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Sid Note:
Coped here 23 August 2015
Article source: American
Thinker
This is a very succinct essay by Scott
S Powell. It is the best and tightest piece I have read about the historical
chain of people and events that led us from there to here. If you can't
follow the trail of philosophical insanity that has brought western civilization
to the state we are in then I suggest you may have a serious comprehension
problem.
Many of the main characters mentioned in
this essay are found in more detail (with links) in the pages and references
within THE LONG MARCH. I have added (here) additional links to other
items and people listed by Mr. Powell.
Sid's DISCLAIMER |
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August 23, 2015
The
Quiet Revolution:
How
the New Left Took Over the Democratic Party
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Frustration with division and gridlock
in Washington lead many Americans to impugn both political parties for
the current broken and ineffective state of government. There is plenty
of blame to go around, but below the surface there has been a quiet revolution
going on in only one of the two parties -- the Democratic Party -- which
is the main source of today's irreconcilable division and moral confusion.
What's remarkable is how the political
and cultural center of American values has collapsed in the last two and
a half decades with the Democratic Party having moved dramatically to the
left. Recently, Democratic National Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz could
not explain the difference between the modern Democratic Party platform
and that of socialism, while at the same time gushing over the prospect
of Socialist Bernie Sanders having a prominent place at the 2016 Democratic
Party convention.
If people today could somehow be transported
back to the time of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy, they would swear those
standard bearers were Republicans with little in common with today's Democratic
Party.
America's two major political parties
have always been fundamentally different. The Republican Party has been
rooted in the moral principles and transcendent values expressed in the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Democratic Party
acknowledges that the starting point of the country may have been the Declaration
and the Constitution, but since Woodrow Wilson many Democratic Party leaders
have contended that progress requires constant adaptation, changing morals,
and liberal interpretations of law and history.
The progressive philosophy that the
Democratic Party has come to embrace now has its roots less in the values
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness and more in the
tenets of race and class identity, equal outcomes, and an expanding welfare
state. Since individuals vary in talent, ability, and motivation and the
free market system produces unequal outcomes of success, a core principle
of the Democratic Party is now redressing this disparity through the redistribution
of wealth.
The strongest critique of early industrial
capitalism came from the German philosopher Karl Marx, who believed that
the contradictory forces of labor and capital inevitably bring about class
struggle. This in turn, he argued, causes the working class proletariat
to rise up and overthrow the capitalist order, seize the means of production,
eliminate private property and create a new order that would equitably
distribute resources from each according to his ability, and to each according
to his need. The notion of conflict of interest between labor and capital,
class warfare, and the need for redistribution of wealth, which has made
its way into the Democratic Party, has its roots in Marx. |
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The
proletariat never did revolt successfully en masse in any advanced industrialized
state. Instead, Marx's political and economic revolution was first staged
in the largely agrarian nation of Russia, carried out by Marxist revolutionary
leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin made major contributions to Marx's theories,
so much so that Marxism-Leninism became the dominant theoretical paradigm
for advancing national liberation movements, communism, and socialism wherever
in the world radical revolutionary movements arose.
Among Lenin's contributions was the
theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses
were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively
small number of vanguard leaders -- professional revolutionaries -- to
advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of
influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press,
the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively
small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise
political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.
It was Lenin who introduced the concept
of the "popular front" and coined the phrase "useful idiots" in describing
the masses who could be manipulated into mob action of marches and protests
for an ostensibly narrow cause of the popular front, which the communist
vanguard was using as a means for a greater revolutionary political end. |
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As
Lenin was consolidating power in Russia, Antonio Gramsci was emerging as
a leading Marxist theoretician in Italy and would found the Italian Communist
Party in 1921. After being imprisoned by Mussolini, the Fascist prime minister
of Italy, Gramsci authored what came to be called the Prison Notebooks,
partially published in 1947 and in complete form in 1975, a legacy that
made him one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century.
Gramsci argued that communists' route to taking power in developed, industrialized
societies such as Europe and the United States would be best achieved through
a "long march through the institutions." This would be a gradual process
of radicalization of the cultural institutions -- "the superstructure"
-- of bourgeois society, a process that would in turn transform the values
and morals of society. Gramsci believed that as society's morals were softened,
its political and economic foundation would be more easily smashed and
restructured. |
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Cultural
Marxism was also in vogue at the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt
University in Germany -- that is until 1933 when the Nazis came to power.
Many members of the "Frankfurt School," such as Herbert Marcuse, Eric
Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkeimer, and Wilhelm Reich fled to the United
States, where they ultimately found their way into professorships at various
elite universities such as Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. In the context
of American culture, "the long march through the institutions" meant,
in the words of Herbert Marcuse, "working against the established institutions
while working in them."
While the Frankfurt School was neo-Marxist,
many of its adherents were less interested in economics and redistribution
of wealth than in remaking and transforming society through attitudinal
and cultural change. They incorporated Marxist class theory into sociology
and psychology while also assimilating Freud's theories on sexuality. Thus,
Marx's theory of the dialectic of perpetual conflict was joined together
with Freud's neurotic ideas, creating a sort of Freudian-Marxism. Their
stated goal was a total transformation of society by breaking down traditional
norms and institutions such as monogamous relations and the traditional
family. This was to be accomplished by promoting and legitimizing unhinged
sexual permissiveness with no cultural or religious restraint
The countercultural influence of radicals
like Marcuse and Gramsci has been advanced more by insinuation and infiltration
than by confrontation. Their "quiet" revolution to remake society was
intended to be diffused throughout the culture gradually over a period
of time. Gramsci argued that alliances with non-communist leftist groups
would be essential to the collapse of the capitalist bourgeois order. Marcuse
believed that radical intellectuals needed to ally themselves with the
socially marginalized substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited
and persecuted of other races and ethnicities, the unemployed and the unemployable. |
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While
the influence of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School and Marxists like Gramsci
was greatest in intellectual circles in a strategic sense, Saul Alinsky
arrived on the scene in Chicago in the 1930s with the tactical tools for
the foot-soldiers of social and political revolution -- the community organizers
and non-academic labor and single-issue activists. Alinsky had a
certain charm and appeal to wealthy funders, and had no trouble raising
considerable sums to establish the Industrial
Areas Foundation in Chicago from department store mogul Marshall Field
and Sears Roebuck heiress Adele Rosenwald Levy, as well as Gardiner Howland
Shaw, an assistant secretary of state in Franklin Roosevelt's administration.
Alinsky also had other benefactors in
Washington and Wall Street. Eugene Meyer, a former chairman of the Federal
Reserve from 1930 to 1933, bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale
in 1933 for $825,000. During the difficult years of the Depression that
followed, the Post carried stories that legitimized Saul Alinsky and his
ideas.
In keeping with Lenin's famous quote
that "capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,"
Alinsky once boasted, "I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire
on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would
make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed
on Monday."
Alinsky's tactics had more in common
with Gramsci and Marcuse than the revolutionary and violent approaches
of Russian Marxists Lenin and Stalin. Alinsky, too, believed in gradualism
and subversion of the system through infiltration rather than confrontation
and revolution.
Alinsky believed that politics was war
by other means, stating specifically that "in war the end justifies almost
any means." But he was more than a nihilistic progressive revolutionary.
Alinsky's handbook, Rules for Radicals, first published in 1971,
included an admiration for the prince of darkness, Lucifer, noting that
he was "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment
and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom"?"
By the 1960s Marcuse and Alinsky were
recognized as two of the most influential leaders of the
New Left, which gained strength and numbers by taking a leading role
in the anti-Vietnam War movement. However, Alinsky and Marcuse were critical
of the violent and confrontational tactics of many of the anti-war radicals,
such as Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, preferring instead that radicals
work behind the scenes and bore into the establishment. This was seen later
in the 1960s with Alinskyites positioned to take advantage of President
Johnson's "War on Poverty" programs, to direct federal money into various
Alinksy projects.
Alinksy succeeded in what would be a
crowning achievement: the recruitment of young idealistic radicals -- Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama -- who would go on to climb to the top of political
power in the Democratic Party. Hillary wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley
College in 1969 on Alinsky's methods and remained a friend of Alinsky until
his death in 1972. A decade later, Barack Obama was trained in the methods
and Rules for Radicals in the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation
in Chicago.
Camouflage and deception are key to
Alinsky-style organizing. When Barack Obama was organizing black churches
in Chicago and was criticized for not attending church himself, he pivoted
and became a regular church attendee, ultimately becoming a member at Jeremiah
Wright's radical Trinity United Church of Christ.
The New Left did not simply fade away
when the troops came home from Southeast Asia. It went mainstream, with
many of the 60s radicals deciding to follow Alinsky's counsel to clean
up their image, put on suits and infiltrate the system. They would become
professional revolutionaries who landed jobs in the knowledge industry:
the universities, foundations, and the media and special interest activist
groups.
By winning "cultural hegemony," the
acolytes of Gramsci, Alinsky, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School believed
that the wellsprings of human thought could be largely controlled by mass
psychology and propaganda. One of Alinsky's unique contributions, explained
as the seventh Rule for Radicals, was the tactic to avoid debate on the
issues by systematically silencing, ridiculing and marginalizing people
of opposing views. At the same time, allies in the media provided cover
and a framework of acceptance for radical issues and leaders. Traditional
values of morality, family, the work ethic and free market institutions
were made to appear outdated -- even reactionary, unnecessary, and culturally
unfashionable. Ultimately this evolved into what has become known as political
correctness, which now envelops the culture.
By 1980, the counter-cultural alliances
would include radical feminist groups, civil rights and ethnic minority
advocates, extremist environmental organizations, and advocates of liberation
theology, anti-military peace groups, union leaders, radical legal activist
organizations like the ACLU, human rights watch-dog organizations, community
organizers of the Alinsky model, national and world church council bureaucracies,
anti-corporate activists, and various internationalist-minded groups. Working
separately and together, these groups could count on a sympathetic media
and favorable coverage, which facilitated building bridges to the Democratic
Party and becoming vocal constituencies deserving attention and legislative
action.
The New Left in America realized that
it was neither necessary nor desirable to own the means of production as
originally envisioned by Marx. Redistribution could be accomplished through
progressive taxation that was enshrined by an enlightened Democratic Party.
Corporate priorities could be redirected through sensational and biased
media exposure, proxy contests, mass demonstrations, boycotts, activist
lawsuits and regulatory actions. No need to be responsible for the means
of production, when you could advance Marx's anti-capitalist agenda from
the sidelines by indicting individual corporations and the system of capitalism
itself. |
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By the early to mid-1980s a third of
the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives supported the budgetary
priorities and the foreign policy advocated by the Institute
for Policy Studies (IPS) --- (the leading revolutionary
Marxist think tank in the United States, located in Washington, D.C.).
Robert
Borosage, the director of IPS, was succeeding in one of his stated
goals to "move the Democratic Party's debate internally to the left by
creating an invisible presence in the party." The particular genius of
Borosage and IPS was their strategy to spawn a myriad of spinoffs and coalitions,
a force multiplier that took propaganda and the Leninist popular front
strategy to a level never seen before in America.
Fast forward to 2008, and we find the
long march through the institutions resulting in the New Left being embedded
in constituencies that provided a base of support and policy positions
for the Obama presidential campaign. And while Barack Obama had a very
unconventional background of lengthy associations with Marxists and anti-American
radicals throughout his formative years and early adulthood, a nearly twenty-year
membership in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "hate America" church, and an extreme
left-wing voting record. The major media -- now enveloped with the
blinders of political correctness -- made little effort to report on his
background or examine his substantive qualifications. Barack
Obama was both the culturally cool and articulate black candidate who provided
a means for national redemption for a racist past, while also being the
one candidate who provided a blank slate upon which people could project
their own desires for hope and change.
Upon assuming office, President Obama
had no problem bypassing the Constitutional advise-and-consent role of
Congress in his appointment of a record number of czars, many of whom were
so radical they would have failed to pass Senate confirmation. One of the
offshoots of former IPS director Robert Borosage was the Apollo
Alliance, an organization that he co-founded in 2001. Apollo saw its
political clout increase dramatically with the election of Barack Obama.
Van Jones, a self-described communist
and an Apollo Alliance activist, was appointed Green Jobs czar by President
Obama. A month after inauguration, a centerpiece of Apollo's policy agenda
was packaged right into the $787 billion stimulus bill, which directed
$110 billion to green jobs programs. At the time of the passage of that
bill -- what came to be known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "The Apollo Alliance has
been an important factor in helping us develop and execute the strategy".
In a free society, extreme and derivative
ideologies from the destructive legacy of Marx, Lenin, and the Frankfurt
School can find some appeal to the alienated and disaffected. A constitutional
republic like the United States should have sufficient strength to withstand
most contradictions and absurdities held by a relatively small minority.
The problem today is threefold: the
Left's wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry,
a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate,
and a failing two-party system. The normal process of checks and
balances, which is made possible when compromise can be accomplished between
the parties, simply no longer works. With the long march through the institutions
having resulted in one of those parties no longer sharing much in the way
of common ground -- in terms of a philosophical heritage and values of
liberty, private property, and limited government -- compromise has become
nearly impossible. The radicalization of the Democratic Party has so affected
Congress and the current president as to render bipartisan solutions and
reconciliation all but impossible.
In the end, what is important for Americans
to realize is that the experiment with a left-wing president, like Barack
Obama, is less an aberration than the logical outcome of the transformation
of both the Democratic Party and the American culture. And the election
of Hillary Clinton, a student of Alinsky and well-schooled and practiced
in his teachings of deceit and camouflage would take the United States
further along its trajectory of decline. Hillary's election would effectively
constitute an Obama third term.
The big question is whether the nation
can survive and prosper if the culture remains fractured with a majority
adrift from the heritage, morality and values of liberty and personal responsibility
that are at the heart of the Declaration and the Constitution.
Edward Gibbon, the renowned historian,
published his first of six-volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, in 1776, the year Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence.
Gibbon described six attributes that Rome embodied at its end:
first, an overwhelming love
of show and luxury;
second, a widening gap between the rich
and the poor;
third, an obsession with sports and
a freakishness in the arts, masquerading as creativity and originality;
fourth, a decline in morals, increase
in divorce and decline in the institution of the family;
fifth, economic deterioration resulting
from debasement of the currency, inflation, excessive taxation, and overregulation;
and sixth, an increased desire by the
citizenry to live off the state.
One might hope that awareness of factors
associated with Rome's fall would prompt an awakening in America. But so
many are now disengaged and relatively few people read books, let alone
possess the capacity to reflect deeply about causality and historical parallels.
Many feel atomized and helpless.
Turning around America's decline will
require more than just political change. It's vital to reestablish a positive
and solid framework and foundation, around which a majority consensus could
emerge and grow. Such a foundation was well understood and articulated
by George Washington -- revered by many as the greatest of all U.S. presidents.
His timeless wisdom was conveyed in both his speech consecrating the nation
at its birth and also in his Farewell
Address delivered eight years later upon leaving office. He said:
"Of all the
dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and
morality are indispensable supports . . . Let it simply be asked: Where
is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of
religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation
in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that
morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to
the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason
and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail
in exclusion of religious principle." |
Unelected and unaccountable judges and
regulatory bureaucrats that are part of today's ever-expanding federal
government are only part of the problem. Clearly, American citizenry need
to understand the roots and causality of the current national decline,
and the need to embark on a new course with the capacity and energy to
go deep and broad and transcend party politics.
Life, liberty, freedom of speech and
religion, and even the Constitution itself are now threatened by a secular
progressive minority at war with God. Americans need a second Paul Revere
moment to wake up and get serious about choosing and electing leaders with
the courage to make hard choices and the conviction to correct the nation's
compass.
Reestablishing the ascendency and authority
of first principles that are at the heart of the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution is a monumental task. Accomplishing it would no doubt
unleash an enormous amount of energy, leading to a more vibrant and bountiful
economy that would in turn go a long way in securing other vital national
needs, from restoring fiscal solvency to rebuilding the military and securing
lasting peace. |
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Scott Powell is senior fellow at the
Discovery
Institute in Seattle and author of Covert
Cadre, a comprehensive book on the New Left in America published in
1988. Reach the author at scottp@discovery.org. |
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Sid Note: Most/all
references in this excellent summary by Scott Powell can be found at
A
Guide To The political Left via
DISCOVERTHE
NETWORKS.org
Bonus Link: Now take a tour of
Defining
and Understanding Conservatism
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