Source: http://chriseller.net/2016/the-rise-of-cultural-marxism-in-america
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 03:10:34+00:00

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The following was submitted as a paper in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master of Arts degree through Luther Rice University.
“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” –Psalm 127:3.
The 1973 Roe v. Wade landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion-on-demand proved to be a dividing line within American culture. Abortion is certainly not a new problem mankind must contend with, but the level of debate and discord surrounding the issues has certainly increased in the last quarter of the 20th Century and first part of the 21st Century. While it is clear to point to a decision like Roe v. Wade as the spark that lit the controversial debate on abortion in America, it is also clear that decisions like Roe do not happen in a vacuum. The seeds that created the culture for Roe were sown decades, even generations before. This course will examine the influence of Marxism dating from the mid-19th Century up to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and the Marxist ideology that molded and shaped the American ethos.
Clearly, the topic of Marxism and Socialism fills libraries of writings and analysis, and is beyond the scope of this paper. The focus, instead, will be on the impact of Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory on America, and how this ideology created the seedbed that produced the sexual revolution, modern feminism, abortion on demand, and ultimately brought destruction to the family. Significant to this thesis is the U.S. Supreme Court and its active role it has played since 1960 as a change agent concerning social and cultural issues. Finally, this paper will examine current attempts to solve the problem of abortion through political victories and the historic failure of Christians to recognize the true nature of the enemy it faces.
In the years 1916-1924, Communist revolts were defeated in Budapest, Munich, Berlin, and Poland. Only in Russia did the Marxists succeed in the overthrow of the tsarist government during the October Revolution of 1917. On all other fronts, it appeared Marxism had been defeated. Yet, the ideas of Marx had not died. Like a seed hidden in the soil waiting to germinate, Marxism would prove to be one of the most forceful and resilient ideologies of the 20th Century.
Cultural Marxism is rooted in the philosophy and writings of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci was an Italian political leader who helped establish the Italian Communist Party in 1921. Like many of his contemporary socialists, Gramsci sought a less dogmatic form of communism than what the Bolsheviks in Russia had established, and one that was more palatable to the intellectual elite.4 Gramsci was jailed by Benito Mussolini in 1926 and lived the remaining 11 years of his life in prison. During this time, Gramsci wrote his “Prison Notebooks,” which present his theory of hegemony.
Like Marx, however, Gramsci was to die in an Italian prison before seeing his theory tested.
With the rise of the Nazis in January 1933, the Institute and its members were forced to leave Germany due to their Marxists beliefs and Jewish ethnicity. The Institute landed in New York and eventually found a home at Columbia University. Three of the original four members emigrated to America with the Institute—Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. (Walter Benjamin initially emigrated to France, but when France was defeated by the Nazis in 1940, he attempted to move to Spain. He was denied entry by the Spanish Government, and committed suicide.14) The Institute became known simply as “the Frankfurt School” within American society. Following the defeat of the Third Reich, Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany in 1948 and continued their work; Marcuse stayed in America, where he became a leading thinker and spokesman for the emerging New Left.
The influence (and culturally destructive force) of the Frankfurt School cannot be underestimated. While Gramsci provided the “why” (evolution vs. revolution), and Lukács provided the “what” (the Christian soul of Western Culture), the Frankfurt School provided the “how” (critical theory). Again, a full understanding of critical theory is far beyond the scope of this paper, but in simplest terms, critical theory teaches adherents to question everything, but especially authority. Remember, the ideology driving critical theory is a Gramscian version of Marxism in which the seeds of cultural change lie within the hearts and minds of the people, and over time cultural values and identity can be erased and replaced with a new set of values and identity. The Frankfurt School taught Americans to question their own culture and the authority which was behind this culture, which, in the eyes of the New Left, was inherently evil. And nowhere is authority more suspect than within the male-dominated, patriarchal family structure.
The father, in Horkheimer’s illustration, is not one to be respected because of his position, but instead, establishes within the child a learned response to obey a strong, authoritarian figure; not because of a relationship established and founded upon love, but instead established because the father is stronger than the child.
The first is that of fascism. They [the authors of The Authoritarian Personality] define fascism as a trait in which a person focuses upon the importance of demonstrating respect for and showing obedience to established authority persons and structures. The leader or master is all-important, all-powerful, and all-good and should be accorded due honor and respect. A person with fascist tendencies is likely to show blind and unquestioning devotion and loyalty to his or her leader (whether it be a führer, president, premier, king, commanding officer, or an older sibling) and to be outraged at hearing criticism of this leader. The fascist person is overly influenced by the position of authority itself. No honor can be greater than to have served the authority well and to have been faithful to the end to all of the leader’s commands and wishes; the virtue comes in having served authority for authority’s sake. Another tendency of fascist individuals is to divide the world’s people into two rather simplistic groups. The “good” group serves authority well and is physically, spiritually, and morally strong. The “bad” group consists of immoral, crooked, and feeble-minded people who can never be trusted, who never learned respect and reverence for tradition, and who are responsible for most of the world’s problems. Finally, there is a tendency in fascism to enjoy and respect symbols of power, authority, and mass conformity—guns, swords, flags, insignias, uniforms.
The second major characteristic of the authoritarian personality is the tendency toward ethnocentrism. An ethnocentric attitude holds that one group or culture or nation is best, and all others are inferior. Political pluralism and ethnic or religious diversity are not societal qualities to be admired or desired.
Third, the authoritarian personality tends to be quite anti-Semitic.18 Such an individual is likely to possess many stereotypes of Jews (e.g., “Jewish power and control in money matters is far out of proportion to the number of Jews in the total population”) and is likely to blame “the Jewish element” for a myriad of social and economic problems.
There is no more unpopular teaching in a place like Manhattan today I think than this whole passage when it says, “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men …” It says, “Respect civil authority. Respect your masters, slaves.” Now what does that mean?
First of all, there is a tremendous anti-authority spirit in our society today. A book was published in America in 1950. It was very influential. It was called The Authoritarian Personality. The thesis of the book is there are people who need to be strong because they’re afraid they’re weak.
Because they feel that they’re weak, they have to lord it over people. They have to gain power over people. The thesis of the book is authoritarian people create, especially in their own children and in people around them, authoritarian people who either need to be authoritarian or they need authoritarian people over them.
This was very, very influential. In the 60s, for example, the thesis behind this book laid behind a lot of the parent effectiveness training and a lot of the books on parenting that came out in the 60s and have continued on through because the books on parenting say parents should never, ever use authority in trying to raise their children. Never. Never say, “Do this because I’m the parent.” Don’t say that. You have to reason. You have to try and persuade. Never use authority. Authority is out….
The fact is, as the passage tells us, God instituted human authority. It says. “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted …” by God, sent by God. God created human authority. He established it. You see it in the church. You see it in civil government. You see it in the family. There are all sorts of various institutions. Why? You can’t live without authority.
The Frankfurt School began, in the 1920s, to actively try to turn Western society toward the world revolution dictated by a Marxist philosophy. They sought a different kind of revolution than the labor movement that Marxists had used in Russia. Realizing that Western labor was too well paid to revolt, a cultural revolution was advocated instead. So they planned what is commonly referred to as their “long march through the institutions” in order to destroy the underpinnings of the culture. They actively infiltrated the education system (with teacher training programs), rewrote history and advocated student, racial, and women’s revolts. An attack on religion as one of society’s institutions was carried out through their “critical theory.” It was not much of a theory. It was more a method that criticized and attacked all institutions, be they religious, educational or societal (such as the family itself).
Therefore, it’s no accident that one of the chief targets of the Unholy Left is the family— just as the nascent family of Adam and Eve was Satan’s target. The family, in its most basic biological sense, represents everything that those who would wish “fundamental change” (to use a famous, curdling phrase) on society must first loathe. It is the cornerstone of society, the guarantor of future generations (thus obeying nature’s first principle of self-preservation via procreation), the building block of the state but superior to it, because the family is naturally ordained, whereas the state is not. Against the evidence of millennia, across all cultures, the Left hurls the argument that the family is nothing more than a “social construct” that we can reengineer if we choose.
Something else happened in the Fall of 1964 that would prove to have great consequence for the remainder of the decade. In August 1964, the first Baby Boomers (born in 1946) entered college. This was the first of the post-war generation to enter adult life. From the beginning, they had been taught to question everything, including the stability and happiness of their own family. Over the next decade, the full arsenal of the left would be unleashed on the unsuspecting American family–the birth-control pill; no-fault divorce; radical feminism; rising numbers of women in the workforce; declining moral standards in pervasive media; stereotyped or inadequate portrayals of marriage in television programming. In 10 years, Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best had been replaced by All in the Family and Maude.
We are faced with a novelty in history, namely with the prospect of or with the need for radical change, revolution in and against a highly developed, technically advanced industrial society. This historical novelty demands a reexamination of one of our most cherished concepts. . . . First, the notion of the seizure of power. Here, the old model wouldn’t do anymore. That, for example, in a country like the United States, under the leadership of a centralized and authoritarian party, large masses concentrate on Washington, occupy the Pentagon, and set up a new government. Seems to be a slightly too unrealistic and utopian picture. (Laughter.) We will see that what we have to envisage is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.
The Court today is, as it always has been, a legal institution, but it also undertakes to decide hot button questions of culture and politics that are, strictly speaking, none of its business. In its cultural-political role, the Court almost invariably advances the agenda of modern liberalism.
The thing to know to fully understand contemporary constitutional law is that, almost without exception, the effect of rulings of unconstitutionality over the past four decades has been to enact the policy preferences of the cultural elite on the far left of the American political spectrum.
I objected to Roe v. Wade the moment it was decided, not because of any doubts about abortion, but because the decision was a radical deformation of the Constitution. The Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, leaving it, like most subjects, to the judgment and moral sense of the American people and their elected representatives. Roe and the decisions reaffirming it are equal in their audacity and abuse of judicial office to Dred Scott v. Sandford. Just as Dred Scott forced a southern pro-slavery position on the nation, Roe is nothing more than the Supreme Court’s imposition on us of the morality of our cultural elites.
There had been a voice that addressed us from beyond us, and since it was one voice for all, it bound us together in shared obedience or disobedience. And indeed its echoes and whispers haunted us for a long time; even Kant listened for them. But with someone like Emerson, the identification of the individual as the sole source of his own torah was complete. It remained for the American Supreme Court to produce what must surely go down as the classic example of obliviousness to any word from an Other, in the majority opinion for Casey: The essence of liberty, it reads, is the freedom of the individual to decree for herself what her liberty is to be.
There is always a risk to make too simplistic of an argument out of a complex issue. This, too, is the risk for the historian. Beliefs and values that take decades, even generations, to take root and bear fruit can often appear perfectly sequential in hindsight. Clearly, life does not happen this way. The greatest changes in history often appear as non-linear events at first, and it is only after seeing events with the clarity of hindsight that these events begin to connect with the greater historical narrative that happens over long periods of time.
Few would argue that the mid-19th Century gave mankind two concepts that would profoundly shape the future. Both concepts are the antithesis of a biblical narrative and openly seek to remove God from His place as Author and Creator of this universe and life itself. The first–the theory of evolution presented by Charles Darwin in 1859–and the second–the theory of the collective or socialism–presented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel in 1867. While these two theories have interwoven in many ways to create a secularist (and atheistic) worldview in the time since they were first published, it has been the focus of this paper to examine the role of Marxism in molding and shaping our current cultural ethos.
Ethics is what is normative, absolute. It refers to a set of standards around which we organize our lives and from which we define our duties and obligations. It results in a set of imperatives that establishes acceptable behavior patterns. It is what people ought to do. By contrast, morality is more concerned with what people do. It describes what people are already doing, often regardless of any absolute set of standards.
We now see the problem of the modern human condition. When ethics and morality are confused and mixed, the result is that the culture makes the norms. The standards become relativistic and changing. That which is the norm is identified with that which is the absolute. The absolute standards are destroyed by the fluid nature of the culture. Relativism triumphs over the absolute.
This is the culture we find ourselves in today. We live in a time when there simply is no transcendent “ought,” no acknowledgement of an authority outside of ourselves, and every man does what is right in his own eyes (Judges 17:6). If we doubt this, we only need to look to the one (supposed) final authority in our land—the Supreme Court—for confirmation. Again, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court declared, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” We are our own gods.
Frankly, I think we’re dealing with a choice between a lesser evil and a greater evil, and Mrs. Clinton is the greater evil. That’s my personal opinion, and if we don’t help the lesser evil prevail over the greater evil, we become responsible morally for helping the greater evil to prevail.
There are many Christian leaders who echo Lamb’s opinion.
The hope that this situation can be changed by shifts in personnel on the Court has been shown to be futile. Eleven consecutive appointments to the Court by Republican presidents pledged to change the Court’s direction have not resulted in the overruling of a single major ACLU victory or even halting the flow of ACLU victories…. The Court will continue to serve as the mirror, mouthpiece, and enacting arm of a cultural elite that is radically alienated from and to the left of the ordinary citizen. … Judicial activism presents the … currently crucial question whether and how we can return to the federalist system of representative self-government that the Constitution contemplates, a return which is necessary if we are to reverse the socially destructive policies that judicial activism has imposed.
The Court has departed from any plausible meaning of the Constitution or a statute. We have, then, national law with respect to our culture that has nothing to do with the Constitution or statute but everything to do with the captious ponderings of a majority of the Justices, led in turn by the latest visions of the self-anointed intellectual elite.
Christian leaders today see the Supreme Court as the last firewall against the complete secularization of America, and, therefore, it is worth investing the resources of the church in the election process in order to elect political leaders who can affect change on the Court. Unfortunately, the blaze of secularism and socialism has already overcome the culture and the Court.
in Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion.
These are all justices the Christian Right fought for during the last quarter of the 20th Century, yet when it comes to the most critical Court decisions of this generation, to a man and a woman, the justices advanced the cause of socialism one more step away from Judeo-Christian values.
Christians living in the 21st Century live in a time when there is no transcendent ought. There is no ethical standard apart from one’s own beliefs that guide and direct our morals or our decision making. This is not by accident, but by design. The seeds were sown 150 years ago and nurtured by men with a clear vision and plan for a world and for the culture that governs the world. They were willing to take the long road and look clearly beyond their own lifetime to see the desired change. The fruit of this investment is a secular/socialist culture that is now affirmed and progressed by the very pillars of our society—our schools, our media, our government, our courts, and, sadly, many of our churches.
1 Max Beer, The life and teaching of Karl Marx (Kindle Locations 1030-1035). Kindle Edition.
3 Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), p. 462.
4 Paul Lagassé, Columbia University, The Columbia Encyclopedia (New York; Detroit: Columbia University Press; Sold and distributed by Gale Group, 2000).
5 Beer, Kindle Locations 124-126.
6 Allen Dwight Callahan, ed., Semeia 83/84 (1998).
7 Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West (p. 72). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
8 Craig A. Phillips, “Literary Criticism,” The Encyclopedia of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI; Leiden, Netherlands: Wm. B. Eerdmans; Brill, 1999–2003), 293.
9 Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (p. 75). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.
10 Michael Loewy, Georg Lukács from Romanticism to Bolshevism (Patrick Caniller, Translator (London: NLB, 1979), p. 112.
13 Lagassé, The Columbia Encyclopedia.
16 Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and others), Continuum, New York, 2002, p. 101.
18 Anderson notes in another portion of the text that “anti-Semitic” has in subsequent years been broadened to include the scapegoating of any cultural, religious, ethnic, or gender group, be they Catholics, blacks, illegal aliens, gays, feminists (p. 112).
19 D. E. Anderson, “Authoritarian Personality,” ed. David G. Benner and Peter C. Hill, Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology & Counseling, Baker Reference Library (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 111–112.

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