Taking America To School … And to Other Places We No Longer Recognize

When I was a young adult, I played a lot of pickup basketball. Each time you faced off against your opposite on the other team, you took the measure of the other player. Invariably, words were exchanged about each other’s alleged competency on the court. My recollection is that more often than not, the player who understated his potential threat was the one you really needed to watch; otherwise, you ended up “being taken to school.” America is being “taken to school” by Barack Obama and the media is doing nothing to warn us. The media have been strangely silent on his college years, during which he solidified his world view, and his experience as a “community organizer” in south side Chicago, during which he put his world view into practice. According to Ryan Lizza of the New Republic, “Publicly, as well, Obama has made his organizing days central to his political identity. When he announced his candidacy for president, he said the ‘best education’ he ever had was not his undergraduate years at Occidental and Columbia or even his time at Harvard Law School, but rather the four years he spent in the mid-1980s learning the art and science of community organizing in Chicago. The night after Obama's announcement speech, he made a similar point on "60 Minutes" as he led Steve Kroft around the old neighborhood.” When there is silence in the liberal media, it is a clear indication that someone should be asking questions.”

My first indication there was a real problem was on September 7, 2008, when Eric Shawn of Fox New’s Weekend Live asked Bob Beckell why Obama had not released his college transcripts and his college thesis, a requirement for graduation. Apparently, Obama’s wife had already released hers. Beckell’s response was that the average American didn’t wake up in the morning asking about Obama’s college transcripts. Alarm bells went off. So, I did some immediate investigation and learned that Obama was a Political Science major at Columbia University. The alarm bell got louder. I remembered reading in Pat Buchanan’s book Death of the West (DOW) that Columbia University was the home to the transplanted Frankfurt School, a school of German Marxist thinkers, and to Herbert Marcuse who championed this cultural revolution school of thought in America in the 1960s. With a little additional research I found that Marcuse’s son, Peter Marcuse, retired as a professor at Columbia and is the “keeper” of the official Marcuse home page (www.Marcuse.org). Disciples of this ideology include Frank Marshall Davis, Malcom X, and Saul Alinsky, all of whom were identified by Barack Obama in his books (Dreams from My Fathers and The Audacity of Hope) as either mentors or influential thinkers in the formation of his world view. In fact, Alinsky was the founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the school that taught Obama how to organize. Alinsky was also the subject of Hillary Clinton’s undergraduate thesis.

So what is the Frankfurt School and how has had it shaped political thought on the left in America and possibly the world view of one of our candidates for President? The Frankfurt School was originally established in 1923 as the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University by Gyorgy Luckacs and other German communists. According to Pat Buchanan in his book Death of the West (pg. 75), it grew out of a recognition by them that “capitalism was not impoverishing the workers. Indeed their lot was improving, and they had not risen in revolution because their souls had been saturated in two thousand years of Christianity, which blinded them to their true class interests … In biblical terms, the word of Marx, seed of revolution, had fallen on rock-hard Christian soil and died … the Marxist had bet on the wrong horse.” In his work, History of Class Consciousness, Luckacs reiterated his commitment to dialectical materialism: “It is not men’s consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness ... Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity." Translation: man’s social nature shapes the core of his existence, that is his consciousness. There is no room for God. To bring the world into alignment with this thinking, Luckacs “… saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution. A world-wide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.” Lukacs’s ideas became known as “cultural terrorism.” As the Hungarian Peoples Republic Commissar for Education and Culture, Luckacs put his program into action by instructing students in free love, the archaic nature of the middle-class family codes, rejection of monogamy, the irrelevance of religion, and called women to rebel against the sexual mores of the times. His basic aim was to destroy the institution of Christianity, which is the foundation of western culture. Fifty years later, these ideas were adopted by the baby boomers. Is this starting to sound familiar?

Antonio Gramsci, a contemporary of Luckacs, was an Italian communist, who also understood that traditional Marxism had failed. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute argues that Gramsci believed in “absolute historicism, meaning that morals, values, truth, standards, and human nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside of a particular historical context: rather, morality is socially constructed.” In other words, truth and morality were not absolute, they were relative. Gramsci argued the culture must be changed, starting with the arts, cinema, theatre, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, and the new electronic medium radio. Through these institutions the public could be captured and converted to the cause. He encouraged fellow Marxists to form alliances with Western intellectuals who embraced human secularism.

In 1930, Max Horkheimer (Traditional and Critical Theory) became the director of the Frankfurt School and the school began to systematically translate Marxism into cultural terms. Musician Theodor Adorno, psychologist Erich Fromm (Escape from Reason), and sociologist Wilhem Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution) joined the school. In 1933, Hitler’s rise to power interrupted the school’s development of its cultural Marxist ideology. The school relocated to America at Columbia University were it developed its Critical Theory, which has been described by Buchanan in DOW (pg.80) 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, ethnocentricity, convention, and conservatism … the crimes of the West flow from the history of the West, as shaped by Christianity.” Buchanan then concludes, “Critical theory ultimately results in ‘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 consider cultural pessimism a necessary precondition of revolutionary change.”

During the fifties, Herbert Marcuse, an ex-OSS officer and Brandeis University professor, defined the proletariat of the American Cultural Revolution: radical youth, feminists, black militants, homosexuals, the alienated, and the asocial. His battle cry: “make love, not war.” In Carnivorous Society, he wrote: “One can rightfully speak of cultural revolution, since protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment … there is one thing we can say with complete assurance. The traditional ideal 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.”

Critical Theory forms the basis of Western Marxism and post-modernist thought. Malcom X, Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky – all self-described by Obama as being influential in his life – studied and practiced the principles of Critical Theory. In his Rules for Radicals, a book that Alinsky ironically dedicated to Lucifer, "the very first radical" [2], Alinsky – Obama’s mentor – outlines his strategy in organizing, writing,

"There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default."

Why haven't we heard anything about this in the media? The silence is deafening. Do you think we need to know more about Obama’s mentors, his world view, and how it came to be formed? He is asking us to place our country and its future in his hands. With such trust comes transparency. We are not getting that from the media or the man.

America is "being taken to school."