Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 12
Marcuse was widely accepted in the 1960s by the student movement—so much so that students in Paris during the 1968 uprising marched with banners reading “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.”
But he still wasn’t winning in America. Marcuse had a big, big problem: America’s founding ideology is still far sexier than that of the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility. Even if Marcuse was promising unending sex, drugs, and rock and roll, most Americans were more interested in living in liberty with their families, in a society that values virtue and hard work rather than promiscuity and decadence.
So Marcuse had to find a way to defy the opposition. He found it in what he termed “repressive tolerance.” In 1965, Marcuse wrote an essay by that name in which he argued that tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish—and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down. “[T]he realization of the objective of tolerance,” he wrote, “would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” America was experiencing a “repressive tolerance” under which dissenting viewpoints were stifled; what it needed was “partisan tolerance.”20
In other words, if you disagreed with Marcuse, you should be forcefully shut up, according to Marcuse. This made political debate very convenient for him and his allies. This totalitarianism is now standard practice on college campuses, in the media, and in Hollywood—the very places that the Frankfurt School sought to control.
The First Amendment—the same instrument that allowed the Frankfurt School to land on our shores and express their pernicious ideas in freedom—was now curtailed by those who had benefitted from it. Marcuse called for a tyranny of the minority, since the tyranny of the majority could not be overcome without a total shutdown.
There’s another name for Marcuse’s “partisan tolerance”: Political Correctness.
In fact, the term “political correctness” came from one of Marcuse’s buddies: Mao Tse-tung. Mao used the term to differentiate between those who had “scientifically correct” views and those who did not; those who did were termed “politically correct.” In 1963, just two years before Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance,” Mao came out with an essay entitled “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?”21 In that essay, he argued that the Marxist society determines correct ideas, and all incorrect ideas must be put out of their misery. Mao thought it. Marcuse thought it. And his ideological heirs thought it and still think it. Hello, neighbor!
And so Marxism came stealthily to our shores, squatted here, planted its roots, and grew like a weed—all before we even noticed it. It happened at the university level and at the governmental level and at the media level. We didn’t notice because we couldn’t read the rhetorical garbage these jokers were spewing, and we didn’t think it was important—“Our Constitution survived a revolution and a Civil War and two World Wars. Why should we worry about a few German eggheads?” Especially since America was economically thriving under such “oppression.”
The foundations of the Complex had been built. But we still couldn’t see the Complex itself—the Complex was hidden under paragraphs of obscure text and in college curricula at places like Tulane University, under the unlikely auspices of “American Studies.” Talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It all seemed so benign, and we figured that if college students went off and had sex and did drugs and engaged in teenage rebellious decadence, oh well, they’d eventually come back to the Constitution, just the way their parents had.
We slept while the other side armed, and while we snoozed they secretly stole away our defensive weaponry—our allegiance to the Constitution and to freedom of speech and opinion.
It was only when they fired the first shots over our bow that we noticed we were unarmed, and that they had weaponized the cloudy bacteria of their philosophy into full-bore ideological anthrax, ready to deploy on a moment’s notice.
The line was becoming clear. Marx and Hegel had paved the way for the Progressives, who in turn had paved the way for the Frankfurt School, who had then attacked the American way of life by pushing “cultural Marxism” through “critical theory.” The Frankfurt School thinkers had come up with the rationale for radical environmentalism, artistic communism, psychological deconstruction of their opponents, and multiculturalism. Most of all, they had come up with the concept of “repressive tolerance,” aka political correctness.
They had penetrated the academies—my American Studies program at Tulane had far more Adorno and Gramsci and Horkheimer and Marcuse than Twain or Jefferson or Lincoln. There was some trickle-down intellectualism going on—all the college students who worked through these programs and took swigs from the Frankfurt School bottle labeled “Drink Me” shrank mentally and ended up as parts of the Complex. But that didn’t explain how American society as a whole was taken over by this stuff. I just couldn’t understand it: how did Frankfurt School philosophy, which is obviously complicated, highfalutin stuff, become a mass psychosis? How did it trick so many millions of people?
And I had another question, too. Frankfurt School philosophy was all about criticizing from the outside. It was about tearing down society by taking it apart, piece by piece, razing it to the ground. That stuff doesn’t go over very well in this country, because people here are generally happy—we don’t see Disneyland as an emblem of corporate greed or capitalistic exploitation, we see it as a fun place to take our kids, and if somebody tried to tear down Disneyland in the name of the collective, we’d have a shit fit. So how did this outsiders’ philosophy penetrate our hearts and our minds? How did the Complex, which was a huge philosophical system designed to take America head-on, recede into the background so much that a few decades later, we can’t even recognize that it exists?
Then I read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: if Marcuse was the Jesus of the New Left, then Alinsky was his Saint Paul, proselytizing and dumbing down Marcuse’s message, making it practical, and convincing leaders to make it the official religion of the United States, even if that meant discarding the old secular religion of the United States, the Constitution.
Rules for Radicals might just as well be entitled How to Take Over America from the Inside. It’s theory made flesh. Alinsky laid it out step-by-step, but we were too busy fighting the results to read his game plan.
Let’s start by noting who Saul Alinsky was. Alinsky was an avowed communist dedicated to installing communism in America from the inside, using the most clever tactical means he could devise. He was born in 1909 in Chicago, and like his Frankfurt School counterparts, he quickly migrated toward Marx. He attended the University of Chicago and majored in Archaeology, but dumped that after he couldn’t get a job. After working as a criminologist, he became a community organizer—yes, a community organizer—for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a major union run by John L. Lewis, an anticommunist leftist who actually pushed for the election of Republican Wendell Willkie in the 1940 election in the hopes that if Willkie were elected with CIO help, the CIO could win major concessions. From Lewis, whom Alinsky called “one of the most outstanding figures of our time,”22 Alinsky learned hardnosed tactics. And he applied those hardnosed tactics to his own Marxism.
One of the crucial lessons he learned was that he had to work from the inside. Whereas New Left leaders like Marcuse preferred to bash the system from the outside and alienate all those who were part of it, Alinsky knew that it was more important to pose as an insider to achieve his aims.
It worked brilliantly. Time magazine bought into Alinsky’s act in a 1970 profile: “It is not too much to argue that American democracy is being altered by Alinsky’s ideas. In an age of dissolving political labels, he is a radical—but not in the usual sense, and he is certainly a long way removed from New Left extremists.” This, of course, was not true—not in the slightest. His own beliefs
were intensely close to those of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School—it was only his practicality and pragmatism that distinguished him and made him infinitely more effective.
Alinsky took on the trappings of American constitutionalism in order to insinuate himself insidiously into the American consciousness. He scorned flag-burning as counterproductive. He talked about the Founders on a regular basis. He even posed as a conservative when it suited his purposes. Time sums up the popular view of Alinsky, a view he cultivated with minute forethought: “Alinsky claims to be doing nothing more un-American than following the precepts of the Founding Fathers. In the Federalist papers, James Madison warned against allowing any class or faction to acquire too much power. In his own way, Alinsky is trying to redress the balance of power within contemporary America. If the desire to preserve basic American principles makes one a conservative, then he indeed qualifies…. He surely offers proof—if any is needed—that significant change can be accomplished within the American system.”23 This about a man who constantly cited communism as his governing philosophy! It is no wonder Alinsky was so effective.
Alinsky summarized his strategy for instituting Marxist change in his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. It’s actually an excellent book, clear where Marcuse is foggy, irreverent where Adorno is stagnant, dirty and funny where Horkheimer is abstruse and boring.
The book’s dedication page explains in a nutshell what was so dangerous about Alinsky—he mixed a dash of religious fervor, a sprinkle of American founding talk, and a heavy dose of “kiss my ass” into a concoction that was relatively easy and fun to swallow. The first page has an epigraph from Rabbi Hillel, one from Thomas Paine, and finally, Alinsky’s “kiss my ass” epigraph: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”24 Only a true egoist would cite himself in his epigraph, but that was what made Alinsky so unique—his brazen disregard for tradition, sewn together with the dressings of majority society.
Alinsky immediately makes clear where he stands on politics: he’s a Marxist, and a pragmatic Marxist at that. Alinsky’s role, as a pragmatic communist, is to succeed where his “fellow radicals” had failed. He despises those impractical Marxists who “panic and run, rationalizing that the system is going to collapse anyway of its own rot and corruption,” those who go “hippie or yippie, taking drugs, trying communes, anything to escape,” those who “went berserk… the Weathermen and their like.” He laughs at the college students who embrace Marcuse-ian philosophy while doing nothing, those who spend their time cribbing from the communist puppetmasters and wear Che T-shirts.25
He also knows that America’s openness provides communists the opportunity to destroy American values, which makes working from the outside a waste of time. Militant outsider-ism is counterproductive. Alinsky, first and foremost, knows that to win, communists must communicate in the language of the people. They must embrace the people, not scorn them. They must embrace the world as it is, not as they wish it were. “As an organizer,” Alinsky writes in Donald Rumsfeld–like language, “I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be…. That means working inside the system.”26
The people, Alinsky thinks, are like happy sheep. In order to steer them in the politically correct direction, they first must be made unhappy, and that unhappiness will result in passivity, then finally in discontent, and then, in the end, revolution. Incrementalism, as Frankfurt School’s Antonio Gramsci taught, is the name of the game. And the only way to begin opening the door to the revolution is to make people unhappy with the status quo. Revolutionaries aren’t supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted—they’re supposed to afflict everybody, making them long for a mass overturning of the system as a whole. After calling for the destruction of the system John Adams helped create, Alinsky, with his typical aplomb, actually quotes John Adams to back him up. (Adams must have been spinning wildly in his grave as Alinsky dug out his dog-eared Adams quote book.)
Alinsky’s clever merging of fake founding philosophy with his own Marxism led him to internal contradictions that would have sunk a lesser ego. While championing “freedom,” for example, he hated the idea of individual freedom the Founders loved—he wanted “communal freedom,” which is to say tyranny led by the government. “The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself,” he wrote.27 This is typically Rousseau-ian messaging—community trumps the individual, and in fact, individualism can only exist within the body politic. In other words, workers of the world unite—from within the system. And he united his ideas under the rubric of “change.” Yes, “change.”28 He also liked “hope,” because his personal philosophy “is anchored in optimism.”29 Sound familiar?
Alinsky says he’s not looking for a Marxist revolution, but he is looking to provide a manual for the “Have-Nots” against the “Haves.”30 That sounds an awful lot like Marxism to me.
All of this is great rhetoric, but how would Alinsky actually build his forces? How would he find his minions?
By finding the raw materials. He tells us straight out what he’s looking for in a “community organizer.”
First off, he looks for flexibility.31 That means moving from method to method, argument to argument, fighting like a guerrilla rather than like a coordinated army. Don’t worry about methodological consistency, says Alinsky—just do what you have to in order to win. Alinsky believes that the ends justify the means as a general rule. He believes that fearing corruption of your internal values only leads to paralysis, and that the only way to truly win is to abandon yourself wholly to your ends. As Stalin would have put it, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Alinsky liked omelets.
This obviously runs directly counter to the notions of Judeo-Christian morality, which ardently state that right ends cannot justify wrong means. That is why American society has such a tough time handling Alinsky’s acolytes: he didn’t play by their rules, and they couldn’t play by his rules. Alinsky simply didn’t care about Judeo-Christian morality—he was a total moral relativist who declared, without batting an eye, “One man’s positive is another man’s negative.”32 He actually made the argument that Nazi resisters weren’t objectively moral—to the Nazis. Winners write history, says Alinsky, so you’d better be the winner. That holds particularly true in war, where “the end justifies almost any means”—and Alinsky views all politics (and actually, all life) as war. If you have the option of using moral means, by all means use them, says Alinsky—if not, screw ’em. As he said in his usual colorful language, the alternative to corrupt victory is to “go home [defeated] with my ethical hymen intact.”33 And he was no virgin.
His bottom line is plain and unvarnished: Kick ass and then pretend you were doing the moral thing. Lie, cheat, and steal for victory. If you have to lie to win, then lie and win, then lie about your lie. If you have to win with brutality, then be brutal and win, and then rewrite history about your brutality. Always cloak your goals in widely agreed-upon American terms that people buy into. Things like the Declaration of Independence or the “common welfare” provision of the Constitution. Sure, you may be standing for none of those things. But that doesn’t matter—victory is what matters. It’s the Chicago way.
Second, Alinsky looks for confidence. Weak-willed people never win, and those who doubt themselves are weak-willed.34 It takes confidence to go after your opposition with a chainsaw. Those who have self-confidence will not shy away from conflict, which is an essential feature of progress, he says (channeling Hegel).
Third, Alinsky espouses the value of experience. Education as a community organizer means embracing Rousseau-like experiential learning, since history doesn’t repeat itsel
f—all history is changeable and changing. This is also an excellent rationalization for young people to ignore the wisdom of the past—this time, just like every time, things are different.
Fourth, Alinsky suggests certain personal qualities in organizers. Here are some of the most important.
Sincerity: the good community organizer must be absolutely honest and sincere. This is good advice for any politician, but it is excellent advice for someone trying to work with populations different from his/her own.
Curiosity and irreverence: the organizer must be curious, because everything needs to be questioned. Values must be questioned. Morals must be questioned. This is basically critical theory in practice. Alinsky’s focus on irreverence is particularly important: “To the questioner nothing is sacred.” Again, this is critical theory in its most basic practical form.
A sense of humor: This is probably the most important quality Alinsky mentions. Humor is a weapon to be deployed as often as possible—it is almost impossible to defend against. It is the weapon the Frankfurt School lacked—their seriousness made them boring and inaccessible. Alinsky is no such thing. He is hilarious, and that hilarity breeds the sort of social change only a Jon Stewart or a Stephen Colbert could bring about rather than a Noam Chomsky.