Herbert Marcuse – Bogeyman of the Radical Right

One of the more remarkable developments of the Radical Right in the US and Europe is the persistent demonizing of the so-called Frankfurt School and the proponents of Critical Theory.  Few Americans have even heard of these German émigré thinkers, whose most important works were published over 60 years ago.  Yet these largely forgotten social philosophers are – in the eyes of the Right – responsible for the end of Western civilization. 

Over a year ago I wrote about the right-wing criticism of Theodor W. Adorno.  But the most vehement attacks are reserved for Herbert Marcuse, who is reviled for being both a militant Stalinist and at the same time (!) patron saint of the Hippies.  Right-wing Ueberblogger Andrew Breitbart lays into Marcuse in his new book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World:

Marcuse's mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and "multiculturalism" as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all "victim groups" in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse's theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer's critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement–Gender Studies, LGBT/"Queer" Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these "Blank Studies" brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies–except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are "exploitative" and "bad."

Breitbart is heavily influenced by the right-wing theorist William S. Lind, who sees the Frankfurt School as the wellspring of "Cultural Marxism".  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lind addressed a Holocaust Denial conference and denounced Marcuse and his colleagues as a "tiny group of German Jews" who were determined to destroy America. In his famous speech "The Origins of Political Correctness" Lind singles out Herbert Marcuse as perhaps the most dangerous Cultural Marxist.

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s.

The British blogger Robin Phillips puts an explicitly Christian spin on Lind's criticism of Marcuse and his secular Jewish colleagues.  For Phillips, Marcuse set out to "Liquidate Western Civilization" and Christianity with a moral relativism that permeates every institution in the West today:

"But above all, the arm of Frankfurt is seen in the antipathy to Christian values which permeates so much of our public discourse."

Once again it is Herbert Marcuse who is singled out as the single greatest proponent of Cultural Marxism:

By getting these groups to think of themselves as victims of Western oppression, the Frankfurt school sought to harness their energy in the fight against Christian values. {…}During the 1960’s Herbert Marcuse popularized these ideas and disseminated them to college radicals. By mobilizing the anti-war movement, the quiet revolution of Gramsci began to increase in volume. The counter-culture adopted Marcuse as their intellectual guru, and he in turn provided the youth with a steady stream of propaganda to sanctify their movement. (It was Marcuse who originally invented the catchphrase “Make Love, Not War.”)

But William Lind's most diligent student is the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.  Shortly before embarking on his murderous rampage Breivik released his (pdf warnings!) Christo-Fascist manifesto, which draws heavily on – and even plagiarizes – Lind's analysis of Marcuse

(Marcuse) has often been described as a Marxist philosopher, but he was in fact a full-blooded social revolutionary who contemplated the disintegration of Western European and American society just as Karl Marx and Georg Lukacs contemplated the disintegration of German society: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society…there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended. These ideas are oldfashioned…What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”

(Marcuse's) revolutionary efforts would blossom into a full-scale war by revolutionary Marxism against the European white male in the schools and colleges.

I guess it's ironic that Marcuse's colleagues, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, anticipated Breivik's pathology in the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality.