What would the Unholy Left do without illusion? It is the cornerstone of their philosophical and governing philosophy, a desperate desire to look at basic facts and plain meanings and see otherwise, to see, in fact, the very opposite. From this standpoint, nothing is ever what it seems (unless it comports with quotidian leftist dogma), and everything is subject to challenge. At the same time, the Left’s fondness for complexity over simplicity betrays its affection for obfuscation and misdirection. The reason the leftist program dares not show its true face in an American election is that it would be overwhelmingly rejected (even today, after a century of constant proselytism from its redoubts in academia and the media). But in an age when credentialism is disguised as supreme, practically Faustian knowledge, and when minutiae are elevated to the status of timeless universal principles (even as the existence of such principles is otherwise denied), Leftism masquerades as sophistication and expertise. But the mask conceals only intellectual juvenile delinquency gussied up in Hegelian drag. The coat might be too small and the shoes too big, but if you don’t look too closely and really wish to believe—as in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot—the illusion might pass for reality.
Which brings us back to Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, the embodiment of the antithetical, whose adherents elevated this delinquent doublespeak into an art form, brought it to the U.S. via Switzerland after fleeing the Nazis, and—wittingly or unwittingly—injected into American intellectual society an angry, defeatist philosophy alien to the Anglo-American and Enlightenment traditions. The Frankfurt School thinkers were the cream of German philosophical society—which is to say the cream of the restive European intellectual society of the period—who had made international reputations for themselves at the University of Frankfurt and then received a warm welcome into the American Ivy League.
The work of the Frankfurt scholars—among them, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich—was grounded in an ideology that demanded (as Marx would say), for philosophical reasons, an unremitting assault on Western values and institutions, including Christianity, the family, conventional sexual morality, nationalistic patriotism, and adherence in general to any institution or set of beliefs that blocked the path of revolution. Literally nothing was sacred. Some representative samples:
Herbert Marcuse:
Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization (The One-Dimensional Man, 1964).
Max Horkheimer:
Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity (Eclipse of Reason, 1947).
Theodor Adorno:
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself (Minima Moralia, 1951).
Who were these people? Marxists all, first and foremost, sent fleeing from their think-tank roost at the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) at the Goethe University in Frankfurt (where else?). The Third Reich hounded them out in part because they were Jews and in part because they were Communists. Ambivalent regarding the achievements of the Enlightenment—in other words, the society that had given them birth, nurture, shelter, and prestige—they rejected the notion of the individual as all-important, preferring to see history as Marx did, as a dialectical battle of opposing historical forces from which a non-teleological perfection would somehow eventually emerge. Adorno and Horkheimer liked to imagine their works as “a kind of message in a bottle” to the future. Unfortunately for posterity, several of those bottles washed up on the eastern bank of the Hudson River near Columbia University in New York City, changing the course of American history.
Among the Frankfurt School’s members was the half-Russian Richard Sorge, who became a spy for the Soviet Union. While he contributed little in the way of cultural theory to Communism, his work as a traitor and double agent is worth remarking upon. After serving in World War I, Sorge—the name means “worry” in German—became a Communist in 1919, but he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 to burnish his German bona fides. Under journalistic cover, he was the first to report to Stalin that Hitler was planning Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1940, a report that Stalin disbelieved. While undercover in Japan as a reporter, Sorge informed the Soviets that the Japanese would not open up an eastern front with the Soviet Union, thus allowing Stalin to transfer military assets to the east to combat Hitler. Sorge was discovered by the Japanese in late 1941 and hanged three years later. In honor of his service to the Motherland, he was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
The Frankfurt School included both Marxists and Freudians in its ranks, which was crucial to its later success in the United States (and a more toxic combination of nineteenth-century voodoo can hardly be imagined). As the website Marxists.org proudly puts it:
In 1931/32, a number of psychoanalysts from the Frankfurt Institute of Psychoanalysis and others who were acquainted with members of the Institut [für Sozialforschung] began to work systematically with the Institut. . . . In joining what was predominantly a “Hegelian-materialist” current of Marxists, these psychologists gave the development of Marxist theory an entirely new direction, which has left its imprint on social theory ever since. . . . The intellectuals who founded the Frankfurt Institut deliberatively cut out a space for the development of Marxist theory, inside the “academy” and independently of all kinds of political party [sic]. The result was a process in which Marxism merged with bourgeois ideology. A parallel process took place in post–World War Two France, also involving a merging with Freudian ideas. One of the results was undoubtedly an enrichment of bourgeois ideology.
Thanks a lot. To this day, we can chart the Institut’s baleful effects through the prisms of artistic narrative (including literature, poetry, music, and opera) and the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, minus the illusory synthesis.
It was the Berlin-born Marcuse—who taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California, San Diego—whose political influence was, on balance, the greatest of them all, owing to his voguish popularity among college students in the 1960s (he was the flip side of Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher,” who had nearly as great an influence on young conservatives of the period). Marcuse came up with the particularly nasty concept of “repressive tolerance,” a notion that has guided the Unholy Left since the publication of his essay by the same name in 1965 in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Marcuse, Robert Paul Wolff, and Barrington Moore Jr. It might be best described as “tolerance for me, but not for thee.” But let Marcuse explain:
The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. . . . Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e., in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the