.” “Horkheimer’s antagonism
to the fetishization of labor, (here’s were they’re obviously departing
from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism,
the demand for human, sensual happiness.” In one of his most trenchant
essays, Egoism
and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer “discussed
the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture.”
And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his
“protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality.”
How does all of this stuff flood in
here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives
today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also,
to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly
they shut down the Institute
for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City,
and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia
University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s,
though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from
Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every
aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society.
There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of
them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became
a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including
Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.
These origins of Political Correctness
would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent
events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was
driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the
student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there
and say, “Hell no we won’t go,” they had to have some theoretical explanation
behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital.
Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the
60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country
today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America
when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And
whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when
it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom,
he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained
here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity
to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the
New Left in the United States.
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book.
It virtually became the bible of the SDS
and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros
and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order
(he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence
of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person
with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed.
We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive
order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have
a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.”
And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play.
What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students,
they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about
anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing
in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot
of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially,
“Do your own thing,” “If it feels good do it,” and “You never have to go
to work.” By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, “Make
love, not war.” Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse
defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from
the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined
the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes
back to the 1930s.
In conclusion, America today is in the
throes of the greatest and direst transformation in its history. We are
becoming an ideological state, a country with an official state ideology
enforced by the power of the state. In “hate crimes” we now have people
serving jail sentences for political thoughts. And the Congress is now
moving to expand that category ever further. Affirmative action is part
of it. The terror against anyone who dissents from Political Correctness
on campus is part of it. It’s exactly what we have seen happen in Russia,
in Germany, in Italy, in China, and now it’s coming here. And we don’t
recognize it because we call it Political Correctness and laugh it off.
My message today is that it’s not funny, it’s here, it’s growing and it
will eventually destroy, as it seeks to destroy, everything that we have
ever defined as our freedom and our culture. |