UCLA Prof on Critical Theory and Marxism: Conservatives Were Right
Just how long have American universities been brainwashing students?
By: Sarah Cowgill
Conservatives have been labeled racist, radical right, every phobic ever documented, and the most shameful conspiracy theorists for decades. All because they warned America that university indoctrination of the young mind would produce Marxist activism.
Now according to one professor, they were right all along. Remember in 1987 when former President Ronald Reagan spoke in Berlin? “Mr. Gorbachev,” he urged the then-Soviet leader, “tear down this wall.” It was a defining moment in the fight against communism and a patriotic push for freedom.
It was powerful, outwardly American, but did not hint at the events taking place in secular institutions under our very noses. Those seeds planted have now come to fruition.
Multiple texts in the eighties claimed offshoots of Marxist-derived “critical theories” were being forced upon students and would create radical activists on a grander scale than ever witnessed.
In addition, several bestsellers were causing a ruckus: Tenured Radicals, Illiberal Education,and The Closing of the American Mind.
Liberal educators scoffed and responded by labeling conservatives as “wingnuts.” But today, one UCLA professor emeritus, Russell Jacoby, admits, “In 1987, I published ‘The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe,’ which elicited heated responses. Only now do I see I got something wrong – as did my critics.”
Critical Theory
Chaos has gripped western civilization. The tenets of freedom, commerce, and capitalism are being chipped away by socialism.
Violent protests, embracing communist icons like Bolivian revolutionary Che Guevara, and kneeling during the National Anthem are all not-so-subtle hints that the American way of life is being mocked from within and is in danger.
As I stated in my show last week, it is now politically incorrect to refer to yourself as American!
Yet, somehow, slang and institutional vernacular jargon are now mainstream talking points. “Critical theory” is a code word for Marxism, according to the book American Exile of the Frankfurt School. And buzz words like diversity, inclusion, microaggression, white privilege, and safe spaces have left the campus and are employed by the activist media. It is not difficult to connect the dots.
Jacoby describes the mindset over matter and explains the no-win argument relied upon by progressives:
“Justifications for liberal desired talking points, however, almost immunize themselves to objections. If you question diversity mania, you support Western imperialism. Wonder about the significance of microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about new pronouns? You incite the suicide of fragile adolescents.”
Does that sound like every discussion on cable and network news between indignant liberal talking heads and conservative guests?
But back in the late eighties, Jacoby found such fears ridiculous, “He argued that the conservatives should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax; academic revolutionaries preoccupied themselves with their careers and perks.”
That has changed recently, and he’s speaking out on what might be a long-lost cause of redirecting the seriously damaged American ship. But what will an apology do at this point?
The Horse has Left the Barn
Jacoby’s retelling of what conservatives have sensed all along does not diminish his guilt. At least not for the damage our own institutions have inflicted on an entire culture.
Sure, it’s refreshing to see a former revolutionary liberal professor who once ridiculed an entire way of life change his tune and admit he was wrong.
But the horse left the barn decades ago. Jacoby notes that “self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students who filter into the public square.”
So, what exactly is Critical Theory?
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/deconstructing_marxist_critical_theory.html
Deconstructing Marxist Critical Theory
For those of you who haven’t been formally introduced to the sociological doomsday weapon of the 20th century, critical theory is an approach to analyzing society not for the purpose of understanding it, but for the purpose of transforming it by undermining its existing institutions.
The hard work of understanding how and why people do things is unnecessary if your goal is merely to take a sledgehammer to the machinery.
Critical theory is the invention of the Marxist Frankfort School of the 1930s, so, as one might expect, it reinterprets everything it looks at through a Marxist (or neo-Marxist) lens.
The women’s studies, racial studies, and gender studies curricula found in almost every university in the West are the direct products of the more general critical theory program. Many things that end in “theory” (e.g., deconstruction theory, queer theory) are also critical theory’s progeny.
The connection between critical theory and Marxism is neither disputable nor often denied. The discipline’s formulators (Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, et al.) were all self-identified Marxists teaching in an avowedly Marxist school.
Modern academic proponents of critical theory and its descendants do not go to any great lengths to deny either the discipline’s origins or their own fundamentally Marxist intentions.
In our deconstruction of this leftist tool, let’s begin with an examination of the promise Marxism has always made though never achieved. While the language of the promise has changed from “emancipation” and “liberation” to “social justice” over the years, the basic sales pitch behind all leftist proselytism has remained consistent – the promotion of a better and fairer society.
Well, who wouldn’t want that? Any decent person, given a choice between a fair society and an unfair one, all else being equal, prefers a fair one. For many reasons, I believe that the Marxist formulation is naïve and problematic, but for the sake of argument, let’s just accept the leftist claim as it stands: their goal is to build a better and fairer society.
In the pursuit of a better and fairer society, critical theory comes with one colossal rub. If we accept that such a society can exist, one of the characteristics it has to possess is at least some degree of stability.
Implicit in “better and fairer” must be the notion that most improvements made become permanent. A utopia poised to blow itself apart at the end of one perfectly blissful generation certainly clashes with the left’s new buzzword: “sustainability.”
Moreover, even the most rabid leftists will admit, if pressed, that change is not always good. For them to believe that white colonizers wickedly oppressed the non-whites of the world, leftists have to imagine some better condition non-whites were living in prior to the colonization.
In other words, they have to admit that conditions can get worse in history – that history isn’t rigged by nature to automatically make things better.
Their argument against conservatism, if they have one, has to be that things can be deliberately improved – not simply that blowing up the status quo inevitably leads to an improvement.
The indiscriminate destruction of the status quo, however, is precisely what critical theory was designed to accomplish.
An all too familiar scenario plays itself out daily on modern college campuses. The old guard of liberal professors, who see themselves as the lineal descendants of Herbert Marcuse and Gloria Steinem (if not quite Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxembourg), are more and more seen by their politically indoctrinated students as the closest available examples of white privilege, entrenched authority, and (if they happen to be male) the dreaded patriarchy.
Genuinely conservative professors (like me) have been hunted to near extinction, so liberal white or older profs must now genuflect embarrassingly to avoid the role of hated oppressors.
They’re the authorities who come most easily to hand and are much more fragile targets than conservatives ever were. They have few ideological places to run. Even declaring sexual attraction to members of the same sex no longer offers victim status to the radical of yesteryear.
For today’s more dedicated social justice warriors, full trans-sexuality is about the only refuge for the terminally Caucasian.
The speech codes and trigger warnings we talked about last week, that have proliferated in today’s classrooms, are not the direct invention of the left’s old guard, but are instead demanded by the students.
They are a grotesque byproduct of critical theory itself. The monsters, it seems, grant no special deference to their ultimate creators. The indoctrinated are not the minions of their forbears but are instead the ungovernable creation of a plan gone out of control.
This is what UCLA Professor Jacoby is warning us about.
When racial studies programs were originally formed, it was taken as a given that the goal was not honest research, but rather the production of a continuous moaning and howling over grievances. That is precisely what critical theory was meant to produce.
Papers written by black students asserting that whites (or cops) acted as a single, corporate, nefarious body could never have passed muster if viewed critically.
Neither could the feminist re-invention of the Western world as a “rape culture.” However, since the goal of racial and gender studies programs never was truth, but merely the raw articulation of a certain kind of outrage, normal academic standards never applied. Reason was not the goal, but an impediment to the goal.
Measure people not by the quality of their arguments, but by the pungency of their hatred, and you will get exactly what we have gotten: generations of narcissistic nihilists who see themselves as right by virtue of the intensity of their feelings.
For decades now, valid-looking academic credentials have been awarded for little more than unsupported posturing. Many of these ideological monsters are now “educators” themselves. Many others swell the bureaucracies of government.
If we are to overcome these people, we cannot lose sight of the methodology that created them. Attempting to argue with anyone who helps himself to the idea that anyone who disagrees with him is wrong is obviously futile.
Nevertheless, one sees innumerable instances in print, on television, and in social media of some frustrated conservative attempting to do just that. We must stop wasting our time! If progressives were amenable to reason, they would not be progressives.
The rational response to a madman is not to argue with the progressive, but to firmly separate him from any means of doing harm.
Progressives must be removed from power, including, at a low level, taking away the public funding that allows them to make careers as full-time street agitators.
While it may make us uncomfortable to deprive people of the freedoms to which Americans ought to be entitled, we must face certain facts.
When someone explicitly makes war on any and all of our existing institutions, it is foolish to imagine that he is, somehow, just our fellow countryman with different opinions. Such people are as much our enemies as any foreign invader.
When Muslims say they would like our Western laws and traditions replaced with sharia law, I see no reason not to take them at their word. When a Marxist says something similar, we should take him at face value, too.
So, there you have it folks. Critical Theory. Even former liberal college professors are now admitting that they may have created a monster with their progressive lesson plans.
Now that they have unleashed an entire generation of indoctrinated students, how do we, who are trying to preserve our history, traditions, faith, and way of life, fight back?