By MIKE MANNO
Regular readers will know that I spend a lot of time writing about law, court decisions, and the interaction they have with society. Of course you can’t spend much time writing about those topics and not have at least a cursory interest in the sociological underpinnings of what is happening in the culture today.
I am a product of the fifties. I attended school with nuns through elementary school, then was sent to the local Catholic high school to be taught by priests, and finally to a Jesuit college. My formative years, you might say, were steeped in a traditional American-Catholic culture and belief system: God, family, and country.
Society then respected and honored the traditions on which our nation was built. We weren’t concerned about using an offensive pronoun around a gender-nonspecific individual; homosexual activity was wrong and the thought of “gay marriage” would have been considered a joke; the idea of clinics supported by the government that existed solely to terminate the life of a fetus was unheard of because society did not tolerate the indiscriminate killing of the unborn; and we didn’t expel students and fire professors because their words in support of traditional beliefs were found to be hurtful to some.
In short, we’ve sunk into a cultural quagmire that has overtaken us like a tsunami. Where did it come from? How did it sneak up on us like a thief in the night and catch us off guard? As I listened to the political arguments (perhaps “rants” is a better term) in the run-up to this month’s midterm elections, I began to think a bit more deeply about the “why” of this cultural transformation and if there is a way to turn it back.
Then I re-watched the EWTN documentary A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, produced by Arcadia Films and the talented father-son team of Richard and Stephen Payne. It was about the rise and influence of Saul Alinsky, whom we have discussed in this column before (see the October 11, 2018 issue), his community organizing, and the roots of his Marxist ideas, which by and large came from a German Marxist think tank organized in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt. It was “The Institute for Social Research,” or more simply, “The Frankfurt School.”
The problem with pure Marxist theory was that it didn’t work. Karl Marx believed that the massive economic inequalities between the rich and poor would cause the poor to rise up and overthrow the rich (the bourgeoisie), which would be followed by rule of the workers (the proletariat), which would ensure equality. That didn’t happen as planned. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, significant advancements to improve the lot of the working class were made, although they might seem rudimentary to us. Wages rose which allowed workers access to more consumer goods.
And the resentment workers had against the bourgeoisie, which Marx thought would cement all working people, regardless of nationality, was foiled during World War I when the proletariat adopted a nationalistic attitude and, wearing their country’s uniform, fought one another.
In the 1920s, the Frankfurt School realized that economic Marxism would not work to create the perfect Communist utopia. Western values had become too ingrained and economic resources were becoming more available for a Marxist workers’ paradise to succeed. Thus they developed the concept of Cultural Marxism, or Critical Theory, which sought to use culture, rather than the economy, as the means to create a Communist heaven on earth.
The idea behind this was simply to change the culture. With the coming of Hitler and the Second World War, members of the Frankfurt School, many of whom were Jewish, fled to the United States. Some brought their Cultural Marxism with them. They took positions with major U.S. colleges and some even went into government work. One example is Herbert Marcuse, an early promoter of the sexual revolution under the guise of “sexual happiness,” who later worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA.
The concept was simply to attack the culture — not by bullets or bombs — but by undermining it from within, following the pattern Bella Dodd once used to attack the Church by planting fellow-travelers in seminaries (see “Hello, Bella,” The Wanderer, September 20, 2018, p. 5A). America, the Church, and anyplace else could be brought down from the inside by changing the minds of the people, turning them away from their traditional institutions, and by destroying their belief in God.
Under attack would be Christianity, Western civilization, sexual morals, personal responsibility, law. family, national unity, language, and tradition, among others. This class warfare, called “cultural hegemony” (social dominance) by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, was designed to undermine these factors from within. Gramsci, as far back as the late 1920s, believed that key to this was the use the media and academia to take the lead in undermining these values.
Needless to say, the main culprit the Marxists wanted to take down was the Catholic Church; morality was to be undermined, replaced by a Marxist humanism in education, law, media, and family. Religion was to be deemed a private matter and all charity was to come from the benevolence of the state. Sexual differences were used to create disunity, conflict, and confusion. Psychology was involved to help break the bonds of family unity and purpose, as well as the hated male patriarchal hierarchy. Thus Shakespeare, other early writers, and even the Bible had to be suppressed as examples of repression of women.
One tool used by the Marxist is to change the perception of history so that whites, men, Americans, and any other “disfavored” group will be seen as exploiters of any number of “victim” groups, such as people of color, women, and homosexuals. They are also responsible for all environmental problems since they recklessly and selfishly exploited the Earth’s resources to the disadvantage of others. Of course it is the white male who is automatically considered to be the evil bourgeoisie.
Another tool used to advance this ideology — remember Marxism and Communism are totalitarian ideologies — was through the concept of political correctness. PC, you will note, has nothing to do with being nice; it is all about controlling social interaction to shape culture. We can see this playing out today on college campuses where students or faculty members who cross the line established by any group — homosexuals, feminists, or other “victim” groups — risk expulsion or termination from the university.
The idea of tolerance morphed into entitlement: affirmative action, demands for reparations and for equal outcomes; opposition therefore is hate speech or racism or whatever “ism” that is appropriate, since dialogue doesn’t matter in the school of political correctness. Education has given rise to multicultural subjects such as gender studies and radical feminism, and relativism has replaced the search for truth.
And, needless to say, if facts contradict any of this, well those are just your facts, and as everybody knows, we’re each entitled to our own facts. Thus there are more than two genders, and we can switch genders at will or simply by desire. And marriage is for whomever you love, never mind sex or gender or species. That’s just the way it is. We are, after all, our own god, endowed by ourselves with the unalienable right of any deity to believe, to accept, or to reject that which we see fit.
Are you getting the idea of where our societal muck is coming from? It’s Marxism gone wild, and we’re the beneficiaries of all of this. Mainstream today means anything goes. Man lives for man, since he is, after all, his own god.
How do we save ourselves and our nation? Mr. Trump can’t do it; neither can Nancy Pelosi, or the Democrats, or the Republicans. Only the true God. Think maybe it might be time to invoke Him before the nation succumbs into the quick sand this ideology is leading us? We can turn this back. He tells us how:
“If then my people . . . humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their evil ways, I will hear them from Heaven and pardon their sins and heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14).
This week we celebrate the uniquely American holiday Thanksgiving. We can show our thanks to God for what He has given us by following His urging. Humbly pray and repent. It’s an answer as old as the ages.
How do I know? The Bible told me so. I’m from the fifties, remember.
(You can contact Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com.)
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