The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

by Michael Walsh

  Marcuse found easy prey on these shores. Many of his comrades returned home to Germany after the American Army had done their wet work for them, but Marcuse stayed, gleefully voiding poison into the American intellectual water supply. In 1972’s Counterrevolution and Revolt, he wrote:

  At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one. Most necessary because the established system preserves itself only through the global destruction of resources, of nature, of human life, and the objective conditions [nice touch of Marxist cant there] for making an end to it prevail. Those conditions are: a social wealth sufficient to abolish poverty; the technical know-how to develop the available resources systematically [more “scientific” jargon] toward this goal; a ruling class [yet more Marxist boilerplate] which wastes, arrests, and annihilates the productive forces; the growth of anticapitalist forces in the Third World which reduce the reservoir of exploitation; and a vast working class which, separated from the control of the means of production, confronts a small, parasitic ruling class.

  Stipulated: This reads like a parody of every Communist cliché, not only from 1972 but from today. But it’s not, and it indicates how successfully the Unholy Left transferred its absurd obsessions into public policy in our own time. It’s insane but extraordinarily potent, in the manner of true madness.

  The proper response to this over-intellectualized twaddle is laughter. And therein lies the rub, for laughter—or, better expressed, disbelief that anyone could take this seriously—is what they count on. Surely, no one could take the idea of political correctness seriously, since it runs counter to every strain and fiber of the American character: How dare you tell me what I can’t say? In its earliest incarnations, the PC code was considered so risible that it was even mocked by the libertarian Left, in the form of Bill Maher’s television show, Politically Incorrect, and in books hawked at San Francisco’s famous Beat bookstore City Lights, such as Drinking, Smoking, and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times (1994). Here is this book’s description, as provided by the publisher:

  Before the notion of “political correctness” encroached on the ways people spoke, wrote, and conducted themselves in public and private, some of American’s best writers embraced unsafe sex, excessive alcohol, and a good cigar. From the classically libidinous Henry Miller to the hilariously contemporary Fran Lebowitz, Drinking, Smoking, and Screwing includes novel excerpts, essays, poems, and short stories in a bawdy and thoroughly entertaining anthology with no warnings—and no apologies.

  Ha ha ha. Apologies aplenty now issue from the Left. Like the hapless Chinese and Cambodians in reeducation camps, they fall all over themselves to disavow their former behavior; surrounded by the darkness at noon, they have now seen the light and retroactively understood that their past actions—which were meant in support of the Revolution!—were misguided and probably corrupted by capitalist piggery. They throw themselves on the mercy of the People. “Trigger warnings” must now be posted on college campuses, lest someone stumble unawares across some sort of offense. Repeated consent must be given prior to and also throughout any sexual encounter, preferably in writing. And nobody in Hollywood drinks at lunch any more, much less smokes, which is now illegal, though the product itself, because of its position as a tax-cow, remains, for the moment, legal enough. How quickly the leftist paradigm, like Mephistopheles molting from a poodle into his own diabolical self in Faust, shifts shape.

  In the Devil’s Pleasure Palace, though filled with writhing naked nuns and fleshly temptations of every kind, there is no room for fun. Its pleasures, like those of the Cenobites in the 1987 film Hellraiser, lie in the infliction of pain. The flesh that shall be torn is ours. Jesus wept.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

  The current struggle between Right and Left, like the conflict between occidental civilization and oriental Islam, is in part a battle over terms. The two sides do not speak a common language, nor, as we saw in Chapter Ten, do they take the same words to mean the same thing. “Peace” to an Islamic jihadist means the absence or submission of Christians, Jews, and all other infidels. It is, literally, absence of conflict between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, between the world of perfect Islamic peace and the world of chaos and war, once the latter has been conquered. Similarly, the modern Left’s ideas about “justice” have nothing to do with justice as most Americans traditionally understand it (blind, impartial, procedural) and everything to do with payback (social, economic, results-oriented). Both Muslims and leftists, in the furtherance of their aims, rely on their common enemy’s good-natured misunderstanding.

  Both, as noted, also proceed from a position of weakness, hoping, judo-like, to flip their stronger opponent by using his strengths against him—another characteristic of satanism, as Satan is always the weaker combatant against God. To take just one political example: In nearly every recent election, the Democrat-Media Complex has insisted, no matter what the electoral results, that what the American people are “really” (there’s that word again) saying is that they want the two political parties to “work together.” On the surface, this seems reasonable enough: Who could object to “bipartisan” cooperation on urgent matters of national urgency? But, like Marcuse’s blather on capitalism, nothing about this bromide makes any sense.

  I have coined the phrases “the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Government” and “the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party” to describe this phenomenon. But what is “bipartisanship”? “Bipartisanship” is just another word for monochromatic government. Further, “working together,” as currently practiced, means only one thing: that the party of the Right must abandon some of its bedrock principles to “compromise” with the party of the Left for the furtherance of some pet social program—and the only “compromise” will be over details of the program, not the idea itself. Thus the recent battle over national “health care.” In reality, it’s a tax increase in the service of a welfare scheme for largely subsidized recipients that benefits only a small fraction of the population at the expense of the many—a classic example of the Marxism dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Phrased like that, it never would have passed even a Democratic Congress; but disguised as “compassion,” “insurance,” and “health care,” it just barely squeaked through by means of manipulation and outright deception, from the presidential level on down.

  What earlier generations understood is that there can be no compromise with evil, only its unconditional (if temporary) surrender. The better elements of German society tried repeatedly to negotiate terms of surrender with the Western allies, to no avail. The Americans under President Truman understood that there could be no separate peace with the Bushido fanatics of Imperial Japan; indeed, once the emperor had accepted the terms of surrender of the Potsdam Declaration, there was a brief rebellion by some of his officers, the so-called Kyj Incident in mid-August 1945. But mindful of the Allies’ promise that Japan would face prompt and utter destruction should it choose otherwise, the Empire of Japan sent its representatives to surrender two weeks later.

  The lack of American success in subsequent wars—largely wars of choice, not necessity—has been instructive, because there have been no bedrock principles at stake. Korea was and remains a standoff, a failure of ongoing, eternal “diplomacy” that seeks no real end, only a continuance of process. Vietnam was no natural threat to the territories of the United States, yet we lost 50,000 men there anyway in the service of an Ivy League theory about the “domino effect” of a Communist victory in Southeast Asia. The Cold War was played, by contrast, in deadly earnest, but mostly in the shadows, in the air, and under the seas. It was a Great Game between one side that played chess and another side that played poker; the latter won. Faced with what appeared to be certain economic defeat (entirely attributable to the inherent inadequacy of Marxist economic theory) and unused to the concept of bluffing one’s ass off, the Soviets simply tu
rned over their queen and folded.

  The Islamic wars since then have also been instructive, in the way of Dickens’s Circumlocation Office in Little Dorrit: “Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—how not to do it.” Thus, the now all-but-forgotten first Gulf War, which ended in the expulsion of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, failed to change the balance of power in the Middle East, because the mission was how not to change things. The aftermath of 9/11 saw the quick defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, whence the attacks had been planned, but not the crushing of Saudi Arabia, whence most of the hijackers originated. Instead, the U.S. got bogged down in an ultimately fruitless war in Iraq and a Vietnam-like morass in Afghanistan.

  The principles behind these Middle Eastern wars should have been simple: to inflict an Omdurman-like defeat on Islam post-9/11, one from which it would have taken a century or more to recover, if ever. But America’s very own Circumlocution Office—otherwise known as the Department of State—intervened. For them, diplomacy is war by other means, which means full employment for the striped-pants set, who can always be counted on to find another reason why not to change things. The only victory came in the Cold War against the Soviets; when asked his strategy for winning the Cold War, Ronald Reagan replied, “We win, they lose.” Patton couldn’t have put it better.

  But a principle, once hobbled, cannot be freed for a very long while. The Left seizes upon every rollback to demand a newer, fresher accommodation, all in the name of reason and compassion and tolerance and diversity and whatever the new buzzword of the day is. They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Constantly on the attack (as they must be, since they have nothing to defend), they constantly probe for weakness, for softness; frustrate them here and they will pop up there. Any inch forward is a victory, and tomorrow is another day.

  In the face of this constant provocation, the Right has had almost no comeback. Why not? In part because the Left accuses the Right of what it itself, in fact, is either doing or planning to do; to use one of their favorite terms, they “project.” A blank canvas, such as the mind of a young person, is one of their favorite things: everything to learn and nothing to unlearn. Only undermine the innate sense of morality—the ur-Narrative—and you’re more than halfway there. Meanwhile, they constantly lob accusations of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, Islamophobia, whatever—the list is endless and constantly refreshed by the outrage of the day. It would be comic were the results not so tragic.

  Still, the unwritten rule (enforced by a complicit media) is that no leftist provocation, however actually violent, can be reacted or responded to in kind, whereas any pushback from the Right is regarded as the second coming of Nazism. The Left has a need to feel oppressed, threatened, unloved; leftists are sure that a Christian theocracy is just around the corner, given half a chance, and they are utterly convinced that they can read the thoughts of conservatives and sense what they’re planning to do.

  As the novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe wrote in Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine (1976): “He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” Wolfe also quotes the German novelist Günther Grass: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

  Descendants of Rousseau, grandchildren of Gramsci and Lukács, children of Marcuse: Like little kids at a horror movie, they live for the imaginary threat, the frisson of danger, secure in the knowledge that nothing really bad is going to happen to them. They want to be the heroes of their own movies, even when they are only the extras in a bad remake of Fellini’s Satyricon.

  But, then, we all want to be heroes—that is the natural lot of man, and the subject of every boy’s fantasy—but only one side will admit it, because only one side will admit the existence of heroism as a concept that exists outside literature, poetry, or the movies. It is something of a mystery why some leftist writers and filmmakers spend so much time denying the existence of heroism and then make a living by creating it, fictionally. Surely they cannot have that much contempt for their audience, because many of them are very, very good at it; their work has the resonance of authenticity, even if it is just fantasy. On some level, they must believe it.

  Fantasy, however, is what we put on the page and up on the screen—fantasy, yes, but a fantasy that draws upon the deepest longings of the human heart, longings for love, glory, honor, family, friends, posterity. No matter how many times the Unholy Left derides these virtues, they continue to exist; no matter how many times the Left denies them, they pop back up; no matter how many times it tries to kill them, they live on, firing the imaginations of a whole new generation that, absent the sapping of the Critical Theorists, grows up believing. If this were not so, Disney would have been out of business decades ago; indeed, at the heart of nearly every Disney fable is the lesson that one must believe, against all external evidence to the contrary, in the rightness of one’s chosen path.

  Elementals, basics—these are the building blocks of culture, not the other way around. These are the essential themes, the innate beliefs, of everyone, and the Left cannot do away with them; they are too deeply ingrained. And they must come from somewhere.

  Thus, principles matter. They are foundational, not arbitrary, as Critical Theory would have us believe. The Devil, the lawyer from Hell, may be in the details, but God establishes principles. If you don’t believe it, ask any astronomer or scientist, even with his necessarily imperfect understanding of man and the universe, whether he detects an ordered hand or the Call of Cthulhu in the music of the spheres; many reject religion, but few advocate Chaos and Pandemonium. To defend a foundational principle is not arbitrary, it is mandatory.

  Thus, no quarter. From the evidence above, it should be clear by now that both sides are Manichaean in their outlook. Neither, at this point, can give an inch, although one side constantly demands it, in the same of “compassion,” “compromise,” “fairness,” “tolerance,” or “Allah,” as the spirit moves them. Details may be negotiated without affecting principles on either side, but details must never be primary. That way lies death by bureaucracy, something that, ironically, helped kill the Soviet Union and that promises to be the death of the United States unless it is pruned back in time. Jesus did not promise that clerks would inherit the earth.

  Therefore, there can be no such thing as “progressivism,” the once-and-future label under which society’s sappers have chosen to take refuge. Instead, there is only regression to an ugly and sordid future that, satanically, squeezes the humanity out of the human, sometimes literally. As Mary McCarthy said of the American Communist writer Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” (The witticism provoked a $2.5 million libel suit—an Oscar Wilde moment for Hellman, fatally damaging to her overblown reputation.)

  Why on earth is the Unholy Left trying to re-create the Garden of Eden, something whose existence they passionately deny, both literally and symbolically? Welcome to the dystopia of numerous futures imperfect—not just 1984 but Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Atlas Shrugged, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” et al., not to mention countless motion pictures, among them Brazil, The Matrix, and Dark City. Futures all too easily imagined and innately feared, like snakes.

  This regression is accomplished by death through a thousand details, regulations, and bureaucratic boilerplate, administered by drones whose only function is the administration of process: everything within the Circumlocution Bureau, nothing outside the Circumlocution Bureau, and with a liberal application of molasses to gum up the works just to make sure nothing does work. They care nothing for humanity, and in that they fully partake of the spirit of Mephisto—amoral, callous, deceitful. As Faust shouts when he finally realizes,
too late, with Gretchen condemned to death and languishing in prison, the depth of the Devil’s depravity:

  FAUST

  Dog! Abominable monster! Transform him, oh Infinite Spirit! Transform this reptile again into his dog-shape, as he often pleased nightly, trotting up before me, growling at the feet of the harmless wand’rer, and hanging upon his shoulders when he fell. Change him back into his favorite shape, that he may crawl upon his belly in the sand before me, that I might trample him, the cast-out, under foot!

  MEPHISTOPHELES

  Now we are already again at the end of our joke, where the mind goes mad for you humans. Why did you make this common cause with us if you can’t see it through? You want to fly, but are unsure because you’re dizzy? Did we force ourselves upon you, or you upon us?

  Scales fall hard, even those of serpents, but they do fall.

  Is this the future we want for our children, should we choose to have any? Is this the present we want for ourselves? Best to reject not only the Left’s prescriptions for a “better”—a fundamentally transformed—America, but the very terms of their argument. Up is down. Black is white. Freedom is slavery. War is peace. And ignorance is what they count on. Nothing is what it seems at the Devil’s Pleasure Palace, especially the pleasure.

  “Did we force ourselves upon you, or you upon us?” What a question.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  OIKOPHOBES AND XENOPHILES

  In his first homily as pope, Francis invoked the saying of Léon Bloy: “Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil.” Then he got even blunter: “When we do not profess Jesus Christ, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.” The first Jesuit pope was proclaiming his profound disinterest in the political divisions of our day in order to concentrate on the essential dichotomy of human existence in a world that either does or does not believe in God.