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

by Michael Walsh

  Is death really an option, even for the Left? What happens when there is no longer a cause for which to “fight”? (Like Satan, the Left must always have something to “fight,” lest it be rendered impotent, because its driving force, as we’ve seen, stems not from philosophy but emotion—hatred, resentment, envy, and malcontentment.) Some thought that the disintegration of the Soviet Union signaled “the end of history,” and in fact the Left was quiescent for a spell after the self-immolation of the U.S.S.R. and the Warsaw Pact nations. Even leftists, snark-mongers that they are, had no comeback to the economic and moral revolution that began with the fall of the Wall and continued to the events of September 11, 2001, when a new and perhaps even more potent ancient evil re-announced itself in the form of four hijacked American airliners. And then the Left found a new enemy to love.

  We are engaged, as Lincoln noted, in a great civil war, this one not yet fought with weapons, but with ideas. In the Left’s attempt to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America, it has used every other weapon in its arsenal, from indoctrination to fabrication, from “moral” suasion based on no morality at all to an unapologetic celebration of hedonism and sybaritism embodied by Reich and Marcuse, Leary and Hefner. To its everlasting shame, it has convinced women to murder their own babies in the name of “rights”: Adam Gopnik, an otherwise fine writer for the New Yorker, has called abortion “one of the greatest moral achievements in human history—the full emancipation of women.” The Left has convinced black Americans, on the Orwellian theory that freedom is slavery, to flock to the banner of the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition in search of freedom from slavery. It has convinced generations of college students that their country was founded in Original Sin (which the Left otherwise rejects). Furthermore, it has taught that this Original Sin can never be eradicated or expiated, since there cannot be a Redeemer; the only recourse is the self-abnegation or total annihilation of the Principal Enemy, which just so happens to be (as Pogo famously observed) us. By embracing the Cause, they are saved, indeed elevated above the constraints of morals, as their goal is just, and they are freed to make holy war upon the sinful, wicked, damned folks back in Dubuque or Topeka.

  None of this is going to happen, not as long as one free man still breathes. For freedom is akin to the light in the darkness: A single exemplar represents total defeat for the other side. Darkness can never be complete until the eradication of the last light, a task beyond even the superhuman capabilities of Satan. Marxists such as Lukács were adamant in their belief that Western civilization needed to be destroyed before true “justice” could arrive. And while the Left relies on youth’s innate “liberalism,” conservatives need to appeal to some of youth’s other typical characteristics, including its skepticism about dogma, its belief in its own heroism and immortality, and its profound sense of self-interest.

  In other words, conservatives should focus on selling the old virtuous wine—those virtues that have fueled every myth since the time of Homer—in new, improved, “revolutionary” bottles. One “scientific” fact the permanent revolutionary Left cannot escape is that eventually the rebels becomes the establishment, and revolutionary theory requires constant revolution in order to keep moving forward. It is a Serpent, unable to fuck Eve, eating its tail.

  Some “revolutionary” parties, such as Mexico’s aptly named “Institutional Revolutionary Party,” a member of the Socialist International, rely on Marxist anti-Narrative to keep their voters in a perpetual state of economic fear while subjecting them to economic misery—on the theory that things could always be worse. Others, such as the Democrats, continue to reinforce their own narrative via the use of the popular media. The majority of leftist and mainstream journalists (a redundancy) subscribe, however consciously or unconsciously, to the following beliefs, which drive how they select or ignore stories: The U.S. is incorrigibly racist; racism is often hard to detect but always present; racism plays a role in nearly every news story, especially when it’s not at all clear that it does. Call it the Holy Ghost theory of racism, explained by the secular version of Original Sin.

  Journalists also reflexively subscribe to cultural-Marxist notions of class; they have internalized them so thoroughly that they no longer even think about them. Just about any story can be framed through the grid of race or class, especially that staple of television news, crime stories. The idea that crime is a function of poverty or the legacy of slavery (which ended in 1865), or that it results from some combination of other social ailments, is axiomatic. That the residue of Evil should also be evil is beyond their comprehension, since the only evil they will admit to is that of their ideological opponents. That Evil could be external is impossible, since there is no other explanation beyond the “scientific” for any human phenomena.

  The third leg of the late twentieth century’s cultural-Marxist stool is “gender,” originally conceived of as liberating the oppressed proletariat of women from their male oppressors (into the nirvana of careerism and lesbianism, they frankly admitted). When the returns on women as mascots began diminishing, gays became the cause du jour; and with little other than same-sex marriage in the cards for gays, “trans” people have now become the new object of pity society must be coerced to love. Once they’ve had their day, some yet smaller, more outré group—polygamists? pedophiles? animal fanciers?—will be picked out and their hurt feelings at the larger society’s considering their lusts bizarre will be engraved on the cudgel with which the institution of the family will continue to be beaten bloody.

  The extraordinary effrontery of this philosophy deserves to be more widely mocked than it is, snark generally being a tool of the Left and not the Right. But consider: For the Unholy Left’s philosophy to be correct, we must reject the experience and empirical evidence of thousands of years of human history in favor of a relatively recent “intellectual” construction that arrogantly assigned all virtue to itself, demonized its opposition, and went about creating a new Garden of Eden here on earth, with man- and womankind at its center, as long as they were having sex. Preferably “safe,” non-reproductive sex.

  Not only, therefore, must we apparently reject the principal tenets of organized religion, most of which share the same basic concepts, variously understood. We must also reject a folk storytelling tradition that is even older than the principal faiths. We must, in short, reject everything that we have previously believed about ourselves that our ancestors taught us. Tradition is the democracy of the dead, as the saying goes, and that democracy must be overthrown in favor of our momentary whims, with an Ermächtigungsgesetz (“enabling law”) that criminalizes even the memory of doing things differently. We must discard out of hand the experience of earlier generations, all deemed superstitious idiots in continuous thrall to some kind of primitive mental illness or superstition, with only a few bright lights (within the upside-down, Bizarro World context of the Left) such as Rousseau and Marx to dispel the darkness of macho mythos and repressive Judeo-Christian sexual morality. Only just be free, they sing like the Sirens to Odysseus, like Mephisto, promising infinite knowledge to Faust and everlasting happiness to the sexually repressed but delivering only slavery, disease, and death. You shall be like gods, they promise the rotting corpses.

  How can conservatism not sell a political program of Freedom, Liberty, and Leave Me Alone to the youth of America and elsewhere? These are heroic verities that have sustained the Republic since its inception—and precisely the truths that have come under the most sustained attack from Critical Theory. Freedom is “really” slavery. “Liberty” is illusory, as we are all subject to Marxist political-historical forces against which the individual counts for nothing. And Leave Me Alone—the crucial principle of the American Revolution—is simply antisocial selfishness. Far safer to be confined to a yoke, free from the terrors that lie just beyond the campfire, and serving your fellow man.

  Fear is what they sell, fear of the unknown. Heroism is what we should be selli
ng, heroism in the face of the unknown. No matter how they may try to reframe the heroes of myth and legend, it is impossible for them to hammer heroes from Ulysses to Dirty Harry into a Marxist cosmology. Our heroes are too individualistic, too contrarian; they don’t care what the world thinks of them, they only want to do what is right. Were we once more to unleash our shared, innate notions of heroism upon the Unholy and Unheroic Left, we would crush them, see them driven before us and hear the lamentations of their women (to paraphrase the immortal words of the fictional Conan the Barbarian, themselves John Milius’s paraphrase of a purported aphorism of Genghis Khan’s). Their cruelty is their strength, but it is their cowardice that will be their undoing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

  We have, intellectually, come to the dead end of Critical Theory. It may stumble around, like Frankenstein’s monster, seeking revenge on a world it feels has wronged it, but the theories set in place by the Frankfurt School have played themselves out intellectually; now they are merely dogma. Although the divine–demonic struggle for mankind’s soul is not yet over (nor can it ever be, until the Last Trump), the high tide of cultural sedition represented by the Institute for Social Research has passed. The brutal facts have had their way with it, and now, it is just a matter of purging Critical Theory from the institutions through which it marched for so many years and that today represent (like their redefinition of patriotism) the last refuge of scoundrels.

  That no good has come from the Left’s relentless assault on Western culture is beyond dispute. Not a single America institution has benefited from progressives’ “analysis.” The most common riposte is for them to point to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which remains for many aging modern leftists the signal memory of their youth. That their participation in it is largely a fantasy, like their attendance at Woodstock, doesn’t matter; their need to be on the “right side of history” allows them to be the heroes of their own story. Even a leftist or a Communist needs to feel that he or she has made a difference for the better, when better is usually the last thing they were aiming for, except in the broadest theoretical sense. The civil rights movement—their one ostensible triumph—was largely a story of the center of American politics: The old liberals for whom the New Left had nothing but contempt united with boring Republicans to defang racist Southern Democrats. But that matters not a whit to them. If it was good, it was a deed of the Left; if it was a deed of the Left, it was good.

  The idea of “progress,” a version of Marx’s historical inevitability, is central to the Left’s mythos. Having imported the concept along with a grab bag of statist policies from Bismarck’s Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Left embraced the label of “progressivism”—effectively, anti-constitutionalism, which held that America’s founding document was the antiquated stricture that kept the enlightened scientific functionaries of the age from hurrying society toward Progress.

  Woodrow Wilson was the great champion of early-twentieth-century Progressivism, though he comprehensively delegitimized it with the public when he took up dictatorial War Socialism. Indeed, his duplicitousness in bringing the U.S. into World War I discredited Progressivism—or at least its name—with a group of mostly literary intellectuals who adopted, with some historical illiteracy, the sobriquet “liberals” in the 1920s. When these “liberals” gained power in the 1930s, they immediately set about recycling their favorite aspects of Wilsonian Progressivism and Bismarckian welfare-statism, adding in the sexy new doctrines of Italian Fascism and National Socialism (which had yet to remove its mask, revealing the Jew-devouring Moloch beneath).

  These New Dealers, like their Progressive predecessors (in fact, many were the very same individuals), disliked the civil society formed by our constitutional system (Sinclair Lewis’s famous Babbitt remains the classic anti-middle-class polemic). They attempted to abrogate its limiting mechanisms whenever possible, as FDR did when he threatened to pack the Supreme Court. Later, in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, they took refuge behind those aspects of the Constitution that suited their “revolutionary” purposes, especially those amendments in the Bill of Rights that gave them safe harbor as they erected their program of “tolerance” of “dissent.” Positing by fiat, without ever quite explaining why, a set of new “values” that mostly were anti-values, they demanded that the larger society conform to their minority wishes. They indicted that society incrementally, attacking its history (“racist”), its religious culture (“Christianist”), its very existence (“colonialist”). But call them “Marxist” and listen to them squeal; by their lights, any attack on them is illegitimate. It has been an unequal debate between unequal sides, both intellectually and morally, in which the minority report argues from its own authority, arbitrarily denies legitimacy to the majority, and counts on the gullibility of the American public and its sense of fair play and sympathy for the underdog not to notice the difference. But even evil things must, thankfully, come to an end, especially when their sole prop is a self-flattering claim to intellectual superiority.

  In the early 1960s, a Communist (Trotskyite) front organization in the U.S. called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was supported by a parade of leftists, including the writers Norman Mailer and James Baldwin, and the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Its most notorious member was a New Orleans–born defector to the Soviet Union named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had returned from a short stay in Minsk with his Russian wife.

  Who could be against “fair play?” That’s un-American! Journalistic convention helped, for it was axiomatic that there must be two sides to every story (whether one was true was a matter of “judgment” and not for the reporter to decide). Living in the Land of No Consequences that was America before the Kennedy assassination, and before the new waves of immigration from non-European countries, most Americans at the time could not conceive that anything essential about the nation could ever be changed; so a little good will toward even the delusional would be tolerated in the name of fair play.

  But young men are dangerous, because they are young men. They are soldiers and criminals, inventive artists and moral monsters, capable of astounding heroism and utter brutality. It’s no accident that the young men Mephistopheles bewitches in Faust in the Auerbachs Keller (the second-oldest restaurant in Leipzig) are students, the future leaders of German society, the “intellectuals.” Mephisto, however, does not appeal to their intellectual vanity; rather, he tests them with coarse, bestial pleasures and punishes them with fire for their gullibility.

  Lee Oswald, only 24 when he died, was a dangerous young man who changed the course of American history with three shots from a mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Shortly before he died, he translated Prince Yeletsky’s aria “Ya vas lyublyu, lyublyu bezmerno” (“I love you, love you immeasurably”) from Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades and left it for his Russian wife, Marina, to find:

  I love you,

  Love you immeasurably.

  I cannot imagine life without you.

  I am ready right now to perform a heroic deed

  Of unprecedented prowess for your sake.

  Oh, darling, confide in me!

  Not even a leftist like Oswald could deny the power of illusion, or its oft-beneficial effects. Illusion was such a powerful force acting upon him that he got it into his confused mind that a heroic deed had to be done, and shooting the president of the United States would be it. (Many assassins are driven by love, like John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan to impress an actress he had never met.) Illusion is the very stuff of Hollywood—although “Hollywood” itself is an illusion, as anybody who has ever worked there quickly comes to understand. Illusion is part of storytelling, and storytelling, as we have seen, is innate. But illusion is only the surface of storytelling, not its heart. Its heart is Truth.

  Note that it was Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who introduced the notion of the uncertainty of Truth. (He, not th
e Jews, is also the weak man who passively condemns Jesus to death.) If we can argue about what the truth is, then we can argue about anything. That is what the Left has counted on since Rousseau. It is the essence of the Frankfurt School’s program. When anything is subject to debate, then everything is; and when that thing is something as essential as Truth, then nothing is sacred.

  But that is precisely the point. The sacred verities of Western civilization did not survive the hellish trenches of the First World War. The period 1914–1918 was the time when culture fractured, when the eternal verities that had built a civilization from the Holy Roman Empire to the Edwardian era came apart—over a family squabble among three members of Queen Victoria’s extended family. In the end, it was a destructive, internecine war of cousin against cousin, a family tragedy, much like Wagner’s Ring. Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.

  Nowhere was this family tragedy more vividly illustrated than in poet Robert von Ranke Graves’s memoir of the Great War, Good-Bye to All That, written after his return from the trenches and published in 1929. Graves was Anglo-Irish on his father’s side and minor German nobility on his mother’s; nevertheless, like the cream of young British men, he went to war against his Hun cousins willingly, enlisting in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and seeing action at the Somme, where he was badly wounded.

  World War I has not received the attention it deserves in American popular culture. This is partly because the war was very controversial among Americans on the home front: At the time of the war, the largest ethnic minority in America was German (as it continues to be, depending on how one counts the peoples of the British Isles), and the sudden possibility that the nation’s largest “minority” could be seditious had a profound effect on Wilsonian America. Fear of Germans led to such oddities as “Liberty cabbage” and “French toast,” the new names for sauerkraut and what had hitherto been “German toast.” A more serious consequence was Prohibition, the revenge of Protestant America on the more recently arrived German and Irish Catholics—the “drinking class” of Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism—and their Jewish liquor-selling enablers. Whereas World War II offers a handy program of Nazi and Japanese villains and British and American heroes, World War I has murky, familial, Wagnerian, even biblical origins: Who, exactly, begat whom? And who forced himself on whom?