Herbert Marcuse and the Democrats’ Impeachment
The partisan impeachment of President Donald Trump, its shredding of the Constitution and disregard for due process, are just symptoms of the Democrat party’s abandonment of both democracy and sanity in its ruthless pursuit of permanent political power at any cost.
Although it may appear inexplicable, the behavior of the modern Democrat party is not without historical precedent. As Democrats continue their political march leftward, they have begun to adopt the non-democratic tactics of the extreme left.
After the successful 1917 communist revolution in Russia, the political left widely believed that a violent proletarian revolt would sweep across Europe and, ultimately, North America. It did not.
As a result, the Communist International began to investigate other ways to create the state of societal hopelessness and alienation necessary as a prerequisite for socialist revolution – in essence, to erode western democracy from within.
The single, most important organizational component of that effort was a Communist think tank called the Institute for Social Research, popularly known as the Frankfurt School.
The task of the Frankfurt School was first, to undermine the foundation of Western civilization that emphasized the uniqueness of the individual and, second, to determine new cultural forms that would increase the disaffection of and division among the population.
Just as in classical economic Marxism, certain groups like workers and peasants are a priori good, and other groups like the bourgeoisie and capital owners are evil, in Cultural Marxism, feminists, racial and ethnic minorities and those who define themselves according to sexual orientation are deemed good and “victims” of societal injustice. It logically follows, then, that white males and “privilege” and, by extension, Western civilization, are automatically and irredeemably malevolent.
To many Americans, the Democrat party promotes policies that undermine the United States as a sovereign nation, our Constitution, our culture, our traditions, all of what "America" has come to mean. Part of that effort is to weaken our ability to transmit to the next generation the values and traditions upon which the United States was built.
The Democrat party’s assault on the First Amendment is meant to narrow the range of thought in order to make independent thinking literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express those thoughts. It is accomplished through the systematic destruction of language as “microaggressions” or endlessly repeating statements that are patently untrue, like the existence of more than two biological genders.
The widespread political intolerance promoted by the Democrats and their media allies is largely based on the essay “Repressive Tolerance” written in 1965 by Herbert Marcuse, an adherent of the Frankfurt School.
Herbert Marcuse in 1955, in Newton, MA (photo via Wikipedia)
Fred Bauer, in his article “The Left and ‘Discriminating Tolerance,'” captures Marcuse’s inverted logic and identifies the origin of the political intolerance presently practiced at U.S. academic institutions:
Marcuse argued that, because of the radical repressiveness of Western society, a tolerance for all viewpoints actually contributed to social oppression. A pervasive network of assumptions and biases implicitly privileges the viewpoint of the powerful, so that seemingly ‘equal’ presentations of opposite opinions actually end up benefiting the viewpoint of the powerful. In the light of this situation, Marcuse made a rather cunning inversion (one that has been aped countless times since by cultural organs across the United States): The fact that society is so radically unequal means that we should be intolerant and repressive in the name of tolerance and liberty.
The inevitable outcome of Democrat policies is a dystopia, characterized by a cataclysmic decline of a society, in which a totalitarian government enforces ruthless egalitarianism by suppressing or denouncing ability and accomplishment, or even competence, as forms of inequality. It creates compete dependency on the state and attempts to eradicate the family as a social institution.
In his article, “Why Americans Are Not Taught History,” Christopher Hitchens, identified the vulnerability of America’s present-tense culture to the Democrat party’s leftist utopian myth.
For the true blissed-out and vacant servitude required by the Democrats’ strategy, you need a society that lacks any sense of itself through an understanding of its own history and traditions. The low-information voter will submit to a combination of governmental coercion as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the hedonist nihilism of a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus managed by the nanny-state found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
No matter how idealistic are the foundations of the United States or how honorable its previous history, the accumulation of excessive power in the federal government transforms it into a dysfunctional super-state dedicated to maintaining its own power irrespective of the well-being of its citizens.
In a dystopia, history, truth and the law are just chalk-writing on a blackboard, which can be erased and rewritten whenever it suits the convenience and desires of a government of perfidious politicians.
We just witnessed an example of that behavior in the impeachment of President Trump.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, an IT command and control and cyber security subject matter expert and a veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com