The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Among the new weapons of cultural conflict the Frankfurt School developed was Critical Theory. The name sounds benign enough, but it stands for a practice that is anything but benign. One student of Critical Theory defined it as the “essentially destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism.”11

  Using Critical Theory, for example, the cultural Marxist repeats and repeats the charge that the West is guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization and culture it has encountered. Under Critical Theory, one repeats and repeats that Western societies are history’s greatest repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, fascism, and Nazism. Under Critical Theory, the crimes of the West flow from the character of the West, as shaped by Christianity. One modern example is “attack politics,” where “surrogates” and “spin doctors” never defend their own candidate, but attack and attack the opposition. Another example of Critical Theory is the relentless assault on Pius XII as complicit in the Holocaust, no matter the volumes of evidence that show that accusation to be a lie.

  Critical Theory eventually induces “cultural pessimism,” a sense of alienation, of hopelessness, of despair where, even though prosperous and free, a people comes to see its society and country as oppressive, evil, and unworthy of its loyalty and love. The new Marxists considered cultural pessimism a necessary precondition of revolutionary change.

  Under the impact of Critical Theory, many of the sixties generation, the most privileged in history, convinced themselves that they were living in an intolerable hell. In The Greening of America, which enthralled Senator McGovern, Justice Douglas, and the Washington Post, Charles Reich spoke of a “total atmosphere of violence” in America’s high schools.12 This was thirty years before Columbine, and Reich did not mean guns and knives:

  An examination or test is a form of violence. Compulsory gym, to one embarrassed or afraid, is a form of violence. The requirement that a student must get a pass to walk in the hallway is violence. Compulsory attendance in the classroom, compulsory studying in study hall, is violence.13

  Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution reflect Critical Theory. But the most influential book the Frankfurt School ever published was The Authoritarian Personality. In this altarpiece of the Frankfurt School, Karl Marx’s economic determinism is replaced with cultural determinism. If a family is deeply Christian and capitalist, ruled by an authoritarian father, you may expect the children to grow up racist and fascist. Charles Sykes, senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Center, describes The Authoritarian Personality as “an uncompromising indictment of bourgeois civilization, with the twist that what was considered merely old-fashioned by previous critics was now declared both fascistic and psychologically warped.”14

  Where Marx criminalized the capitalist class, the Frankfurt School criminalized the middle class. That the middle class had given birth to democracy and that middle-class Britain had been fighting Hitter when the comrades of the Frankfurt School in Moscow were cohabiting with him did not matter. Nor did it matter that middle-class America had given Adorno and his colleagues a sanctuary when they had fled the Nazis. The truth did not matter, for these were Marxist ideologues, and they alone defined truth.

  Having discovered fascism’s nesting ground in patriarchal families, Adorno now identified its natural habitat: traditional culture: “It is a well-known hypothesis that susceptibility to fascism is most characteristically a middle-class phenomenon, that ‘it is in the culture’ and, hence, that those who conform the most to this culture will be the most prejudiced.”15

  Edmund Burke once wrote, “I would not know how to draw up an indictment against a whole people.”16 Adorno and the Frankfurt School, however, had just done exactly that. They flatly asserted that individuals raised in families dominated by the father, who are flagwaving patriots and follow the old-time religion, are incipient fascists and potential Nazis. As a conservative Christian culture breeds fascism, those deeply immersed in such a culture must be closely watched for fascist tendencies.

  These ideas have been internalized by the Left. As early as the mid-1960s, conservatives and authority figures who denounced or opposed the campus revolution were routinely branded “fascists.” Baby boomers were unknowingly following a script that ran parallel to the party line laid down by the Moscow Central Committee in 1943:

  Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic … . The association will, after enough repetition, become “fact” in the public mind.17

  Since the 1960s, branding opponents as haters or mentally sick has been the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the left. Here is the “secret formula” as described by psychologist and author Thomas Szasz: “If you want to debase what a person is doing … call him mentally ill.”18 Behind it all is a political agenda. Our sick society is in need of therapy to heal itself of its innate prejudice. Assessing the Frankfurt School’s Studies in Prejudice, of which The Authoritarian Personality was the best known, Christopher Lasch wrote:

  The purpose and design of Studies in Prejudice dictated the conclusion that prejudice, a psychological disorder rooted in the “authoritarian” personality structure, could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy—by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum.19

  This is the root of the “therapeutic state”—a regime where sin is redefined as sickness, crime becomes antisocial behavior, and the psychiatrist replaces the priest. If fascism is, as Adorno, says, “in the culture,” then all of us raised in that old God-and-country culture of the 1940s and 1950s are in need of treatment to help us come face-to-face with the prejudices and bigotries in which we were marinated from birth.

  ANOTHER OF THE. insights of Horkheimer and Adorno was to realize that the road to cultural hegemony was through psychological conditioning, not philosophical argument. America’s children could be conditioned at school to reject their parents’ social and moral beliefs as racist, sexist, and homophobic, and conditioned to embrace a new morality. Though the Frankfurt School remains unfamiliar to most Americans, its ideas were well-known at the teachers’ colleges back in the 1940s and 1950s.

  The school openly stated that whether children learned facts or skills at school was less important than that they graduate conditioned to display the correct attitudes. When Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind that “American high school graduates are among the most sensitive illiterates in the world,” with some of the lowest test scores on earth in comparative exams, but the highest scores for sensitivity to issues like the environment, Bloom was testifying to the success of the Frankfurt School.20 Parents may consider today’s public schools costly failures where children no longer learn. To the Frankfurt School, they are a success; for the children coming out of them exhibit all the right attitudes. On entering college, these students now go through orientation sessions, where they are instructed in the new values that obtain on college campuses—to get their minds right, as the warden said in Cool Hand Luke.

  How successful has the cultural revolution been in eradicating the old values and instilling new ones in the souls of the young? In the days after Pearl Harbor, the enlistment lines at navy, army, and marine recruiting stations wound around the block. College boys were as well represented in those lines as farm boys. But in the days after the slaughter at the World Trade Center—before a single U.S. soldier had gone into combat or one cruise missile had been fired at the terrorists’ base camps—the antiwar rallies had begun on American campuses.

  But the importance of schools in conditioning the minds of the young w
as soon surpassed by that of the new media: TV and movies. As William Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, writes:

  The entertainment industry … has wholly absorbed the ideology of cultural Marxism and preaches it endlessly not just in sermons but in parables: strong women beating up weak men, children wiser than their parents, corrupt clergymen thwarted by carping drifters, upper-class blacks confronting the violence of lower-class whites, manly homosexuals who lead normal lives. It is all fable, an inversion of reality, but the entertainment media make it seem real, more so than the world that lies beyond the front door.21

  To appreciate how the cultural revolution has changed the way we think, believe, and act, contrast the values that 1950s films like On the Waterfront, High Noon, and Shane reflected and undergirded with the values espoused by the leading films of today. At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2000 the two most honored films were American Beauty and Cider House Rules.

  American Beauty starred Kevin Spacey and depicted life in an American suburb as a moral wasteland. The villain is an ex-Marine who represses his homosexuality, collects Nazi memorabilia, and becomes a homicidal maniac. In Cider House Rules, Michael Caine portrays a soft-spoken abortionist who stands up to the bigotry of Middle America. America’s mass media have become siege guns in the culture war and a vast Skinner Box for conditioning America’s young.

  DURING THE FIFTIES, the Frankfurt School lacked a personality to popularize the ideas buried in the glutinous prose of Horkheimer and Adorno. Enter Herbert Marcuse, ex-OSS officer and Brandeis professor, whose ambition was to be not only a man of words but a revolutionary man of action. Marcuse provided the answer to Horkheimer’s question: Who will play the role of the proletariat in the coming cultural revolution?

  Marcuse’s candidates: radical youth, feminists, black militants, homosexuals, the alienated, the asocial, Third World revolutionaries, all the angry voices of the persecuted “victims” of the West. This was the new proletariat that would overthrow Western culture. Among the “oppressed,” the potential recruits for his revolution, Gramsci himself had included all the “marginalized groups of history … not only economically oppressed, but also women, racial minorities, and many ‘criminals.’”22 Charles Reich was the echo of Marcuse and Gramsci: “One of the ways the new generation struggles to feel itself as outsiders is to identify with the blacks, with the poor, with Bonnie and Clyde, and with the losers of this world.”23 Coincidentally, in 1968, the year Bonnie and Clyde, a film romanticizing two perverted killers, was nominated for an Academy Award, two of Reich’s “losers,” Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, achieved immortality with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. King.

  Past societies had been subverted by words and books, but Marcuse believed that sex and drugs were superior weapons. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse urged a universal embrace of the Pleasure Principle. Reject the cultural order entirely, said Marcuse (this was his “Great Refusal”), and we can create a world of “polymorphous perversity.”24 As millions of baby boomers flooded the campuses, his moment came. Marcuse’s books were consumed. He became a cult figure. When students revolted in Paris in 1968, they carried banners proclaiming “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.”

  “Make love, not war” was Marcuse’s own inspired slogan. In One Dimensional Man, he advocated an educational dictatorship. In “Repressive ‘tolerance,” he called for a new “liberating tolerance” that entails “intolerance against movements from the right, and toleration of movements from the left.”25 Full of Marcusian conviction, sixties students shouted down defenders of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam and welcomed radicals waving Vietcong flags. On some campuses, paroled killers can today find more receptive audiences than can conservatives. The double standard against which the Right rages, and which permits conservatives to be pilloried for sins that are forgiven the Left, is “repressive tolerance” in action. Marcuse did not disguise what he was about. In Carnivorous Society, he wrote:

  One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment … there is one thing we can say with complete assurance. The traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution have ended. These ideas are old-fashioned … what we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.26

  The “diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system” means nothing less than the abolition of America. Like Gramsci, Marcuse had transcended Marx. The old Marxist vision of workers rising up to overthrow their capitalist rulers was yesterday. Today, Herbert Marcuse and his cohorts would put an end to a corrupt Western civilization by occupying its cultural institutions and converting them into agencies of reeducation and of revolution. As Roger Kimball, author and editor at the New Criterion, writes:

  In the context of Western societies, the “long march through the institutions” signified—in the words of Herbert Marcuse— “working against the established institutions while working in them.” It was primarily by this means—by insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation-that the countercultural dreams of radicals like Marcuse have triumphed.27

  For cultural Marxists, no cause ranked higher than the abolition of the family, which they despised as a dictatorship and the incubator of sexism and social injustice.

  Hostility to the traditional family was not new to Marxists. In The German Ideology, Marx himself wrote that patriarchal males consider wives and children first as property. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels popularized the feminist conviction that all discrimination against women proceeds from the patriarchal family. Erich Fromm argued that differences between the sexes were not inherent, but a fiction of Western culture. Fromm became a founding father of feminism. To Wilhelm Reich, “The authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in miniature … . Familial imperialism is … reproduced in national imperialism.” To Adorno, the patriarchal family was the cradle of fascism.

  To decapitate the family with the father as its head, the Frankfurt School advocated the alternatives of matriarchy, where the mother rules the roost, and “androgyny theory,” where male and female family roles are made interchangeable, and even reversed. Female boxing, women in combat, women rabbis and bishops, God as She, Demi Moore’s G.I. Jane, Rambo-like Sigourney Weaver comforting a terrified and cringing male soldier in Aliens, and all the films and shows that depict women as tough and aggressive and men as sensitive and vulnerable testify to the success of the Frankfurt School and the feminist revolution it helped to midwife.

  Like Lukacs, Wilhelm Reich believed the way to destroy the family was through revolutionary sexual politics and early sex education. The appearance of sex education in elementary schools in America owes a debt to Lukacs, Reich, and the Frankfurt School.

  IN THE DEATH of the West, the Frankfurt School must be held as a prime suspect and principal accomplice. The propaganda assault on the family it advocated has contributed to the collapse of the family. Nuclear families today represent fewer than one-fourth of U.S. households. And women’s liberation from the traditional roles of wife and mother, which the school was among the first to champion, has led to the demeaning and downgrading of those roles in American society.

  Millions of Western women now share the feminists’ hostility to marriage and motherhood. Millions have adopted the movement’s agenda and have no intention of getting married and no desire to have children. Their embrace of Marcuse’s Pleasure Principle, their tours of duty in the sexual revolution, mean marriages put off. And, as our divorce and birthrates show, even the marriages entered into are less stable and less fruitful. In the depopulating nations of Europe, even in the old Catholic countries, use of contraceptives is almost universal. Contraception, sterilization, abortion, and euthanasia are the four horsemen of the “culture of death” against which the Holy Father will inveigh to the end of his days. The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the
cultural revolution.

  In the 1950s, Khrushchev threatened, “We will bury you.” But we buried him. Yet, if Western Man does not find a way to halt his collapsing birthrate, cultural Marxism will succeed where Soviet Marxism failed; for in a 1998 report on the depopulation of Europe, the pope’s Pontifical Council for the Family tied cultural pessimism directly to infertility.

  A return to a higher fertility rate in those countries whose fertility is declining at the present can be expected only if there is a change in the “mood” in these countries, a shift from present pessimism to a state of mind which could be compared to that of the “baby-boom” era, during the era of post World War Two reconstruction.28

  No such “mood change” is remotely visible on the Old Continent, where birthrates continue to fall. In helping to undermine the family and induce cultural pessimism, the Frankfurt School can claim a share of the credit for having assisted in the suicide of the West.

  Thus did a tiny band of renegade Marxists help subvert American culture and begin the deconstruction of our republic. On the tombstone of architect Christopher Wren is written, “Lector, si monumenta requiris, circumspice.”29 “Reader, if it is monuments you seek, look about you.” So it may be said of Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, and Marcuse, four who made a revolution.