Niall Ferguson: Osama bin Laden’s Posthumous Victory

"Comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. ...

"It is not just that the West has been successfully penetrated by an antagonistic civilisation that fundamentally rejects the fundamental division between religion and politics - church and state - that lies at the heart of both Christianity and Judaism. The West is also being geopolitically outmanoeuvred by 'the rest' in just the way Huntington foresaw*.

"Contrast the global order after 9/11 with the global order today. We have come a long way since NATO secretary-general George Robertson’s statement on September 11, 2001 - 'Our message to the people of the United States is . . . "We are with you." '

"In the past three years, Zbig Brzezinski’s worst-case scenario has come about. 'Potentially, the most dangerous scenario,' he wrote in 'The Grand Chessboard' (1997), would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by 'complementary grievances' Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that grand coalition has come into being, with North Korea as a fourth member. The 'Axis of Upheaval' (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) are now cooperating in military, economic and diplomatic ways. Moreover, the Trump administration’s combative treatment of American allies (the European Union, Japan, South Korea) and neutrals (Brazil, India, and Switzerland), not least with respect to trade policy, is alienating not only the traditionally nonaligned but also key partners.

'The upshot is that Israel is now virtually alone in fighting against the Islamists, so that even the United States wants plausible deniability when, as this week, the Israeli Air Force strikes the leadership of Hamas in the Qatari capital, Doha.

'The point is that the clash of civilisation continues. Now ask yourself: Who’s winning? 

...
"[C]omparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. That’s not to say his particular brand of Salafist jihadism is winning; it can even be argued that it’s in decline. Bin Laden’s creed was always too uncompromising to form alliances of convenience. By contrast, the pro-Palestinian 'global intifada' is much more omnivorous, and can easily absorb the old left (Marxism and pan-Arabism) and the new (anti-globalism and wokeism). ...

"At the same time, Western civilisation today is so much more divided than it was 24 years ago. The public response to 10/7 illuminated the divisions. Whereas older voters generally remain more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, younger cohorts have swung the other way. Perhaps that’s because to Gen-Z, 9/11 is a faint memory - as distant as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s assassination were to my generation. But it’s also because the Islamists have done such a good job of co-opting the campus radicals, somehow overriding the cognitive dissonance in slogans such as “Queers for Palestine,” while at the same time tapping the antisemitism that still lurks on the far right. ...

"Walking the streets of New York this week, I felt old. To my children, my students, and my employees, 9/11 is not a memory. It is not even an historical fact. It is something people argue about on social media. ...

"It has taken me all these years to understand that 9/11 really was a clash of civilisations. And it has taken me until this week finally to face the reality that ours is losing."

~ Niall Ferguson from his post commemorating September 11, 2001: 'Osama bin Laden’s Posthumous Victory'

* Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntiongton, whose seminal essay on “The Clash of Civilizations” was published in 1993, aligning with the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernise.

New Left vs the Masses

"There is one line by [New Left hero Herbert] Marcuse that is quite telling about the essence of the New Left:

"‘If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television programme and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population. (…) The people recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment’. (One-Dimensional Man, pp. 10-11). 

"For Marcuse, a worker who can afford a resort place, a working-class girl having access to amenities that were previously only available to the elites, and a person of colour owning a car, are all problematic. People escaping the drudgery of millennia means they can’t anymore play the convenient role of the victim in the intellectual’s schemes of class warfare. Which is why Marcuse gives up on ordinary people as political agents, and looks instead to the ‘lumpenproletariat’ for his new revolutionary subjects. 

    "The masses and their aspirations are a problem!

    "Notice also the anti-materialism: how dare these proles enjoy amenities! How dare they enjoy that split-level home! They’ve lost their souls, but I, Marcuse, can tell them what’s good for them - know your place proles! 

    "No one saw as clearly this shift of the Left, from promising abundance to problematising working class people having stuff, than Ayn Rand: 

'The old-line Marxists used to claim that a single modern factory could produce enough shoes to provide for the whole population of the world and that nothing but capitalism prevented it. When they discovered the facts of reality involved, they declared that going barefoot is superior to wearing shoes'."

~ Nikos Sotirakopoulos

PART 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

 

So if you've been reading this series, you now know what identity politics is, and why we've all been talking about gender and race and .... and .... getting so fucking tired of it all. But if you've been reading, now you know what caused all the nonsense, why it stinks so much, and why it's been causing so much bloody conflict. 

Here's something else about it that stinks. If you've been around academia or company's personally departments, you'll have heard the term "intersectionality." And if you've been listening in to people who want to make victims out of everybody, you'll have heard them shouting about it -- and shouting even louder about how they need to silence those who have so-called 'privilege.' 

So just what the hell is this "intersectional analysis"? And why should you care? Your second-favourite blogger is on the case...

Intersectionality: How some tribes are made more equal than others

"Identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-

them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning."

~ Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

THE "MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN FORCES in society” mentioned in Part 4, those concealed agents of oppression that Marx + Marcuse allegedly uncovered, are what they say justifies the blatant suppression of free speech. To fight against this would-be censorship, you have to know how they generally go about it.

Marcuse’s hidden structure is given legs by the left’s tool of so-called “intersectionality.” In essence, it's an engine to divide and conquer -- to create in innocent folk the omnipresent feeling of victimhood, and in others the disarmingly guilty feeling of unearned privilege. Why would someone do this to others? Simple. Because they want power. If you can talk on behalf of some folk while you help silence others, then political power can be yours, you hope. It might be only a stone's throw away.

In his best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind, American academic Jonathan Haidt traces the emergence of this influential tool to a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor then at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies). In the essay, she argues that a black woman’s experience in America is more than just the sum of “the black experience” and “the female experience.” There are “layers” of structural oppression, she claims, that this would allegedly gloss over.

Crenshaw’s important insight [explains Haidt] was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.” More generally, as explained in a recent book by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge: ‘Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.’[1]

These categories can be mapped on a diagram as a series of bipolar dimensions, as one Kathryn Pauly Morgan did in a famous diagram now taught in university classrooms around the western world. Every graduate from the last two decades in most disciplines has had this rammed down their impressionable young throats. The simplified diagram shown below shows only seven axes of victimhood; Morgan herself identifies fourteen!

In an essay describing her approach [says Haidt], Morgan explains that the centre point represents a particular individual living at the “intersection” of many dimensions of power and privilege; the person might be high or low on any of the axes. She defines her terms like this: “Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways …. Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.” Morgan draws on the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that each of us occupies a point “on each of these axes (at a minimum) and that this point is simultaneously a locus of our agency, power, disempowerment, oppression, and resistance. The [endpoints] represent maximum privilege or extreme oppression with respect to a particular axis.”[2]

If this looks like a particularly lunatic version of a magazine quiz (“10 Questions to Reveal How You’ve Been Victimised By Reality” or "7 Questions to Expose Your Privilege") or a particularly disrespectful parlour game (just how insulted should, say, a non-white disabled female feel at being told they’re a victim of nature?) then you’d be right.[3] It is precisely what Washington Post journalist Michael Gerson once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,”[4] performed as a pseudo-scientific dance.

According to Morgan’s view however, any young, white, attractive, euro, anglophone who is a gentile, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich, credentialed, cis-gendered, fertile male is ipso facto an oppressor to some degree. Whatever they’ve done, or haven’t done themselves. [Shout this loud enough, and Marama Davidson will show up soon enough to applaud.]

Quite how you are responsible for someone else’s alleged infirmity is another matter never fully addressed: what nature has rent asunder in the poor, infertile, disabled, non-white, lesbian, politics will (somehow) be able to make whole again. And note that however much the politicians screw the scrum in favour of these alleged victims, they still remain victims by virtue of their underlying power differential. (So as the Hobson’s Pledge organisation has discovered, whatever happens in law to “redress the power imbalances” to favour minorities, middle-aged straight white males will always remain their oppressors.)

And it matters not at all how tolerant you yourself are; in this world of power-driven adjectives if any one of those privileged adjectives describes you (able-bodied, fertile, swinging a penis) then you are one of the oppressing class and, in the views of Marcuse and his followers and fellow travellers, people like you must be silenced as a matter of social justice. After all, “the end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.”

Marcuse offered this vision in 1965:

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise [i.e., the allegedly 'privileged'], and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth [i.e., the alleged victims of reality] presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.’[5]

There have been millions willing  and eager to undertake that suppression. Often violently.

NOW REMEMBER, THIS IS what your children are being taught on every campus.

Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of "intersectional thinking" described above, along with training in spotting so-called micro-aggressions, [i..e, what we used to call an unintentional slight, but can now be "weaponised" by the would-be power-luster. More on this here and here.] By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, to identify more distinct identity groups, and to see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent … [and they'll have forgotten what they went to university to learn, and have no time in the curriculum for it anyway.]

This combination of common-enemy identity politics and micro-aggression training [see Chapter 6] creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offences committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.[6]

How will students fare who have been taught this bile? We don’t even need to guess, just observe:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.

You've wondered why the "woke" can so easily label straight white folk as "Nazis"? Here's a clue right here. But even a non-straight can be in danger if they're part of the "power structure":

An illustration of this way of thinking happened at Brown University in November of 2015, when students stormed the president’s office and presented their list of demands to her and the provost (the chief academic officer, generally considered the second-highest post). At one point in the video of the confrontation, the provost, a white man, says, “Can we just have a conversation about—?” but he is interrupted by shouts of “No!” and students’ finger snaps. One protester offers this explanation for cutting him off: “The problem they are having is that heterosexual white males have always dominated the space.” The provost then points out that he himself is gay. The student stutters a bit but continues on, undeterred by the fact that Brown University was led by a woman and a gay man: “Well, homosexual … it doesn’t matter … white males are at the top of the hierarchy.”[7]

OBSERVE AGAIN THAT ALL the qualities chosen by the intersectionalists are, almost each and every one of them, something you have at birth, something about which you can do nothing, something which (in their own eyes) is considered to be a negative. There is not a single quality about which one can do anything, and almost none that have real existential import. In a very real sense, these identitarians are not just in revolt against reality, they are blind to genuine human values.

[T]he tribalists keep proclaiming that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that adherence to a tribe—any tribe—is the only way to keep men moral … [Yet their only moral] standard is “We’re good because it’s us.”[8]

For centuries, philosophers have identified morality as a science based on free will -- a field of study based on our ability to make choices, and to judge those choices against a given moral standard. But by this intellectual sleight of hand, your ability to make choices is considered irrelevant to whether your are good or bad. Your birth made you that way -- and the intersectional diagram will show you how.

The intersectionalists have chosen qualities, of course, that you cannot change -- and that, since only the un-privileged few who are victims are able to ever acquire -- are necessarily divisive. But one could just as easily, and with much more coherence, draw up a diagram of life-giving virtues which anyone (even the alleged victims) could choose; actions and behaviour that one could follow as a means to shake off their poor start in life, perhaps, and to pursue real, meaningful life-enhancing values – like those shown in Figure 4 below. But benevolent outcomes like individual growth, prosperity, success and happiness take individual effort, not group whinging – “his own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it”[i] – and would hardly fuel the social unrest Marcuse and his followers are after. Indeed (if you recall) their system is designed to mitigate against these very things!

Happy, successful people don’t follow dictators. Victims do. And it is victims that these power-lusters hope to harvest.

Commenting on this phenomenon at its birth, many years ago, Ayn Rand observed that it marked an important transition in human affairs: the explicit emergence of what she called “the hatred of the good for being the good,” and the arrival on the scene of creatures dedicated only to destruction. She marked the 

virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man or woman because he or she is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction. (Emphasis in the original.) [9]

It represents not just a revolt against values, but against reality itself.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity[10] is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.[11]

NOW, I BET MANY of you on the so-called "right' are reading all this while thinking smugly to yourself things like "those stupid Lefties," and  "at least I'm too smart to have fallen for all that crap." Well, tomorrow I'll explain to you why you're probably very wrong about that.

More on that tomorrow...

CONTINUED IN PART 6: 'The Right Adopts the Left's Love Child'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'

NOTES
[1] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 67-68). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid (pp. 68-69). 

[3] As Hicks and others have noted, this form of measurement raises suffering and victimhood to a kind of moral high ground. It’s underlying ethic sets others above self, the weak above the strong, and elevates those who suffer most over those who avoid or diminish suffering. Indeed, it sets a group’s victim status as central to social virtue, and sets all rules in relation to their alleged suffering. The connection to so-called hate speech should be obvious. See on this the discussion between Yaron Brook, Onkhar Ghate and Greg Salmieri on Free Speech & Patreon, December 2018, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/yaronbrook/2018/12/23/yaron-brook-onkar-ghate-greg-salmieri-free-speech-patreon

[4] Gerson coined it for a 2002 George W. Bush speech to the NAACP, which concluded “No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt."

[5] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 66). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[6] Ibid (p. 71).

[7] Ibid  (p. 70)

[8] Ayn Rand, ‘Selfishness Without a Self,’ collected in the book Philosophy: Who Needs it

[9] Ayn Rand, ‘The Age of Envy,’ (1971) collected in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971

[10] The ‘Law of Identity’ to which she refers is Aristotle’s philosophical law, not to be confused with the laws created by identity politics. It can be quickly summarised as: things are what they are.

[11] Ibid.

[i] Ayn Rand, on whose virtue schema this diagram is based, from ‘Galt’s Speech,’ collected in For the New Intellectual

IDENTITY POLITICS (Part 4): Politics & Polylogism, Marx + Marcuse

So now you know what identity politics is, and something about what makes it stink: it stinks, because it says everyone who's born the same, or are grew up the same, thinks the same. So "stay in your lane"!

It suits the group-think merchants to promote this bullshit because (they hope) they can surf to political power on the group conflict it creates.

But how do they get away with it?

TODAY we burrow down into how this idiotic groupthink emerged into political life, and from where. And for that, we have to go all the way to Germany, and a bearded bloke in the British Museum Library, and their excuse for why the proletariat seems so generally happy with the fruits of capitalism, and wholly un-ready to revolt ...

Some Causes: Politics & Polylogism

"To the Frankfurt School, Freud offered a psychology admirably suited

to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism… Thus Marcuse has an

explanation for the new generation of revolutionaries-in-training for

why capitalism … seems to be peaceful, tolerant, and progressive—when,

as every good socialist knows, it cannot really be—and for why the

workers are so disappointingly un-revolutionary. Capitalism does not merely 

oppress the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically."

~ philosopher Stephen Hicks (Explaining Post-Modernism, pp 162-3)

THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES REPRESENTED by encouraging group conflict were grasped early by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).

Marcuse had a rare heritage. He was a German Marxist from the Frankfurt School, and also a student of Martin Heidegger, who embraced Nazism during the later war. In the rarefied atmosphere of Sixties America, Marcuse's writings on revolt and political power would make him “the father of the New Left.”

From Marx, Marcuse got the rejection of reason as a universal tool.  Like Marx, he promoted instead the notion of poly-logism – of so-called “multiple logics” – the idea that the conditions of one’s birth and upbringing “hard wire” your thinking and your very means of thought. 

You think we're all talking past each other? Of course, say Marcuse and Marx: because what's true in logic for your group is not true for mine.  They do mean this literally:

Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure. [Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action]

It wasn't born as a "socialist" idea however. It was embraced by both right and left: For the European left at this time, the defining feature was class; for the European right, it was race. For both, the important thing was the collective -- the only difference was how the collective was defined. 

This could seem amusing. For one example, David Ricardo’s 200-year-old Law of Comparative Advantage (which demonstrates the win-win proposition of free trade) was condemned by German Marxists because he was bourgeois, by German racists because he was a Jew – and by German Nationalists because he was English! So that was it: free trade was out, without any need at all to address any of Ricardo’s reasoning. Because by this anti-principle of multiple logics, reason is no longer universal, and each group has its own “logic” – precisely the formula for dissent, disagreement, and disruption that a Marcuse was after.

Marcuse was reinforced in this rejection of reason by Heidegger, who called it that “most stiff-necked adversary of thought" – an obstacle to be discarded. Marcuse was happy to throw it out: bathwater, baby, and all. 

HE THEN SET ABOUT about redressing the problem apparent to every Marxist no matter how blind: that the masses were simply failing to become impoverished under capitalism, and would therefore never rise up in revolt in the manner than Marx had long predicted. 

On this troublesome point, Marcuse found comfort in the ideas of Sigmund Freud. When Freud applied his worrisome psychoanalytics to social philosophy, he found himself arguing that civilisation is “an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies,” the forces of civilisation having evolved (according to Freud) “by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms. Civilisation is thus an artificial construct overlaying a seething mass of irrational energies in the id.”[1]  To Marcuse and, the Frankfurt School, “Freud offered a psychology admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism.”[6]

It was not that the masses were not impoverished, argued Marcuse[3], who was blind to folk around him who were enjoying the fruits of rising post-war prosperity. It was simply, he argued, that individuals en masse were themselves blind to the so-called “structural impoverishment”that is allegedly implicit in the capital system,:“increasingly unaware that the apparently comfortable world they live in is a mask for an underlying realm of brutal conflict and competition.”[8] 

You didn't realise all that was seething underneath the surface of your weekly supermarket shop, did you.

Since the proletariat themselves however are blind to this brutal, if implicit, “structural” oppression -- if Joe Sixpack enjoying his relative peace and comfort to much to even see it -- then Mr Sixpack must have his eyes opened! Opened, insisted Marcuse, by overt political action from outside the proletariat. By a “great refusal.” It was the job of the insightful activist, he said, to "lift the veil" from victims’ eyes. Only then would they rise up and overthrow their structural oppressors. 

ALL THIS SOUNDS MAD enough. But first, he had to sell them a new idea of oppression. Instead of being happy in their own rising wealth and prosperity, they had to be taught to be unhappy in the alleged inequality of this blessings across the land -- to be upset that some others were pulling down more -- to be angry that the majority of the wealth, comfort, and power was in the hands of the "oppressors." To be angry about it, and to act.

One of the first "direct actions" Marcuse called for was to silence these alleged “oppressors.” (This was "cancel culture" back in the sixties.) Silencing the alleged oppressors on the grounds of this new view of equality, based upon so-called “power differentials.” Silenced as a matter of "social justice." In his widely influential 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,”

Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication. Indiscriminate tolerance is “repressive,” he argued; it blocks the political agenda and suppresses the voices of the less powerful. If indiscriminate tolerance is unfair, then what is needed is a form of tolerance that discriminates. A truly “liberating tolerance,” claimed Marcuse, is one that favours the weak and restrains the strong. Who are the weak and the strong? For Marcuse, writing in 1965, the weak was the political left and the strong was the political right.[5]

He went on to argue that that the forces of the left must therefore use the arguments of “tolerance” against the powerful forces of intolerance allegedly commanded by the capitalist class. He therefore demanded 

the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought [sic] may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.[6]

Remember, this is what he called "repressive tolerance."

If we summarise, he is arguing that

“Because Western civilisation is inherently oppressive... speech should be free for those who oppose freedom, capitalism and the foundations of Western society, but not for those who defend them.”[7]

And in case the reader misses it, Marcuse makes the point explicit:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. [8]

This is a message impossible for any reader to miss. And they don’t.

[Remember some years ago for example when Chris Trotter was defending Helen Clark's illegal pledge-card spending as "acceptable corruption"? And then applauding her subsequent Electoral Finance Act “shutting down those with money [as] a necessary restriction on freedom of expression”?[10] That's where this comes from. Observe the widespread justification and even denial of the violence in Albert Park earlier this month? That's where it leads.] 

Following this script, those who dissent from the new orthodoxy are shouted down, denied platforms, forced into sensitivity re-education courses, forbidden from speaking, intimidated, mobbed, and even threatened with violence to get them to shut up. Consider again University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s call to her backers — “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!” [9] That was Marcuse’s message in action. So too is the shouting down of "TERFs" and "Nazis" by folk too ignorant to even know what Nazism means.

All is acceptable when it’s your Team’s corruption you're defending.

We see here too, slithering in from stage left, one of the most irrational ideas afloat on this whole sea of abject, anti-rational nonsense: the idea that is called intersectionality. It is this notion – justifying that some groups be made more unequal than others – that powers much of the tribalism shutting down modern debate.

MORE ON THAT TOMORROW.

CONTINUED IN PART 5: Intersectionality, or 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'

NOTES

[1] In his 1930 book Civilisation and Its Discontents
[2] Summaries of Freud and Marcuse are from Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition), (2013), pg 161-2.
[3] In his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation, making the obvious hat tip to Freud’s tome, and the 1964 best-seller One-Dimensional Man
[4] Ibid, pg. 162-163, summarising the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer
[5] Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind; How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, pg. 65
[6] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance,’ 1965
[7] Steve Simpson, ‘At the Heart of the Attacks on Free Speech, (2015), collected in Defending Free Speech, ed. Steve Simpson (2016)
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tom Palmer, ‘The Three Most Pressing Threats To Liberty Today,’ Cato Policy Report, December, 2016
[10] Editorial, NZ Herald, 18 December, 2017, which noted that “during the controversy over this bill. Illiberalism reigned. ‘People shouldn't be able to say that,’ was a common refrain… There was often an implied trade-off: that shutting down those with money was a necessary restriction on freedom of expression. It reeked of political commentator Chris Trotter's disgraceful conclusion a year ago that the unlawful spending on Labour's pledge card had been acceptable corruption.”

QotD: "This, in a nutshell, is the precise formulation of the New Parasitism, which his followers and allies are now trying to impose by force on Western civilisation. Marx sought to appeal to the proletariat by proclaiming 'Who does not toil shall not eat.' Marcuse seeks to appeal to the Lumpenproletariat, to the bums, to those who eat without toiling."

"Without any knowledge of or concern for its sources, basis or validity, many people have accepted [Herbert] Marcuse's notion of guaranteeing everyone's 'basic needs.' This notion is shared today by most 'liberals' and by many 'conservatives.' It motivates the proposals for a guaranteed annual income and for a 'negative income tax.'  

  "What is Marcuse's ethical justification of that notion? It is expressed completely in one terse statement in [his book] 'One Dimensional Man': 'The only needs that have an unqualified claim for satisfaction are the vital ones -- nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture.'    "This, in a nutshell and in Marcuse's own words, is the precise formulation of the New Parasitism. This is the base of his political philosophy , which his followers and allies are now trying to impose by force on Western civilisation. [Marx sought to appeal to the proletariat by proclaiming 'Who does not toil shall not eat.' Marcuse seeks to appeal to the Lumpenproletariat, (whom Marx despised) to the bums, to those who eat without toiling.] 

    "Notice first that Marcuse says that man's vital needs have an unqualified claim to satisfaction. This means that there is some corresponding obligation on someone to satisfy them and that there can be no questioning or limitation of either the claim or the obligation. To whom could such a bill be presented? Obviously not to nature, because Marcuse acknowledges that nature does not automatically satisfy man's needs. The answer therefore is: to 'society.' But society consists only of individuals. And what Marcuse does not acknowledge is the fact that there are two kinds of individuals: those who are able and willing to provide for their own vital needs, and those who are not. Obviously the first kind is not going to present any 'unqualified claims' to 'society.' It is only the second kind who will -- and to say that they will present them to 'society' means only that they will present them to the first kind of individuals. 

    "Marcuse's principle means that those who are able and willing to provide for their own vital needs are morally obligated to provide for those who are not." 

        ~ philosopher George Walsh, from his 1970 article 'Herbert Marcuse, Philosopher of the New Left'

George Walsh, Marcuse.pdf by on Scribd:

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Quote of the day: On curing poverty

 

“If concern with poverty and human suffering were the collectivists’ motive, they would have become champions of capitalism long ago; they would have discovered that it is the only political system capable of producing abundance. But they evaded the evidence as long as they could. When the issue became overwhelmingly clear to the whole world, the collectivists were faced with a choice: either turn to the right, in the name of humanity — or to the left, in the name of dictatorial power. They turned to the left — the New Left.
    “Instead of their old promises that collectivism would create universal abundance and their denunciations of capitalism for creating poverty, they are now denouncing capitalism for creating abundance. Instead of promising comfort and security for everyone, they are now denouncing people for being comfortable and secure.”
~ Ayn Rand on the New Left

[Hat tip For The New Intellectuals]

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So Trump wants to be like Nixon huh? This is not good.

Trump: Nixon? Surely Not

Guest post by Jeffrey Tucker

If you have followed the Republican trajectory over the last year, perhaps this will not surprise you. And maybe you discerned this last week when “Law and Order” became another official Republican campaign slogan, alongside “Make America Great Again.”

As it turns out, the model that the Donald Trump campaign is using for its public image, messaging, and policies was the one pioneered by Richard Nixon in 1968. Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort confirmed it.

Then the candidate himself agreed.

I think what Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first [said the Trumpanzee]. The ’60s were bad, really bad. And it’s really bad now. Americans feel like it’s chaos again.

Nixon Was the Turning Point

Nixon was a remarkable case. His public credibility was built by his big role in the 1948 congressional hearings that pitted State Department Official Alger Hiss against Whittaker Chambers. Nixon was then a congressman from California and a key player on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). He publicly demonstrated Hiss’s Communist Party connections, and thereby became a hero to the anti-communists of that time.

The event became the cornerstone of Nixon’s entire career, establishing him as the leader of the anti-leftist faction of the party. Based on this reputation, he went from the House to the Senate in 1950, to the Vice Presidency in 1950, and finally the Presidency in 1968. Upon his election, hopes were high among the libertarians of the time that he would perhaps work to dismantle the welfarism and warfarism of the Lyndon Johnson era.

I recall my father telling me about his own feelings at the time. “I never trusted Nixon,” he told me years later. “But we shared the same enemies. At the time, that was enough for me.”

[Ayn Rand herself, politically was not primarily anti-communist but pro-freedom. Writing of that 1968 election she called herself an “Anti-Nixonite for Nixon.”

As to the state of the country at large, as we approach the Presidential election of 1968: it is obvious that there is an enormous swing to the right—if by "right" we mean the trend toward freedom and capitalism. But, tragically, it is a blind swing, without conscious knowledge, programme or direction. The people are rightfully, indignantly against the welfare state, against the blatantly cynical injustices of pressure-group warfare, against the deceptions and contradictions of pragmatic "anti-ideology." But they do not know the root nor the solution of these evils. They do not know whether they are for capitalism—they should be, but probably would not be, at present. It is the task of a country's intellectuals to provide the people with political knowledge—with an intelligible political philosophy. The philosophy of a mixed economy, of the Welfare State in all its variants, is bankrupt: it has had its day and has brought us to our present state. There is only one alternative now: the philosophy of capitalism—if a collapse into dictatorship is to be averted.
    Without the proper intellectual leadership, the people's blind rebellion will not save this country and will come to nothing, as have all the blind rebellions of the past. But the people's groping need and desperate eagerness for enlightenment are there, waiting for the men of courage and integrity to speak. Let us hope that a Nixon Administration will make it easier for such men to appear and to be heard.

Like many others, she was to be profoundly disappointed.]

Even in those days, the Republican Party was a coalition of disparate groups: foreign policy hawks, law-and-order conservatives, and the libertarian-minded merchant class that was sick of government spending, inflation, taxation, and regulation. The political priorities of the groups were in tension, often in contradiction. Which would prevail?

As it turned out, Nixon would devastate the anti-communist crowd by opening up diplomatic relations with China. But that was nothing compared to his complete betrayal of the libertarian wing who had reluctantly supported him. He began the drug war that was specifically structured to harm blacks and hippies. He ordered IRS audits of his enemies.

Nixon closed the gold window and officially put the monetary system on a paper standard – thus realising the dreams of decades of Keynesians and backers of big government. He pushed the Fed for more inflation. He founded the Environmental Protection Agency, which has harassed private property owners ever since.

Most egregiously and shockingly, on August 15, 1971, Nixon announced to the nation a policy that hadn’t been experienced since World War II. It was like a scene from Atlas Shrugged. “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States,” he said. After the freeze, all price increases—every single one – were to be approved by a pay board and a price commission. [The Moratorium on Brains, Rand called it.]

Galvanising the Libertarians

This was the event that led the libertarians to gain a heightened consciousness of the task before them. What had previously been a loose association of intellectuals and a few other writers became a mass movement of students, donors, organisations, publications, and activists. The Libertarian Party was founded. Reason Magazine, founded as a mimeographed pamphlet in 1968, became a real magazine with an actual publication schedule. Ron Paul, under the intellectual influence of the Foundation for Economic Education, decided to enter public life.

Murray Rothbard captured the spirit of outrage that gave birth to the libertarian movement. He wrote the following in the New York Times on September 4, 1971:

On Aug. 15, 1971, fascism came to America. And everyone cheered, hailing the fact that a “strong President” was once again at the helm. The word fascism is scarcely an exaggeration to describe the New Economic Policy. The trend had been there for years, in the encroachment of Big Government over all aspects of the economy and society, in growing taxes, subsidies, and controls, and in the shift of economic decision-making from the free market to the Federal Government. The most recent ominous development was the bailout of Lockheed, which established the principle that no major corporation, no matter how inefficient, can be allowed to go under.
    But the wage-price freeze, imposed in sudden hysteria on Aug. 15, spells the end of the free price system and therefore of the entire system of free enterprise and free markets that have been the heart of the American economy. The main horror of the wage-price freeze is that this is totalitarianism and nobody seems to care…
    The worst part of our leap into fascism is that no one and no group, left, right, or center, Democrat or Republican, businessman, journalist or economic, has attacked the principle of the move itself. [Well, Rand did, as we’ve noted above.] The unions and the Democrats are only concerned that the policy wasn’t total enough, that it didn’t cover interest and profits. The ranks of business seem to have completely forgotten all their old rhetoric about free enterprise and the free price system; indeed, The ‘Washington Post’ reported that the mood of business and banks is “almost euphoric.”…
    The conservatives, too, seem to have forgotten their free enterprise rhetoric and are willing to join in the patriotic hoopla. The New Left and the practitioners of the New Politics seem to have forgotten all their rhetoric about the evils of central control...

It was this article, and the events he described, that made the libertarians realise that they needed their own movement, something different from the left and right, and outside the Democrats and Republicans, each of whom represent their own kind of tyranny. Never again would they trust the promises of a “strong president.” Never again would they trust a mainstream party.

The experience with Nixon taught those who seek more freedom that there is a huge difference between merely hating the left and actually loving liberty. The lesson was burned into the hearts and minds of a whole generation: to see your enemies crawl before you is not really a victory. The only real victory would be freedom itself. And to love liberty is neither left nor right. Libertarianism is a third way, a worthy successor to the great liberal movement from the 17th-19th centuries, the movement that established free trade, worked for peace, celebrated prosperity through freedom, ended slavery, liberated women, and universalised human rights.

The realisation marked a new era in American political life.

Then there Was Watergate

If you don’t like government as we know it, you need to decide why. When Nixon was finally driven out of office following the Watergate scandal, conservatives wept. But the libertarians, having now developed a sense of their task quite apart from the rightest cultural and political agenda, cheered the end of the cult of the Presidency. By then, Nixon had become their bete noir.

Rothbard wrote:

It is Watergate that gives us the greatest single hope for the short-run victory of liberty in America. For Watergate, as politicians have been warning us ever since, destroyed the public’s “faith in government” – and it was high time, too. Watergate engendered a radical shift in the deep-seated attitudes of everyone – regardless of their explicit ideology – toward government itself. For in the first place, Watergate awakened everyone to the invasions of personal liberty and private property by government – to its bugging, drugging, wiretapping, mail covering, agents provocateurs – even assassinations. Watergate at last desanctified our previously sacrosanct FBI and CIA and caused them to be looked at clearly and coolly.
    But more important, by bringing about the impeachment of the President, Watergate permanently desanctified an office that had come to be virtually considered as sovereign by the American public. No longer will the President be considered above the law; no longer will the President be able to do no wrong. But most important of all, government itself has been largely desanctified in America. No one trusts politicians or government anymore; all government is viewed with abiding hostility, thus returning us to that state of healthy distrust of government. *

It’s almost a half century later and the Republicans have once again chosen a man who is loved mainly because of the people he hates and those who hate him back. And once again, we are being told that greatness, law, and order should be the goal. Once again, the right is defining itself as anti-left while the left is defining itself as anti-right, even while both favor centralist and nationalist agendas.

It’s a perfect time to remember what that Nixon generation learned: regardless of ideology, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even twenty years later, libertarians were highly skeptical of Ronald Reagan for this reason. It wasn’t until he showed himself to be a very different kind of candidate than Nixon – Reagan was very clear that the real enemy of the American people was government itself – that libertarians went along.

Regardless of the personalities ascendent at the moment, the real struggle we face is between the voluntary associations that constitute the beautiful part of our lives, on the one hand, and, on the other, the legal monopoly of violence and compulsion by the institutions of the state, which lives at the expense of society.

If you don’t like government as we know it, you need to decide why. Is it because you believe in a social order that minimizes coercion and unleashes human creativity to build peace and prosperity? Or is it because you think the wrong people are running it and we need a strong leader to put them in their place? This is the major division in politics today.

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Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education and CLO of the startup Liberty.me. Author of five books, and many thousands of articles, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.
His post first appeared at FEE.

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NOTE:

*  Ayn Rand disagreed. It was the disaster of pragmatic government that Watergate exposed, she argued immediately after the televised Watergate hearings – of short-termist unprincipled government without any serious goals beyond re-election (sounding familiar?):

It is not a matter of personalities, nor of anyone's honesty or dishonesty. The corruption is inherent in the system: it is inherent in any situation in which men have to act without any goals, principles or standards to guide them. "The good of the country" is not a goal (unless one has a clear, objective definition of what is the good). "The public interest" is not a principle. (Observe that all pressure groups claim to represent "the public interest.") Someone's wish or "aspiration" is not a standard.
    You have heard every politician in every election proclaim his allegiance to those empty generalities. You have been wise enough not to believe his public utterances. What makes you believe that he has better principles in the privacy of his own mind and that, once elected, he will act on them? He hasn't and he can't.
In a controlled (or mixed) economy, a legislator's job consists in sacrificing some men to others. No matter what choice he makes, no choice of this kind can be morally justified (and never has been). Proceeding from an immoral base, no decision of his can be honest or dishonest, just or unjust—these concepts are inapplicable. He becomes, therefore, an easy target for the promptings of any pressure group, any lobbyist, any influence-peddler, any manipulator—he has no standards by which to judge or to resist them. You do not know what hidden powers drive him or what he is doing. Neither does he.
    Now observe the results of such policies and their effect on the country. You have seen that Nixon's wage-price controls, imposed two years ago for the purpose of slowing down inflation, have accelerated it. You have seen that a shortage of soybeans, which you probably do not buy, has led to the shortage of most of the food items which you do buy and need. You have seen a demonstration of the fact that a country's economy is an integrated (and self-integrating) whole—and that the biggest computer would not be able to predict all the consequences of an edict controlling the price of milk, let alone an edict controlling the price, the costs, the sales, the amounts of wheat or beef or steel or oil or electricity. Can you hold in mind the total of a country's economy, including every detail of the interrelationships of every group, every profession, every kind of goods and services? Can you determine which controls are proper or improper, practical or impractical, beneficent or disastrous? If you cannot do it, what makes you assume that a politician can? In fact, there is no such thing as proper, practical or beneficent controls.
    Like the Nixon re-election committee, the government of a mixed economy is a setup ruled by undefined goals, undefined principles, undefined standards, undefined responsibility, undefined (and unlimited) power, unearned (and unlimited) wealth. A country  that accepts such conditions can achieve nothing but self-destruction, as the men of the re-election committee did. This is the lesson that comes loud and clear through the grimy mess of the Watergate hearings—a pictorial lesson that concretises the senselessness, the pettiness, the futility, the chaos, and the depersonalised evil of a government swollen with a power no government can or should hold. (For a discussion of the proper functions of a government, I refer you to my [essay on ‘The Nature of Government.’)
…

    A "mixed" government is the only institution that grows not through its successes, but through its failures. Its advocates use every disaster to enlarge the power of the government that caused it…. The solution, of course, is to eliminate … the government's power over the economy. No, it cannot be done overnight. But if you want to fight for that ultimate solution, Watergate provides you with intellectual ammunition: its lesson is the diametric opposite of the notions now being palmed off on the country by the statist-liberal establishment.
    If you feel, as many people do, that such a battle would take too long and comes too late, there is one piece of advice I should like to give you: if you choose to resign yourself to the reign of an unchallenged evil, do so with your eyes open. Hold an image of the Watergate hearings in your mind and ask yourself what I asked you at the start of this discussion: Do you feel respect for the men on either side of the long committee table? To which of them would you care to surrender your freedom? To Senator Ervin? To Jeb Stuart Magruder? To John D. Ehrlichman? Whose judgment would you regard as superior to yours and competent to do a job which you can neither grasp  nor judge nor define nor undertake: the impossible job of controlling this country's economy? The judgment of H.R. Haldeman? Of Frederick C. LaRue? Of Senator Montoya? Which of them would you entrust with the power to dispose of your life, your work, your income, and your children's future? Senator Baker? Senator Weicker? John W. Dean 3d?
    If you hold Richard Nixon responsible for Watergate, as the absentee authority in whose name the men of the re-election committee were acting and whose favor they were scrambling to win, then—in relation to all the politicians of this country—you are the absentee authority, it is in your name that they are issuing their edicts, it is your favour that they are scrambling to win (or wheedle or extort or manipulate) at election time. No, you cannot fight them by means of your one vote. But you can make yourself heard. It is your voice that they fear, when and if it is the voice of your mind, because their entire racket rests on the hope that you will not understand.
    Do not hide behind the futile hope that the men you saw on television might be bigger in real life, that responsible government positions would raise their stature. In real life, they are smaller; today's government positions shrink them—for a reason stated by a great political thinker of the last century.
    His statement was mentioned during the Watergate hearings, but no one paid much attention to it. Yet that statement is the real answer to Senator Baker's question: it indicates what must be eliminated in order to prevent the future occurrence of events such as Watergate (or such as the Watergate hearings).
    That thinker was Lord Acton, who said: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

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New Left v Old Left

 

The rise of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders seems to pit Old Left against New Left, some say. But are there any real differences between the two ideologies? And are either New Left or Old Left actually even ideologies at all?

Philosopher Greg Salmieri answers the question in talking about the similarities and differences between the so-called “Free Speech movement and the campus riots of the 60s, and the “Occupy” movement and its “safe spaces” of today.

Asked by The Undercurrent what Ayn Rand took to be the essence of that earlier movement, he answers:

Dr. Salmieri: She saw the events at Berkeley and, later, on other campuses, as an attempt to erase the distinction between speech and action and to intimidate others into adopting their political positions. The students objected to Berkeley’s policies concerning what political activities were permitted on parts of the campus, so they seized control of the campus and did things like turning over police cars and using them as rostrums. The students could have worked to persuade the administration that their preferred policies were right. If that didn’t work, they could have withdrawn and gone to another school—or, since Berkeley is a public university, they could have attempted to persuade the legislators or the voters who elected them. This is the peaceful, civilized way to settle disputes. Instead, the students resorted to force. In effect, they said: “You must grant our demands, because we’re a big gang who can physically bar your way, disrupt campus life, and destroy property.” We’ve seen a reprise of this in the “Occupy” movement, and more recently in the spectacle of student groups occupying quads and administrators’ offices and seizing control of forums to read lists of demands.
    The students at Berkeley were outraged that the existing policy prohibited certain sorts of speech on campus property, and some of the current student groups are outraged that campus policies don’t prohibit certain types of speech that they think is offensive. So in this narrow respect they could be seen as opposite, but the groups are the same in that they are trying to impose their preferred policies by physical force and intimidation, rather than by persuasion. The recent groups are more consistent, because the whole idea of free speech, which the ‘60’s students claimed to be for, rests on the distinction between speech and action. If “speech” extends to trespass and physical intimidation, then of course it cannot be free, since the “speech” of some will amount to violence against others.
    This blurring of the line between speech and action was part of a broader development that Rand thought was going on in the 1960’s. She called it “anti-ideology”—the attempt to undermine the concepts and principles that people need to think rationally about political issues. Without such concepts, a nation is reduced to the status of warring gangs each of which is united, not by any shared convictions, but by factors such as race, locality, profession, or income. Anti-ideology is popular when people are acting on motives that they are unwilling to admit (to themselves or others), and Rand thought that this was the case across the political spectrum in the ‘60’s.
    For decades, the political left had been pushing for ever greater government control over individuals’ lives. The only consistent implementation of their ideas is totalitarianism, of which communism and fascism are both variants, and the horrors of that system were obvious to any honest observer in the aftermath of World War II. So the leftists didn’t want to admit what they stood for. But their opponents on the political right were unwilling to embrace the opposite system, capitalism, because it was seen as “selfish” and “materialistic.” So both sides sought to evade the fundamental issue at stake between them and to focus on narrow policy questions, without reference to the principles needed to understand them or rationally evaluate them.
    As a result, American politics was reduced to pressure group warfare. Without recourse to the principle of individual rights, which enables people to live together in non-sacrificial harmony, factions multiplied and formed uneasy alliances that enabled momentary majorities to use elections as an opportunity to sacrifice minorities. Rand saw what the students at Berkeley were doing as a more naked version of this same pressure group warfare. Instead of imposing mob power at the ballot box, as their parents were doing, the students were trying to impose it in crudely physical terms, out on the streets.
    The source of the anti-ideology, in Rand’s view, was intellectuals—especially professors of philosophy and the humanities—and it seeped out into the culture from the universities. So she didn’t see it as any surprise that violence erupted first on campuses. That’s where young people go to find the ideas that will enable them to make sense of the world and chart their course through life. Instead, their professors gave them an anti-ideology that was a rationalization for imposing their whims by brute force. Of course, the professors of today include many members of the ‘60’s student movement, many of whom are teaching variants of these same doctrines. We can see their influence in some of the current groups occupying campuses. . .

… and also podiums and voting booths.

Pete Seeger: “If I had a hammer and sickle”

America’s most famous, and most successful, Communist has just died.

Pete Seeger, folk singer, banjo player, successful communist recruitment tool – the man some dubbed Stalin’s Songbird – was 94.

The conventional wisdom holds that it was ever so—that American popular musicians have always been leftists, and that music-as-radical-politics has stretched across the decades, expressing the nation’s social conscience. The late New Left chronicler Jack Newfield, for instance, celebrated a “native tradition of an alternative America” that included not just such openly activist musicians as Woody Guthrie but also apparently non-political singers like Hank Williams and Mahalia Jackson.
    Yet this “native tradition” is a myth. Until quite recently, popular music’s prevailing spirit was apolitical … The politicisation of American pop … grew out of a patient leftist political strategy that began in the mid-1930s with the Communist Party’s “Popular Front” effort to use popular culture to advance its cause…
    Adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, the Popular Front tasked communists in the West with building “progressive” coalitions … The Popular Front sought to enlist Western artists and intellectuals, some of them not party members but “fellow travelers,” to use art, literature, and music to insinuate the Marxist worldview into the broader culture. The murals of Diego Rivera, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the novels of Howard Fast—all exemplified this approach…
    Thirty years after the Popular Front issued its call to transform culture through music, it had now become proper, even natural, for popular music to embrace leftist moral and political causes and for many young Americans to look to musicians for guidance on such matters…
    One figure stands out in this enterprise: the now—[deceased] singer, songwriter, “folk music legend,” and onetime party stalwart, Pete Seeger. Given his decisive influence on the political direction of popular music, Seeger may have been the most effective American communist ever…

As Mark Steyn said on the occasion of Seeger’s 90t birthday:

One must congratulate the old banjo-picker on making it to four score and ten, which is a lot older than many "dissenting artists" made it to under the regimes he's admired over the years…
    Yes, [his tunes are] dopey nursery-school jingles, but that’s why they’re so insidious. The numbing simplicity allows them to be passed off as uncontentious unexceptionable all-purpose anthems of goodwill..

Read more in this lengthy and well-argued 2005 piece at CITY JOURNAL: America’s Most Successful Communist; in this obituary of the old commie at HUFFINGTON POST: Pete Seeger, "Folk Music" and the Left; and in the title of this piece linked by Andrew Bolt: If only Leni Riefenstahl was a Communist like Pete Seeger...

MORE: 

• “Until Pete Seeger’s death at 94 last night, he was perhaps the last man alive to say that he supported Hitler, Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh. That’s quite the totalitarian trifecta.”
  Pete Seeger’s Totalitarian Trifecta – Ed Driscoll,PJ MEDIA
• “Americans have a great capacity to forgive and a small capacity to remember, which has been a great asset to the career of folk singer and national monument Pete Seeger. He was recently given two of the country's highest arts awards despite a life spent laboring on behalf of the most malignant political ideology ever put into practice.”
  America Honors Its Troubadour Of Totalitarianism – Stephen Chapman CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 1995

Here, below, is one of his most lucrative tunes, and here the story of the dirt-poor shanty-town African stole it from and never acknowledged.