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To understand why conservatives have been losing the war for America’s soul, Christopher Rufo’s new book, “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything,” is must reading.
Since the 1960s, hardcore leftists have been executing plans to “silence, marginalize, and suppress” dissent — all in the name of tolerance.
The intellectual founder of this ideological movement was the Marxist, Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).
Marcuse, a member of the radical Frankfurt School of critical social analysis, migrated to the United States in the 1930s to evade the Nazis.
After teaching stints at Columbia and Brandeis universities, Marcuse settled down at the University of California in San Diego.
In a 1967 lecture, “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” he praised the fledgling counterculture movement on college campuses for its commitment to a “sexual, moral, and political rebellion.”
Marcuse called for “the complete disintegration of existing society, beginning with a revolt in the universities and the ghettos” and the eventual capturing of “public institutions and the cultural repression of the opposition.”
To achieve that end, he called for “liberating tolerance,” AKA repressive tolerance, which means intolerance towards those who disagree.
“Liberating tolerance” includes censorship, repression, and when necessary, violence.
Counterculture leaders influenced by Marcuse included Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Bill Ayers, and H. Rap Brown.
Many Marcuse followers called for “guerrilla warfare in all cities.” Modeling themselves on Che Guevara, the Weathermen, and black nationalist groups, “perpetrated a stunning number of property bombings, police assassinations, bank robberies, prison breaks, and violent assaults.”
But by the early 1970s, those radicals ran out of steam. They had become “anti-intellectual, decadent and authoritarian.”
The New Left destroyed itself, Marcuse said, “when they forfeited their political impetus in favor of withdrawal into a kind of private liberation — drug culture, the turn to Guru-cults and other pseudo-religious sects.”
Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, and others retooled the movement.
They encouraged followers to invade the university system and conquer its administration departments.
Thus began the “Long March” through the institutions.
Overtime, Rufo notes, “the radicals shifted the university as a whole, securing positions of influence, legitimizing their ideas in sympathetic journals, purging reactionaries from the faculty, and recruiting cohorts of graduate students who would transform the spirit of revolutionary communiques into a dense academic mass.”
Between 1987 and 2015, American universities hired close to 1 million left-wing administrators. To advance their agendas, they created a new vocabulary — “institutionalized racism,” “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “male supremacy,” “Institutional sexism,” “cultural identity,” and “anti-sexist men,” etc.
At the University of Pittsburgh, for example, administrators created a host of departments to implement their racialist ideology including: the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Racial Equality Consciousness Institute, Center for Race and Social Problems, Black Action Society, Black Lives in Focus, and Black Senate.
Graduates brainwashed by radical ideology professors have been invading all aspects of American Life.
The results: “the creation of a new ideological regime — composed of a unity between the university, the media, the state, the corporation — that has coalesced around the critical theories, transmitted them through the public bureaucracy, and enforced the new orthodoxy through the top-down management of private life.”
All the Fortune 100 companies, have surrendered “to the ideology of critical theories, filtered through the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Children throughout the nation’s public education system are being indoctrinated to believe that racist values include, “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “right to comfort,” and “worship of the written word.”
Public schools in Portland, Oregon, have “designed a program of political education for their students that resembles propaganda.”
By infusing into the minds of the young that America is evil “and lionizing the rioters in the streets,” Portland schools have become training grounds for radicals. “Some of the most violent anarchist groups in Portland are run by teenagers. Dozens of minors were arrested during the long stretch of the George Floyd riots.”
In just about every field, conservatives have been steamrolled by left- wing culture warriors.
Why?
First and foremost, the left labored to infiltrate America’s institutions 24/7 for years, while the right sat and talked.
Another reason for failure: many wealthy right-wing contributors are afraid the radicals will publicly attack them and their businesses if they donate money to wage a counter-offensive. They prefer supporting less controversial organizations like the Club for Growth, whose main concern is tax cuts.
While it looks pretty bad, Rufo believes that not all is lost because “the new elite has failed to extinguish the bourgeois desires for property, family, religion, and democratic representation.”
The ultimate objective of the counter-revolution Rufo argues “must be the restoration of political rule.”
It must “seek to channel public sentiment and restore the rule of the legislature, executive, and judiciary over the de-facto rule of managers and social engineers.”
Will conservatives throughout the nation have the fortitude to spend years fighting on the culture battlefields to restore America’s Founding principles?
I hope so.
But, before putting on their political armor, they should get to know the enemy by studying Rufo’s extraordinary work.
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of “The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact,” and “Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy.” Read George J. Marlin’s Reports — More Here.