[From article]
“Critical theory” is the academy’s weasel phrase for nontraditional scholarship that seeks to change society instead of studying it. Traditional scholarship would, in other words, be “traditional theory” rather than “critical theory.” The “critical” has nothing to do with understanding and explaining society. It has everything to do with censuring and changing society. It’s the academic provenance of Obama’s political vow to fundamentally transform America.
That nexus should surprise no one. The academy’s the laboratory of culture. All politics are cultural. Obama’s the academic product of Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard University. And the modern American academy’s the leftist hotbed of domestic neo-Marxist social activism. Indeed, when the Nazis chased Max Horkheimer’s critical-theory Institute for Social Research out of Germany in 1933, Horkheimer in 1934 reformed the Institute as part of Columbia University Department of Sociology. That same year, Herbert Marcuse, an Institute colleague, followed Horkheimer to the reincarnated Institute at Columbia University before joining the CIA’s predecessor during World War II.
Karl Marx got the ball rolling: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world . . . the point is to change it.” But Marxism at the end of a rifle barrel didn’t work out well in the Soviet Union, and it was Horkheimer’s critical-theory Institute which restated neo-Marxism’s objective:
The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.
But it was Marcuse himself who -- teaching from 1951-1976 at Columbia University, Brandeis University, and the University of California (where he remained a Professor Emeritus until his death in 1979) -- would go on to preeminently lead critical theory’s long march through the modern American academy (a fait accompli since chronicled by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D'Souza).
[. . .]
So what does critical theory’s cultural Marxism do when its own failure becomes empirically manifest? It shuts down discourse, as every utopian ideology everywhere has always done when it senses the proletarian pack hot on its trail.
“Political correctness is,” as Theodore Dalrymple said, “communist propaganda writ small.”
[. . .]
The secret of Trump’s Republican presidential political success is that mainstream America is terminally sick and tired of a culturally-Marxist political correctness that has squelched it into “a society of emasculated liars.” If Trump’s anything, he’s the antithesis of political correctness. And mainstream America is turning to Trump not because he’s a lifelong principled conservative but because he’s the living and breathing negation of political correctness. Mainstream Americans who empirically sense cultural Marxism’s deconstruction of their traditional society, but can’t object without being condemned as racists, sexists, homophobes, or simply mean-spirited reactionary rednecks, are in full-blown revolt against their critical-theory jailors. And Trump -- political incorrectness incarnate -- is their natural leader.
The Republican Party needs to wake up to this reality because the revolt involves much more than the working-class Republicans at whom the Party elites turn up their patrician noses. The revolt involves every man and woman in America -- liberal or conservative, male or female, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat -- whose disgust at cultural Marxism’s repression of their freedom to engage in a principled dialogue about the future of their society is now at the boiling point.
And Hillary Clinton -- the most grotesquely hypocritical politician in American history -- was a Goldwater Republican until she got into ideological bed with the critical theorists at Wellesley College and Yale University. She’d be President today if Obama hadn’t beaten her at her own game.
The great Trump PC jailbreak is about to go down.
And the jailors are getting nervous.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/03/the_great_trump_pc_jailbreak.html
March 13, 2016
The Great Trump PC Jailbreak
By Michael L. Grable
No comments:
Post a Comment