“You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
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“If I ever hear that ‘can’t make an omelet’ phrase again, I’ll start doing a little murder myself! It’s used to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi, or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men’s souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!” – Doremus Jessup in Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here
This post builds off an earlier post of mine in which I argued that Progressive elites are invoking Marxist thought (in the form of a neo-Marxist, post-modern ethos) in a way that further alienates rural Americans and fosters a divisive society. I am continuing with a dive into critical theory and post-modern philosophy because we often forget that ideas matter, and intellectuals, those who are in the business of producing ideas, have real consequences. This post considers the work of the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. For context, when Marcuse was writing in the mid 20th century, he was an intellectual rockstar who had widespread academic and popular influence. He also served as the doctoral advisor for Angela Davis, the renowned Marxist, political activist, and prison abolitionist.
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In 2017, CNN published an article on the leftist Antifa movement, describing the organization’s methodology as one where “[a]ctivists seek peace through violence” (though the headline was later changed).
The notion of any group seeking peace through violence in a democratic society should worry us, for it is always easy to utilize an “ends-justify-the-means” approach to morally defend even the most abhorrent of actions. At the very least, the intellectual and moral foundations of any claim based on such forms of reasoning should be meticulously scrutinized.
A (slightly) less radical form of this reasoning can be seen within progressive discourse on rural Americans, the white working class, and “Trump voters,” in particular. As I noted in my previous post, Hilary Clinton famously (and arguably to her, and the Democratic party's, peril) denounced such people as “deplorables” unworthy of redemption (though she quickly qualified and backtracked on this, but the damage was done.)
More broadly, some social issues that are important to rural America have been framed by Progressives in a manner in which there is only one morally justifiable (not simply morally correct) side to be on. The difference between morally justifiable and morally correct is important here because the issue is not solely that Progressives are articulating that they believe there is only one correct side to be on (every political faction believes this to be the case for their side), but that there is only one correct moral ethos that can be utilized to arrive at a conclusion on a given issue. The upshot entails Progressives limiting (with intellectual and moral justification) the scope of discourse on issues by policing what perspectives are morally worthy of free speech and free expression.
I’ll give one personal example of this. This past summer, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs, a business acquaintance, who happens to be a non-white non-Christian female, approached me at an event to ask my thoughts about what unfolded at her company. She warily shared that just before Dobbs was published, her company sent an apolitical email regarding the Court’s potential ruling. The email was from the head of the company, who stated its purpose was to ensure belonging and safety for all within the organization, regardless of political, religious, or other beliefs and practices. It was a message of unity.
Nevertheless, the heart of the email stated that the company recognizes that the Dobbs ruling will be divisive (regardless of the outcome) and that some folks in the company will be deeply upset whereas others may welcome the Court’s perspective.
At first, I thought, OK, this sounds reasonable. The company was simply playing the middle ground and affirming everyone’s perspective on a heated political issue that was certain to shake many.
But my instincts were wrong. The email generated outrage amongst Progressive employees at the company, and within the span of 24 hours, the company’s executives recanted their original message and scheduled a company-wide video conference discussion with the executives and the company’s head of diversity, equity, and inclusion. What happened?
The ultimate question posed to me by this acquaintance was: "What about me? I thought diversity and inclusion incorporated me as a woman of color, but apparently it doesn’t."
I have thought long and hard about this issue, and I have concluded that the explanation for what happened at this acquaintance’s company is that Progressives have adopted a Marcusian notion of “liberating tolerance” in which true tolerance entails enacting “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” Hence, the problem with my acquaintance’s perspective (per Progressive philosophy) is that her commitments on the issue of abortion are deemed morally reprehensible and therefore outside the realm of morally and intellectually defensible positions. Let me explain.
Herbert Marcuse was a German-American neo-Marxist philosopher and member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory where he figured prominently alongside Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In 1965, Marcuse published an essay titled “Repressive Tolerance” in which he famously articulated and proposed his theory of “liberating tolerance.”
The basic premise of liberating tolerance is that it is a form of “censorship, even precensorship.” It is justified because, according to Marcuse, traditional tolerance towards all people, including those with whom you disagree with, is actually a mechanism for protecting and furthering oppression within society: “[tolerance] is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression.” Hence, Marcuse proffered, there is a need to subvert the “oppressors” (the political Right) by being intolerant towards their thoughts, ideas, and perspectives and by being especially tolerant of the political Left.
Extraordinarily, Marcuse further argues that in order to effectuate “liberating tolerance,” the Left ought to go beyond the realm of law (“But I believe that there is a ‘natural right’ of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate,” and to even use violence if necessary (“If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one. Since they will be punished, they know the risk, and when they are willing to take it, no third person, and least of all the educator and intellectual, has the right to preach them abstention.”)
Circling back to my acquaintance, we can now better understand why her position on abortion (despite her status as a woman of color) is no longer a morally justifiable position amongst the Left. Again, this is very different than saying that it is not a morally correct position; rather, the Left seems to be arguing (perhaps implicitly) that there are absolutely no grounds upon which such a position could be defensible or even articulated. It is a position exclusive to the oppressor.
All of this is to say that I believe this philosophy is being equally applied to many rural Americans broadly, especially those who voted for Trump. Voting for Trump, regardless of rationale, is a line that once crossed, is due nothing by detest. You become an irredeemable deplorable. This is especially so if you actually believe in conservative perspectives on deeply contested social issues. It is even so if you are a life-long Democrat who simply isn’t comfortable with joining the post-modern realm of pure moral relativity and lack of objective truths.
This is quite the convenient (and pernicious) ideology for those who invoke it. And, ironically, it’s roots are in liberal, elitist academia and its victims include some of the poorest and most neglected members of society. Perhaps it’s time to redefine and reconsider the “bourgeoise” and the “proletariat”.
Interestingly, Progressives have now become “the new Puritans,” as Noah Rothman cleverly articulates in the title of his new book: The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, in which he argues that “in pursuit of a better world, progressives are ruining the very things which make life worth living.”
We should all pay heed to the contours of Progressive post-modern philosophy and the dangerous outcomes it produces. And we should all be weary of the form in which it manifests. Perhaps the irony of all ironies is the case of “Trumpism” itself being a form of neo-Marxism (articulated here and here.)
To conclude, it is worth pointing out that the neo-Marxist philosophy that stemmed from the Frankfurt school was not wholly false—it contained an element of truth in its critique of consumer society. But the Frankfurt solution, or alternative, to rampant capitalism and commodity culture was essentially Utopia, devoid of any pragmatism and utterly impossible.
The late English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton explains the missing piece by clarifying that the Frankfurt critique of capitalism is essentially a Biblical critique of idolatry sans God. Hence, Dr. Scruton expounds, the partial truth of the Frankfurt critique is in its diagnosis of a real problem (that of Capitalist consumerism) but its proffered solutions are disastrous because of its denial of God, who is then substituted with “Utopia,” promised, but impossible:
[i]ndeed [the partial truth of the Frankfurt critique] is the truth enshrined in the Hebrew Bible, reformulated time and again down the centuries: the truth that, in bowing down to idols, we betray our better nature.
By turning to God we become what we truly are, creatures of a higher world, whose fulfilment is something more than the satisfaction of our wishes. Through idolatry, by contrast, we fall into a lower way of being–the way of self-enslavement, in which our appetites shape themselves as gods and take command of us.
[The Frankfurt School’s] attack on mass culture should be seen in the Old Testament spirit, as a repudiation of idolatry, a reaffirmation of the age-old distinction between true and false gods—between the worship that ennobles and redeems us, and the superstition that drops us in the ditch. For Adorno the true god is Utopia: the vision of subjects in their freedom, conscious of the world as it is, and claiming that world as their own. The false god is the fetish of consumerism—the god of appetite, who clouds our vision and confiscates our choice.
(Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, 144 (2019).
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