WHAT HAPPENED IN THE 1960’s?

In 1923, Lukacs and other Marxist intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Germany founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute, which became known as the Frankfurt School, was modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1933, when Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled. Most came to the United States and many became influential in American universities. The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the basis of what became known as “Critical Theory.”

Critical Theory was essentially destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism.

Critical Theorists recognized that traditional beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and then replaced with a “new thinking” that would become as much a part of elementary consciousness as the old one had been. Their theories took hold in the tumultuous 1960s, when the Vietnam War opened a Pandora’s Box of reevaluaton and revolution. The student radicals of the era were strongly influenced by revolutionary ideas, among them those of Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School who preach the “Great Refusal,” a rejection of all basic Western concepts and an embrace of sexual liberation, and the merits of feminist and black revolutions. His primary thesis was that university students, ghetto blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World could take the place of the proletariat in the coming Communist revolution.

Marcuse may be the most important member of the Frankfurt School in terms of the origins of Political Correctness, because he was the critical link to the counterculture of the 1960s. His objective was clear: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including morality of existing society.”

When addressing the general public, contemporary advocates of Political Correctness – or Cultural Marxism, as it might just as easily be called – present their beliefs with appealing simplicity as merely a commitment to being “sensitive” to other people and embracing values such as “tolerance” and “diversity.”

The reality is different. Political Correctness is the use of culture as a sharp weapon to enforce new norms and to stigmatize those who dissent from the new dispensation; to stigmatize those who insist on values that will impede the new "PC" regime: free speech and free and objective intellectual inquiry.

 

EXCERPTED FROM:

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=552

Even before 1960, Americans felt their freedom slipping away...

THE LISTENER by Taylor Caldwell (1960 pp.246-247)

It was funny. Pa worked in a machine shop. They didn’t call him Labor, then. He was a man. He wasn’t Labor. He was a person. Independent. He’d have his beer on the porch at night, and his neighbors would come and they’d talk politics and get real excited. And sometimes sweat. Who were the Presidents then? She didn’t remember. Presidents come and then they go. Nobody remembered them, except when they did some kind of harm, and then the people cursed them. But it was a kind of happy cursing. Washington was a long way off. Now it was kind of everywhere. Who wanted it? It was like something looking over your shoulder all the time and breathing down your neck. Making you hurry, hurry, hurry. “Growth.” For what? And Washington wanted your money; she had to pay out taxes on what she earned by her hard work. For what? Who wanted your money and made Washington scream for it like it was a pack of policemen? It didn’t make sense. What a person earned was always his own, earned with the sweat of his brow, like the Bible said. Now, it looked like, it wasn’t yours. It was somebody else’s. Why? Did they earn it on their knees in somebody’s kitchen or doing somebody’s laundry? No sir. They didn’t. But they wanted your money all the same, even if they hadn’t earned it themselves. She wondered what Pa would say about all this. He’d say, “The country’s gone to the dogs, for sure. And maybe we’d better roll up our sleeves and get it back for ourselves.” Yes, that’s what Pa would say. And all the men like him. They talked all the time about the Revolution and the Boston Tea Party. Maybe what the country needed was another Tea Party.

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson brought the Progressive movement to Washington, sowing the seeds for the paramount political problem of our time: centralized administration

Progressivism came in on two great waves: the 1930s New Deal and the Great Society of the 1960s. President Obama often invokes Progressivism and plans to generate its third, and greatest, wave. American businesses large and small must be brought under centralized direction. Contracts, the very core of personal and social freedom, are scrapped or rewritten by the administration as decades old bankruptcy laws are cast aside in the reorganization of the auto makers. The compensation which employers pay to secure the services of executive employees is now reviewed and second-guessed by a presidential "pay czar." Marriage and family life, church and voluntary organizations are all being weakened mostly by nonrepresentative government agencies. First wave Progressives demanded the popular referendum. Third wave Progressives do everything possible to stop local and state referenda which citizens would use to end this assault on the pillars of free society.

Health Care reform is a prime example of Progressivism in action.

The delivery of health care services has grown costly, leaving many without coverage. But survey after survey shows that 75 or 80 percent of Americans or more are personally satisfied with the quality of their own health care.

The Democratic leaderships' brazen attempts to rush through a health care reform with little public debate and deliberation have disgraced the annals of government by consent. They frantically scribble thousand-page laws behind closed doors and demand midnight votes from members who are given no opportunity to read the legislation they are voting about. This farcical process flunks the Constitution's "due process of law" test.

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Paul Ryan represents Wisconsin's First Congressional District. He serves as ranking member of the House Budget Committee and senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee.