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Revealing the subversive and shocking roots of \u2018political correctness\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n By William S. Lind<\/p>\n Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. In the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.<\/p>\n Where did it all go? How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today \u2013 so different that those who grew up prior to the \u201960s feel like its a foreign country? Did it just \u201chappen\u201d?<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t just \u201chappen.\u201d In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how and why is one of the most important parts of our nation\u2019s history \u2013 and it is a story almost no one knows. The people behind it wanted it that way.<\/p>\n What happened, in short, is that America\u2019s traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from our Western, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an ideology. We know that ideology best as \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d or \u201cmulticultural- ism.\u201d It really is cultural Marxism \u2013 Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms in an effort that goes back not to the 1960s, but to World War I. Incredible as it may seem, just as the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union has faded away, a new cultural Marxism has become the ruling ideology of America\u2019s elites. The No. 1 goal of that cultural Marxism, since its creation, has been the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion.<\/p>\n To understand anything, we have to know its history. To understand who stole our culture, we need to take a look at the history of \u201cpolitical correctness.\u201d<\/p>\n EARLY MARXIST THEORY<\/p>\n Before World War I, Marxist theory said that if Europe ever erupted in war, the working classes in every European country would rise in revolt, overthrow their governments and create a new communist Europe. But when war broke out in the summer of 1914, that didn\u2019t happen. Instead, the workers in every European country lined up by the millions to fight their country\u2019s enemies. Finally, in 1917, a communist revolution did occur, in Russia. But attempts to spread that revolution to other countries failed because the workers did not support it.<\/p>\n a program sponsored by a young Marxist named Felix Weil who had inherited millions. Weil and the others who attended that study week were fascinated by Lukacs\u2019 cultural perspective on Marxism.<\/p>\n THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL At first, the Institute worked mainly on conventional Marxist issues such as the labor movement. But in 1930, that changed dramatically. That year, the Institute was taken over by a new director, a brilliant young Marxist intellectual named Max Horkheimer. Florkheimer had been strongly influenced by Georg Lukacs. He immediately set to work to turn the Frankfurt School into the place where Lukacs\u2019 pioneering work on cultural Marxism could be developed further into a full-blown ideology.<\/p>\n To that end, he brought some new members into the Frankfurt School. Perhaps the most important was Theodor Adorno, who would become Horkheimer\u2019s most creative collaborator. Other new members included two psychologists, Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, who were noted promoters of feminism and matriarchy, and a young graduate student named Herbert Marcuse.<\/p>\n ADVANCES IN CULTURAL MARXISM Second, again contrary to Marx, he announced that in the future, the working class would not be the agent of revolution. He left open the question of who would play that role \u2013 a question Marcuse answered in the 1950s.<\/p>\n Third, Horkheimer and the other Frankfurt School members decided that the key to destroying Western culture was to cross Marx with Freud. They argued that just as workers wereoppressed under capitalism, so under Western culture, everyone lived in a constant state of psychological repression. \u201cLiberating\u201d everyone from that repression became one of cultural Marxisms main goals. Even more important, they realized that psychology offered them a far more powerful tool than philosophy for destroying Western culture: psychological conditioning.<\/p>\n Today, when Hollywood\u2019s cultural Marxists want to \u201cnormalize\u201d something like homosexuality (thus \u201cliberating\u201d us from \u201crepression\u201d), they put on television show after television show where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual. That is how psychological conditioning works; people absorb the lessons the cultural Marxists want them to learn without even knowing they are being taught.<\/p>\n The Frankfurt School was well on the way to creating political correctness. Then suddenly, fate intervened. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, where the Frankfurt School was located. Since the Frankfurt School was Marxist, and the Nazis hated Marxism, and since almost all its members were Jewish, it decided to leave Germany. In 1934, the Frankfurt School, including its leading members from Germany, was re-established in New York City with help from Columbia University. Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to doing so in the United States. It would prove all too successful.<\/p>\n NEW DEVELOPMENTS Critical Theory: To serve its purpose of \u201cnegating\u201d Western culture, the Frankfurt School developed a powerful tool it called \u201cCritical Theory.\u201d What was the theory? The theory was to criticize. By subjecting every traditional institution, starting with family, to endless, unremitting criticism (the Frankfurt School was careful never to define what it was for, only what it was against), it hoped to bring them down. Critical Theory is the basis for the \u201cstudies\u201d departments that now inhabit American colleges and universities. Not surprisingly, those departments are the home turf of academic political correctness.<\/p>\n Studies in prejudice: The Frankfurt School sought to define traditional attitudes on every issue as \u201cprejudice\u201d in a series of academic studies that culminated in Adornos immensely influential book, \u201cThe Authoritarian Personality,\u201d published in 1950. They invented a bogus \u201cF-scale\u201d that purported to tie traditional beliefs on sexual morals, relations between men and women and questions touching on the family to support for fascism. Today, the favorite term the politically correct use for anyone who disagrees with them is \u201cfascist.\u201d<\/p>\n Domination: The Frankfurt School again departed from orthodox Marxism, which argued that all of history was determined by who owned the means of production. Instead, they said history was determined by which groups, defined as men, women, races, religions, etc., had power or \u201cdominance\u201d over other groups.<\/p>\n Certain groups, especially white males, were labeled \u201coppressors,\u201d while other groups were defined as \u201cvictims.\u201d Victims were automatically good, oppressors bad, just by what group they came from, regardless of individual behavior.<\/p>\n Though Marxists, the members of the Frankfurt School also drew from Nietzsche (someone else they admired for his defiance of traditional morals was the Marquis de Sade). They incorporated into their cultural Marxism what Nietzsche called the \u201ctransvaluation of all values.\u201d<\/p>\n What that means, in plain English, is that all the old sins become virtues, and all the old virtues become sins. Homosexuality is a fine and good thing, but anyone who thinks men and women should have different social roles is an evil \u201cfascist.\u201d<\/p>\n That is what political correctness now teaches children in public schools all across America. (The Frankfurt School wrote about American public education. It said it did not matter if school children learned any skills or any facts. All that mattered was that they graduate from the schools with the right \u201cattitudes\u201d on certain questions.)<\/p>\n Media and entertainment: Led by Adorno, the Frankfurt School initially opposed the culture industry, which they thought \u201ccommodified\u201d culture.<\/p>\n Then, they started to listen to Walter Benjamin, a close friend of Horkheimer and Adorno, who argued that cultural Marxism could make powerful use of tools like radio, film and later television to psychologically condition the public. Benjamin\u2019s view prevailed, and Horkheimer and Adorno spent the World War II years in Hollywood. It is no accident that the entertainment industry is now cultural Marxism\u2019s most powerful weapon.<\/p>\n THE GROWTH OF MARXISM IN THE UNITED STATES But hell had not forgotten the United States. Herbert Marcuse remained here, and he set about translating the very difficult academic writings of other members of the Frankfurt School into simpler terms Americans could easily grasp. His book \u201cEros and Civilization\u201d used the Frankfurt Schools crossing of Marx with Freud to argue that if we would only \u201cliberate non- procreative eros\u201d through \u201cpolymorphous perversity,\u201d we could create a new paradise where there would be only play and no work. \u201cEros and Civilization\u201d became one of the main texts of the New Left in the 1960s.<\/p>\n Marcuse also widened the Frankfurt School\u2019s intellectual work. In the early 1930s, Horkheimer had left open the question of who would replace the working class as the agent of Marxist revolution. In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question, saying it would be a coalition of students, blacks, feminist women and homosexuals \u2013 the core of the student rebellion of the 1960s, and the sacred \u201cvictims groups\u201d of political correctness today.<\/p>\n Marcuse further took one of political correctness\u2019s favorite words, \u201ctolerance,\u201d and gave it a new meaning. He defined \u201cliberating tolerance\u201d as tolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the left, and intolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the right. When you hear the cultural Marxists today call for \u201ctolerance,\u201d they mean Marcuse\u2019s \u201cliberating tolerance\u201d (just as when they call for \u201cdiversity,\u201d they mean uniformity of belief in their ideology).<\/p>\n The student rebellion of the 1960s, driven largely by opposition to the draft for the Vietnam War, gave Marcuse a historic opportunity.<\/p>\n As perhaps its most famous \u201cguru,\u201d he injected the Frankfurt School\u2019s cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation. Of course, they did not understand what it really was. As was true from the Institute\u2019s beginning, Marcuse and the few other people \u201cin the know\u201d did not advertise that political correctness and multi-culturalism were a form of Marxism.<\/p>\n But the effect was devastating: A whole generation of Americans, especially the university-educated elite, absorbed cultural Marxism as their own, accepting a poisonous ideology that sought to destroy America\u2019s traditional culture and Christian faith.<\/p>\n That generation, which runs every elite institution in America, now wages a ceaseless war on all traditional beliefs and institutions. They have largely won that war. Most of America\u2019s traditional culture lies in ruins.<\/p>\n A COUNTER-STRATEGY versities, the media, the entertainment industry and most of the mainline churches \u2013 from the cultural Marxists. They expect us to try to do that, they are ready for it, and we would find ourselves, with but small voice and few resources compared to theirs, making a frontal assault against prepared defensive positions. Any soldier can tell you what that almost always leads to: defeat.<\/p>\n There is another, more promising strategy. We can separate ourselves and our families from the institutions the cultural Marxists control and build new institutions for ourselves, institutions that reflect and will help us recover our traditional Western culture.<\/p>\n Several years ago, my colleague Paul Weyrich wrote an open letter to the conservative movement suggesting this strategy. While most other conservative (really Republican) leaders demurred, his letter resonated powerfully with grass-roots conservatives.<\/p>\n Many of them are already part of a movement to secede from the corrupt, dominant culture and create parallel institutions: the homeschooling movement. Similar movements are beginning to offer sound alternatives in other aspects of life, including movements to promote small, often organic family farms and to develop community markets for those farms\u2019 products. If Brave New World\u2019s motto is \u201cThink globally, act locally,\u201d ours should be \u201cThink locally, act locally.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, our strategy for undoing what cultural Marxism has done to America has a certain parallel to its own strategy, as Gramsci laid it out so long ago. Gramsci called for Marxists to undertake a \u201clong march through the institutions.\u201d Our counter-strategy would be a long march to create our own institutions. It will not happen quickly, or easily. It will be the work of generations \u2013 as was theirs. They were patient, because they knew the \u201cinevitable forces of history\u201d were on their side. Can we not be equally patient, and persevering, knowing that the Maker of history is on ours?<\/p>\n William S. Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth in 1%9 and received a Masters in History from Princeton in 1971. A military historian, Lind is the author of the \u201cManeuver Warfare Handbookco-author; with Gary Hart, of \u201cAmerica Can Win: The Case for Military Reform* and co-author, with William H. Marshner, of \u201cCultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda\u201d<\/p>\n The preceding is excerpted from Dr. Ted Baehr and Pat Boones \u201cThe Culture-wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World<\/p>\n
\nWeil responded by using some of his money to set up a new think tank at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. Originally it was to be called the \u201cInstitute for Marxism.\u201d But the cultural Marxists realized they could be far more effective if they concealed their real nature and objectives. They convinced Weil to give the new institute a neutral-sounding name, the \u201cInstitute for Social Research.\u201d Soon known simply as the \u201cFrankfurt School,\u201d the Institute for Social Research would become the place where political correctness, as we now know it, was developed. The basic answer to the question \u201cWho stole our culture?\u201d is the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School.<\/p>\n
\nWith the help of this new blood, Horkheimer made three major advances in the development of cultural Marxism. First, he broke with Marx\u2019s view that culture was merely part of society\u2019s \u201csuperstructure,\u201d which was determined by economic factors. He said that on the contrary, culture was an independent and very important factor in shaping a society.<\/p>\n
\nTaking advantage of American hospitality, the Frankfurt School soon resumed its intellectual work to create cultural Marxism. To its earlier achievements in Germany, it added these new developments:<\/p>\n
\nAfter World War II and the defeat of the Nazis, Horkheimer, Adorno and most of the other members of the Frankfurt School returned to Germany, where the Institute re-established itself in Frankfurt with the help of the American occupation authorities. Cultural Marxism in time became the unofficial but all-pervasive ideology of the Federal Republic of Germany.raditional beliefs on sexual morals, relations between men and<\/p>\n
\nNow you know who stole our culture. The question is, what are we, as Christians and as cultural conservatives, going to do about it?
\nWe can choose between two strategies. The first is to try to retake the existing institutions \u2013 the public schools, the uni<\/p>\n