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Critical Theory: Not Just a Punching Bag
CONSERVATIVES like to use the Frankfurt School (of neo-Marxists) and their "critical theory" as punching bags. Not to mention as the source of all our problems.
Yes, it's true that all the cruel and unjust ideological repression against conservatives through the application of what we call "political correctness" seems to issue from the ideas of the Frankfurt chappies like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and second-stringer Herbert Marcuse.
But in my view it is better for conservatives to study and understand the ideas of the Frankfurt School than to stigmatize and reject them as, for instance, the excellent Bill Whittle does here.
That's because if conservatives want to win the culture war we need to be able to understand and transcend the ideas of the left. We need to grasp the kernels of truth in their critiques of bourgeois society, and then go on to show how they completely miss the point.
Let's take Max Horkheimer's definition of critical theory as an example. He wrote that a theory is
critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."Now, of course, lefties use critical theory in the limited scope that assumes that it is traditionally marginalized groups that need to be liberated and bourgeois culture that they need to be liberated from.
But what about liberals? Think of the awful liberal bubble of The New York Times and NPR. Think how they enslave liberal minds. Think of a glorious future in which liberals could free themselves from their ideological devotion to "good" government and comprehensive and mandatory universal administrative programs designed and implemented by "large-minded" people.
Why not use critical theory to liberate liberals from the ideas that enslave them? Who else could do the job but conservatives. Actually, Jonah Goldberg already did it with his Liberal Fascism.
The Frankfurt School originated after World War I when German intellectuals realized that Marxism as defined by Marx and implemented by the Bolsheviks was a mess. So they went to work to understand where Marx had gone wrong and to try to rescue their millennial Marxian hopes from despair.
By the time that Horkheimer and Adorno wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment in the US during World War II they had despaired of the Enlightenment project. Because they saw that fascism was already encoded in the notion of enlightenment and reason. What man wants from nature is to dominate it and other men, they wrote.
When Herbert Marcuse came up with One-dimensional Man in the 1960s his grand contribution amounted to a lame notion that, now that the working class had made its peace with capitalism, narcotically immunized by big media and and advertising and consumer goods, the would-be revolutionaries would have to look elsewhere for the cannon fodder for their revolution.
But real thinkers like Jürgen Habermas began on a solution to the problem of enlightenment and its identification with domination. He revived the idea that we are not just mechanical wind-up toys, cogs in a rational machine, but communicators. So his Theory of Communicative Action proposes that the systems world of Enlightenment and instrumental reason should be balanced by a life-world of communication and negotiation. In German, the "Action" in his book's title is "Handeln." It means not just action but exchange, negotiation. It also had a use in German as a pejorative when applied to Jews as hagglers and peddlers.
Now, of course, the silly lefty liberals in our US universities have made a complete dog's breakfast of "critical theory." They have fashioned it into a club with which to beat conservatives and stigmatize us as racists, sexists, anti-choice fascists and homophobes. Not to mention that their Gramscian "march through the institutions" turned the academy into a sterile monoculture.
Be of good cheer. All is not lost. We can see, finally, as we get into the scandal zone of the Obama administration that critical theory is leading liberals off the cliff. It's encouraged them to think that they, the lame critical theorists, are the good guys, and the defenders of freedom and tradition are pond scum.
The thing is that critical theory and postmodernism can be applied to anything. Used judiciously, they can be used to do a penetrating critique of any cultural tradition and expose its assumptions and hypocrisies.
Like Obama and the Obamanauts.
So I say: forget about trashing the Frankfurt School and critical theory. Read up on it. Then apply its tools against fin de siècle liberalism. Because everything that liberals say about the patriarchy or dead white males or capitalism applies in spades against the monstrous self-serving ruling-class ideology we call liberalism or progressivism or multiculturalism or whatever.
And this is just the moment to do it, as the Obama years-the-locust-ate collapse in a welter of scandals that all issue from the self-inflicted wounds of liberalism and its foolish attempt to keep the Marxist dream alive.
Let's face it: the original Marxism did nothing but harm to the working class. Finally, through a maelstrom of purges and death camps the working class emerged and made a separate peace with capitalism. So what did the Marxists propose as an encore? To apply the same ideas to what Herbert Marcuse called "a new substratum of outcasts and outsiders." It's the same thing. Trust in us, the noble overclass, and we will protect you, the minority and the marginalized, from the evil white man and his cunning plan to oppress and exploit you. And by the way, whaddya think of this free stuff?
Already, back in the land of Israel, Esau found out that it is not a good idea to exchange your birthright for a mess of pottage. It didn't do the working class much good to exchange their benefit clubs and friendly societies for the administrative benefits and "free stuff" of the welfare state. It isn't doing much good for today's "women and minorities." Because, relying on government, they are always "hardest hit" when something goes wrong. That's because when you get your stuff from government you let your ties of family and solidarity weaken and shrivel. When you need them, when all of a sudden government isn't there like liberals promised, your social ties aren't strong enough to take the strain.
As the Obama administration spirals into scandal and failure conservatives have a once in a generation opportunity to lead America back to the ideas that made it great: freedom and civil society.
It would really help if, in between teaching the American people about truth, justice, and the American Way, we could eat the liberals' lunch, and apply critical theory to the hypocrisies of their rotting pile of multiculturalist diversity.
| perm | comment(0) | 
| 05/24/13 7:09 pm ET
Tri-gate: Pay for Play
I know we are all supposed to be outraged at Lois Lane, er, Lerner's neat little trick of taking the Fifth right after her self-justificatory statement.
Yeah, what would Clark Kent down at the Daily Planet say about that?
But let's be practical. Lois Lerner is merely telling Congress a simple fact. Hey, pal, you want information, you gonna pay for it. Immunity for Information. Pay for play. That's the First Commandment in the Beltway.
Immunity for Information. That's how things go in the Obamian Culture of Intimidation.
Look. We conservatives finally get to come up for air and have a good laugh. Because liberals did this to themselves. They believe in the chimera of Good Government. Ethical activists and credentialed experts think up beneficial legislation and then the administrative state executes on it.
Settled science alert: Hayek told us half a century ago that the Good Government/Expert/Administrative state model was bound to fail, because the man in Whitehall (he was still in Britland at the time) could never know more than a million consumers.
On top of that liberals believe in a kind of salvific politics. Only elect the right man, the young and vigorous JFK, the charismatic policy wonk Bill Clinton, the intellectual Barack Obama, and the oceans will start to recede.
(Do these people not understand how religious this sort of thing sounds?)
But government is force. Politics is division. Administration is domination. If you don't limit all three you lose society. It turns into an internment camp. Liberals think that because they are virtuous and well intentioned and intellectual that they can design a beneficent society administered by large-minded people like them.
But the philosophy of limited government says that anyone, no matter how virtuous and large-minded, is corrupted by power. It says that the more government you have, the more force you have. The more politics you have the more society will be divided. And the more that you systemize things into administrative bureaucracies the more domination you have.
Well, now, five years after liberals went into a multiple political orgasm over the OMG! First! Black! President! we are starting to see the wages of folly. That wonderful intellectual president has been presiding over an IRS that has specifically targeted grass-roots political organizations for delay and harassment. The wonderful politician who was going to move beyond red and blue has tapped the telephones of AP journalists. Not just right-wing nut-cases at FoxNews, but good liberal AP journalists! And the most transparent administration in history is tangled in a web of lies and obfuscations over the murder of a US Ambassador.
Look liberals. Politicians are merely professional specialists in winning elections. That is all. Activists are activists, narrow, driven people with an agenda. Experts are thinking about their next grant. And bureaucrats are thinking about keeping their noses clean for the next few years until they collect their pensions. That is what you believe in.
There is such a thing as society; it's just not the same thing as the state. Society evokes the idea that humans are social animals; we cooperate and work and play together because that's who we are. But government is force; politics is division. The more government you have, the less freedom you have. the more politics you have, the less unity you have. With more government and more politics, the less society you have, because you have reduced society to an internment camp of force and division, mediated by systematic bureaucratic domination.
I don't think liberals really understand what is coming. They are safe in the soothing NYT-NPR bubble. But people are hurting. They are hurting as they get stripped of their health insurance by Obamacare, as they are stripped of a future by the sluggish economy.
Think of the next three years as Oklahoma in the tornado season. There are black clouds all around, but nobody knows when a line of thunderstorms will touch down into a twister. And nobody can know whose house it will rip apart and whose life it will tear in pieces.
Conservatives and Republicans are notorious for being stupid about politics and messaging and tactics. But when something big is in the air the minutiae of tactics usually don't matter as much as the professionals would like to believe. What matters instead is what the Soviets used to call the "correlation of forces" or the "contradictions" of the existing order.
All we can know for sure is that the lives of millions of Americans are going to be ripped to shreds in the next few years as the tornado of bankrupt government touches down on the ordinary American heartland.
And all the while the job-for-life IRS myrmidons that dutifully ragged on mom-and-pop Tea Parties will be taking the Fifth and bargaining about Immunity for Information.
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/23/13 5:10 pm ET
Richard Wagner: Most Hated Composer
TODAY'S the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner. He's #3 in Charles Murray's list of classical composers compiled in Human Accomplisment. But he's probably #1 on the list of most-hated composers. That would partly be due to his anti-semitism. And partly due to the fact that he wrecked the good old opera formula of recitative followed by beautiful songs. But really, he upended music as a ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/22/13 4:01 pm ET
Putting a Name on Obama Politics
IT'S lucky that liberals never have to look at themselves in a mirror, and never have to listen to their hate speech. Because what liberals do is an utter betrayal of what they say they believe. They say that everything they do is for the little people. But they don't have a problem siccing the IRS on the little people of the Tea Party. They say that dissent is the highest form of ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/21/13 5:38 pm ET
Obama's War on Women
ONE of the underappreciated facts about the Tea Party movement is that women have been in the vanguard. And they started organizing in the fall of 2008. We're supposed to believe that all women are Democrats. But Keli Carender (@LiberTBelle), who started the Tea Party here in the Seattle area, is a graduate of Oxford, a teacher and sometime actor. Doesn't fit the profile. And of course many...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/20/13 3:55 pm ET
Obama. A Gift from the Gods
IN a thumb-sucker about the managerial shortcomings of the Obama White House, John Fund surfaces the worries of Democrats, that "chaotic implementation" of Obamacare could "could become the biggest political liability Democrats will face in next year’s midterm elections." Don't set your sights too high, Mr. Fund. How about: the train wreck of Obamacare implementation could result in the ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/17/13 3:52 pm ET
Dear Liberals: About Your Politics of Hate(1) |
| 05/16/13 4:58 pm ET Separation of Secular Church and State
SOMETIMES I have to agree with liberals. The writers of the US Constitution were living in another age. They just could not foresee how things would change and make the constitution obsolete. Take the First Amendment and the Jefferson corollary. The whole idea of preventing an "establishment of religion" and enforcing a separation between church and state is just so 18th century, darling. ...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/15/13 4:03 pm ET
What If Romney Had Won? |
| 05/14/13 3:41 pm ETMother's Day Meltdown |
| 05/13/13 3:43 pm ETRepublicans Doing the Right Thing |
| 05/10/13 3:55 pm ET Capitalism is Not a System
A great irony of our modern era is that at exactly the same time that the Cartesian-Newtonian world-view was emerging the anti-systemic capitalist culture was emerging as well. On the one hand you had the billiard ball determinism of Newtonian mechanics. On the other hand you had the infinite complexity of the market process. So why do we talk about the free-market "system", the price "system...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/08/13 5:09 pm ET
The Theory of Willful Blindness
A while back I took a look at "Marx's Five Big Mistakes," five big things that Karl Marx got wrong. I mean things like the immiseration of the working class, the alienation of workers by the division of labor, the labor theory of value, the idea that bureaucracy would wither away under socialism, and that people would abandon the division of labor under socialism. But then I got to wondering...
| perm | comment(0) | | 05/01/13 3:57 pm ET
| May blogs | April blogs |
A New Manifesto
A spectre is haunting the liberal elite—the spectre of conservatism.
The Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.
Business, Slavery, and Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.
Freebooters and Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.
The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.
A Critique of Social Mechanics
The problem with human society reduced to system.
From Multitude to Civil Society
The larger the government, the smaller the society.
The Answer is Civil Society
In between the separated powers.
The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.
Conservatism Three by Three
Conservatism, political, economics, and cultural.
The Culture of Involvement
Imagining lives without the welfare state
The Poor Without the Welfare State
Can the poor thrive without the welfare state?
The Middle Class Without The Welfare State
How would the middle class live without all those middle-class entitlements?
The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”
AAM Book of the Day
Lane, Frederick C., Venice A Maritime Republic
AAM Books on Education
Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education
Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system
James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls
E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in
AAM Books on Law
Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century
F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law
Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract
John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present
AAM Books on Mutual Aid
James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.
David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century
David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again
David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland
AAM Books on Religion
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China
Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation
Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state
David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
Blame it on the Frankfurt School.
Some Companies Foster Creativity, Others Fake It
Creativity takes leadership that listens, empathizes and trusts.
How to Walk Away
advice for Obamison sunk costs.
The first important conservative thinker
new biography and critique of Edmund Burke and his ideas.
Danes Rethink a Welfare State
There is no more money.
> archive
cruel . corrupt . wasteful unjust . deluded
After a year of President Obama most Americans understand that the nation is on the wrong track. But how do we find the right track? Americans knew thirty years ago that liberalism was a busted flush. Yet Reaganism and Bushism seemed to be less than the best answer.
But where can we turn? Where are the thinkers and activists of the old days? Where do we find the best ideas? And how do we persuade our present ruling class to loosen its grip on power so that we can move the locomotive of state back onto the right track?
With all of our problems it seems like the worst of times.
In fact, this is the best of times. Under the radar a generation of great thinkers have been figuring out what went wrong and conjuring up visions of a better future. This book, "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" is an introduction to their ideas, and to the great future that awaits an America willing to respond to their call.
Although this book is addressed to all Americans, conservative, moderate, and liberal, and looks to a nation that transcends our present partisan divide, I must tell you that liberals will have the most difficulty with the book. The reason is simple. I am asking liberals to give up a lot of the power they have amassed in the last century. But we are all Americans, and we must all give up something for the sake of the greater good.
I am Christopher Chantrill and I am writing this book in full view. I'll be blogging on the process and the ideas, and I'll be asking you, dear readers, to help. Read the blog. Read the articles as they come out on American Thinker and ponder over the draft chapters here on this site.
Then send me your reactions, your thoughts, and your comments. You will help more than you know.
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
