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

by Michael Walsh

  Can one believe in nothing, as some atheists would have it? As G.K. Chesterton apparently never quite said (the aphorism seems derived from several different writings, including his Father Brown stories): “The man who no longer believes in God does not believe in nothing; rather, he will believe in anything.” The Satan of Paradise Lost very much does believe in something: the necessity of revenge, a desire so great it overcomes even his lust for Eve’s perfect female body. Like the flames of Hell, it consumes him without killing him; it literally fires him to effect his vast plot against mankind. Much of today’s Unholy Left seems motivated by the same emotion: revenge on the country that gave them either birth or shelter. They are at once oikophobes (fearing their home) and xenophiles (loving what is foreign)—particularly untrustworthy specimens of humanity.

  The Left’s is not a classic Third World revenge, best expressed by Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: “You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Instead, it seeks a larger, dare one say, “comprehensive” target: a revenge on a society that remains distressingly what it is and that adamantly refuses to become what, by their lights, it should be. At root, their beef is not with Man but with God; even if they refuse to admit he exists, they still want to fight him anyway.

  As refugees both luxuriating in and resenting their outsider status, the wise men of the Frankfurt School were infuriated by the non-state control of Hollywood and the national and local media they encountered in New York, New Jersey, and California. They scorned what they dubbed the “culture industry” and seethed with contemptuous rage against a land that cared very little for what they thought. Except of course for academia.

  Most of today’s “vilenesses various” (in J.P. Donleavy’s phrase from The Unexpurgated Code) derive from this deep-seated resentment. P.J. O’Rourke’s famous characterization of the Left—“a philosophy of sniveling brats”—is spot-on. As Mephistopheles observes in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Solamen miseris, socios habuisse doloris.” (“It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.”) For those of us who came of age during the tumultuous 1960s, who saw said sniveling brats trade in their knee pants for the tie-dyed jeans and ponchos of Woodstock, for those of us who never joined them in their posturing anarchy and supererogatory celebrations of self, the Left has been a continuing mystery, perhaps most especially in its remarkable success at making a parasitic living from a society its claims to despise. Like the bank robber Willie Sutton, modern leftists went where the money was: at Gramsci’s behest, into academia; prompted by Adorno’s ire, into the “culture industry”; and at Marx’s insistence, into the machinery of the state.

  And there they have stayed ever since, fifty years on and counting. The irony is remarkable: a group of self-styled revolutionaries constantly reliving the glory days of their youth and professing fealty to ideas a century older than they are. The government programs they cherish date from the Roosevelt administration; never mind that schemes such as Social Security and Medicare, fraudulently conceived at the outset, are careening toward auto-destruction. Never mind that the leviathan state espoused by the “progressive” wings of both political parties is itself fundamentally regressive in every sense: sclerotic, unworkable, infeasible, and (something they will never admit) immoral. They are Dorian Gray inverted and writ large in the Baby Boomer generation: inwardly still youthful (indeed adolescent) in thought and outlook, but outwardly wrinkled, decrepit, corrupted, doomed. Until this wing of the Boomers shuffles offstage and into that black nothingness it so desperately claims to embrace (but against which it will fight to the end, with the best doctors and medical technology its money and yours can buy), the country will continue to be afflicted by their reductive, jejune, hand-me-down Marxist philosophy.

  What will it take to disabuse the rest of America? We have a partial answer before us—and in recent history. As it happens, I spent much of the period between February 1985 and the summer of 1991 behind the Iron Curtain, in what was then the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. From the time I arrived, it was evident to me that the socialist system could not last. Its “internal contradictions” were not merely theoretical, like the West’s, but visible and grotesque. Its “liberated” women had been reduced to little more than prostitutes, sexually available for the price of dinner or a new dress. In the Soviet Union, if you were a man in need of female companionship, it came to you: All you had to do was wait for a woman in an elevator to offer to visit you in your room or, even easier, wait for the chambermaids to knock on your door, with delicacies boosted from the kitchen and themselves as the sweeteners. The old Soviet Union was Reich’s sexually liberated paradise come to life, and all the scars on the women’s bodies from multiple abortions spoke of its mutilations and death toll.

  The men, meanwhile, were seemingly disinterested members of the economic-justice proletariat, but you couldn’t find a taxi driver in Moscow; the official “living wage” fares weren’t worth the trouble to start the engine. Far easier for you to hold up one or two fingers (signifying how many packets of smuggled-in Marlboros—the de facto currency—you were willing to pay for a ride) and get a lift immediately, to anywhere you wanted, no questions asked. An added bonus: Very often, the civilian driver would be carrying a load of fenced contraband, including caviar, vodka, and, at times, weapons.

  These men and women were not examples of the failure of the Soviet system; they were exemplars of the superiority of capitalism and the Christian West’s desire for personal freedom (contrary to George W. Bush’s claim, it is, alas, not universal). In the fun-house mirror that was the old Soviet Union, citizens learned a devilish lesson: Vice is virtue. And they profited from the lesson, as best they could, until at last the entire rotten edifice buckled.

  Why the Soviet Union so suddenly collapsed at the end of 1991 is a puzzle that has occupied scholars and apologists ever since. Yet it is no mystery to anyone who was there. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said Lincoln. Far more so than the U.S., the U.S.S.R. was beset by the cognitive dissonance arising from the conflict between its proclaimed ideals and the brute force with which they were implemented. Everybody knew it, except the Western intellectuals and mainstream journalists, who insisted, right up to the end, that the Soviet Union was the “other superpower,” the idealized (if not actually ideal) alternative to the American experiment. The evidence was right in front of their faces: The Soviet Union was a society that could barely build a functioning toilet; it was afflicted by severe housing shortages (it was customary for parents of marriageable children to retire discreetly to the bedroom of a two-room flat in order to let the young folks have sex in the living room; failing that, couples had sex in the backs of cars or in the local graveyard); it tested the seaworthiness of its deep-water subs by sending a few underwater to measure at what depth their hulls cratered and their crews died.

  The clue that the end was near came in the summer of 1989, when the Hungarians—faced with a crush of East Germans trying to flee one of their few legally allowed vacation spots—decided to open the border with Austria on August 19. There had been a gesture in that direction a couple of months earlier, when the Austrian foreign minister and his Hungarian counterpart symbolically clipped a section of barbed wire that had divided the two formerly united provinces of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. But on that day, as the East German “Ossies” first forced their way through whatever remained of the old Soviet-imposed fortifications, something that had not happened since the erection of the Berlin Wall actually did happen: nothing. Nobody stopped them. Nobody shot at them. Nobody killed them. In the face of freedom, and their willingness to risk their lives for it, the death cult of Communism had fallen impotently silent. Again, why?

  For one thing, the Communist system had become so economically moribund that it could no longer afford even to keep its prison fences in working order. It took money—real money, “hard currency,” valuta—to buy materials the system could not supply. For the Hungarians and the ot
her satellite nations on the fortified border with the West, that expense had more and more been rolled off on them during the Motherland’s long, slow twilight. Finally, they had had enough. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, more or less: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other’s people’s money.” (She actually said: “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.”)

  Many of what we used to call the “captive nations” lay within television-signal reach of the West. In East Germany, only the Saxon city of Dresden was beyond immediate Western cultural influence, and its people were derided by their fellow Ossies as ignorant buffoons. Throughout Eastern Europe and even in Moscow, a brisk trade in bootleg Western jeans and rock albums had long been in place, but restive populations wanted the real thing, plus (as we soon learned after the Wall fell) fresh fruit, bananas, and porn. Adorno’s feared “culture industry” had done its work well.

  Who were these heroes? The names of the border guards that day are largely lost to history, but they were the Men Who Didn’t Shoot, who did not contribute to the death toll that hardened the postwar division of Europe, who finally just said no to Satan. Unlike Michael Corleone, they meant it.

  To stand at the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate before the Mauerfall, the fall of the Wall, was to see, on the Western side, rows of markers, each one in memoriam of some brave East German who had tried and failed to breach the “Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier.” Not far away, as the Wall doglegged behind it, stood the dead hulk of the Reichstag, so symbolic of both German strength and German savagery, abandoned along with the “Dem Deutschen Volke” commemorated in the famous dedication above the doors: to the German people. And who could forget the defining image of the end of the WWII in Europe: the Russian soldier atop the Reichstag, waving the Soviet flag over the bombed-out ruins of Berlin?

  Few would have expected that the fierce Soviets would simply give up, allow the Wall to fall, and freely remove their troops. After all, they had been hell-bent on revenge for what they saw as Germany’s treachery in launching Operation Barbarossa in 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in defiance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, which had partitioned Poland and given the Baltic states over to the Russian Bear. But give up the Soviets surely did. There came a time, even for them, the victors in what Stalin called the Great Patriotic War (they were fighting for country, not Communism), when further killing wasn’t worth the price it took on their souls. The Devil may never sicken of slaughter, but humans do.

  I recall in particular one hot summer afternoon on the Potsdamer Platz: July 21, 1990. The occasion was a live performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a rock opera suddenly current again. My review of the concert, which ran in the August 3, 1990, issue of Entertainment Weekly, began like this:

  You couldn’t go anywhere in Berlin on July 21 without bumping into The Wall. . . . On this hot Saturday afternoon, Potsdamer Platz, for 28 years a bleak no-man’s-land known as the Death Strip that separated the two Berlins, was transformed into a 35-acre German Woodstock. All morning, a crowd estimated at more than 200,000 had gathered outside the temporary wire fences, and at 2:30 p.m. the gates opened and the people started thronging in. Quickly, they formed a mass that stretched from the old Wilhelmstrasse across the square to the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert hall, the Philharmonie.

  You can find my full review of the concert—which also featured the Hooters, members of The Band, Sinéad O’Connor, Joni Mitchell, and a host of others—online on the magazine’s website, but perhaps the conclusion is worth quoting:

  The day after the show, the curious were poking through the concert debris. A few tents were still pitched, harboring sleeping hippies. Some youths sat by the side of the road, dazed from their exertions of the night before when, after the concert, Berlin was one big party town. A young boy with a shopping cart happily wheeled away a souvenir: one of the Styrofoam bricks, nearly as big as he was.

  A lifetime ago, the Woodstock Generation thought it could change the world with a flower and a three-chord song, a dream that died in a hail of bullets in Vietnam and Kent State and Memphis and Los Angeles. Now, 21 years later, their sons and daughters had gathered, 200,000 strong, and by their presence made the eloquent point that maybe the Woodstockers were right all along.

  It is interesting to note that as workers were excavating the site, not simply for the concert venue but for the new, commercial Potzdamer Platz that was slated for construction, they came across an old SS bunker, an unexploded Soviet bomb, and small arms and ammunition, some of the last relics of the war. And then those, too, were gone and the musicians took over.

  I spent much of that day wandering around the spot where Hitler had spent his last hours in the Führerbunker, aware that the advancing Soviets were drawing ever nearer, and finally shooting himself, like Brünnhilde throwing herself upon Siegfried’s burning bier, a drama queen to the end. All around me were Soviet soldiers, their presence purposeless, their mission once accomplished, now failed. I got together with a Russian “journalist” and an East German whom I had first met under official circumstances in East Berlin back in 1985, who is now an old and dear friend, and we repaired to a nearby pub for some cold beers. I made them buy. We drank a toast to the end of the Cold War, and to whatever was coming next.

  Like the Soviets and the East Germans, Gramsci’s long march must and will finally fail when Alinsky’s children are inevitably co-opted by the “culture industry” that Adorno warned them about, when they give up and give in. It’s difficult to retain revolutionary fervor and high dudgeon for very long. The red-diaper babies—quintessential imported oikophobes and xenophiles (certainly, Russophiles)—of the 1930s managed to do it even as they grew old and fat on the spoils of the capitalist system they still railed about to their dying day. One thing you could say about them: If the cognitive dissonance of their lives and beliefs ever bothered them, they didn’t let it show. They retained their animus against America—and their fondness for a political system they knew they would never have to suffer under—to the bitter end. But their children and grandchildren are another story.

  There is an old saying: “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” That’s the length of time any American institution lasts between its founding by a man of vision (Joseph P. Kennedy, Carlo Gambino, Henry Luce, to name at random three family enterprises, only two of them criminal) and its demolition by inadequate and unworthy heirs, who wreck it with their foolish business decisions. The Unholy Left and its institutions are not immune from these ironclad, deterministic historical forces (pure Marxism in action, when you stop to think about it).

  Their prolonged assault on American politics and culture—which, for purposes of discussion, we might date from the anti-Constitution Woodrow Wilson administration—has been steadfast and unwavering. But no political victory is ever permanent, as the Soviet example shows. No military victory is ever permanent, either. The Left’s ascendancy in the U.S. culminated in the election of a frankly socialist candidate, but two terms of exposure to him and his leftist ideals have resulted in a vast revulsion against “the fundamental transformation” of the United States he promised to deliver. Because the high ground of academia, the media, and pop culture is still occupied by fellow travelers (and their spouses, neighbors, friends, and intimates), the Left’s recent losses have been partly hidden. Conservatives might not like to hear this, but until the day the New York Times—the die-hard house organ of American progressivism—admits on its front page that it has been consistently wrong for more than a half-century, the Academic-Media Complex will not be disabused of its long-held, devilish illusions.

  We have seen earlier how most of these illusions are based on what “ought” to be, rather than what is. Indeed, a refusal to accept reality is, for leftists, a form of heroism. Yet it is not; with the possible exception of Don Quixote, there is nothing heroic about mental defectiveness, emotio
nal immaturity, and a cowardice that hides behind the skirts of doubletalk. But this is what the Left offers to an apparently inexhaustible supply of impressionable, often materially comfortable young people in need of a cause. The Democratic Party, which was seized by radicals between 1968 and 1972, has evolved into a party made up entirely of factions: the youth vote, the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the single-women’s vote. It has no center and is now largely confined to the two seaboards and a swath of the upper Midwest. Historically disposed to social do-gooder-ism, the latter is only now becoming aware of the consequences of its one-size-fits-all Protestantism—something made visible, for instance, by the burgeoning Somali population of Minnesota, with its concomitant jihadi subculture. For Democrats, it doesn’t matter if the center cannot hold, since there is no center, just a never-ending quest for more aggrieved “minorities” with which to fan the flames of resentment and deliver the payback the Left earnestly desires.

  Viewed in military terms, conservatives should be rolling up the progressives rather easily. They are essentially confined to the tribal homelands, where they should be quarantined until the ruinous poison of their governing philosophy has run its course: the busted budgets; the enormous dependence on the public sector; the political internalization of organized crime (a hallmark of big cities since Tammany); crushing taxation; ever more social programs piled onto earlier failures; tight, expensive housing; and de facto racial and economic segregation in their principal cities.

  But of course they cannot be confined, which makes them akin to the predatory, parasitic aliens from Independence Day (as conservative a motion picture as High Noon) who move from planet to planet, despoiling everything in their wake until their host orb gives up the ghost and it is time for them to move on and seek fresh victims. When the president of the United States, in temporary mind-meld with one of the monsters, asks, in true liberal fashion, “What do you want us to do?” in the hopes that we can all just get along, the beast hisses: “Die.”