Ideas and Society

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This is part two of my interview with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College (Pennsylvania), about his most recent book, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage (WND Books, 2015).

SM: At the start of the book it says that  the Communist Manifesto was “…an enormously influential work that launched a revolution unprecedented in its destruction” and this is the key, “…totalitarian movements that envisioned nothing less than a transformation of human nature were inspired by that book.” My question is, what about human nature are they trying to change?

PK: I think that’s all part of it. Really, it’s just that their view of human nature is a totally different one. It is not one based on, to borrow from Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration, “The laws of nature and nature’s God.” Their view of human nature is not a natural-law, biblical-law based view of human nature. They’ve got a totally different design, different conception. Now to make this even easier and even more clear, that’s why in the book I go into the cultural Marxists: Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School. Those guys are really crucial.

For them, this transformation of human nature, and their vision for Marxism, was about sex, gender. They really went after sexuality and gender in a way that the more traditional, orthodox Marxist—the likes of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Communist Party USA—did not or couldn’t even conceive. The Frankfurt School Marxists, such as Marcuse and Reich, were Freudian Marxists who talked about people being fundamentally capable of sexual intercourse with either gender. They argued that sex outside of marriage at a very young age was a very natural, normal thing that should not be condemned. And it was those sexual, cultural Marxists that the 1960s New Left was inspired by and picked up: Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground. And that’s the sort of Marxism—the cultural Marxism—that has predominated in our universities.

So, I would caution here, people ask me, “Well, do you think that America will become a communist country?” No, absolutely not. This country is never going to embrace an economic- and class-based Marxism. But the more insidious offshoot of communist thought, where Marxism has had a remarkable effect, is this cultural Marxism—this war on gender and sexuality.

SM: You write about the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920’s-1940’s, and the role it played in changing the tactics used by the left to advance communist ideas. They recognized that the arguments made by the left which were centered on economics were not working. Those in the Frankfurt school knew that the best way to advance communism was to change the culture. We can see just how effective that method has been.

PK: That’s right. Guys like Georg Lukacs, the Hungarian communist and cultural commissar, were incredibly shrewd. They realized as early as the 1920s that traditional Marxism wasn’t going to win because of its economic failures. So they started looking toward culture as a way to take down the West and to try to forward the Marxist worldview. It would turn out that that strategy would take a lot of time, but it really came to fruition as they hoped and expected it would. It did so through the conveyor belts of education, especially higher education, mass media, and Hollywood. That’s where they had stunning success.

SM: How many people were part of the Frankfurt School? The thought that came to my mind is, “how on earth could so few have such a massive impact in comparison to the population at large?”

PK: Well, I’ll borrow from the great book title by Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences. You start with a few people, a few ideas, and sometimes they eventually catch fire. I mean, Marx and Engels were just two people who started Marxism. In fact, here’s a perfect modern cultural application of what you’re talking about: Look right now at the success of gay marriage. You have one to two percent of the population is homosexual, and of those, only a small number actually want to get married. So, a very, very, very tiny portion of marriages that are same-sex marriages are going to be able to permanently redefine marriage in America, and make same-sex marriage a constitutional right in all 50 states. So, it’s astonishing how just a few people or a tiny minority can enact such revolutionary changes. Ideas have consequences.

SM: When I think of the Left, I think of an adolescent. They want what they want, and they want it now. I just thought it was interesting that those at the Frankfurt School seventy plus years ago recognized that the change they wanted to bring about would take many years. It required a good amount of patience by those on the left.

PK: Right. That’s a very good insight. Look, I think a lot of people on the Left, their thinking is driven by emotion. I see this all the time in simply trying to dialogue with them on this issue of same-sex marriage. No matter how much logic you use with them, they simply want to accuse you of hate. It takes a while to break through to them, for them to see that you’ve got a bunch of reasons for your position and that it’s not just hate. So, a lot of the thinking is emotional.

And yet, to your insight, progressivism is all about evolutionary change. It is about being patient and waiting over time to try to accomplish your goals.

The Marxists were revolutionists, they tried to find quick solutions. The cultural Marxists, they were willing to wait much more slowly, like Fabian socialists. The cultural Marxists, like the secular progressives, have been willing to be more patient, including on these sexual, cultural, gender issues.

Yet, having said all of that, the idea of same-sex marriage is very recent. None of these radicals 100 years ago—even the most extreme among them—were thinking of same-sex marriage. That’s come out of nowhere. But the systematic, slow, taking down of traditional marriage, the rejection of a set concept for family, for marriage, the idea that you can redefine marriage, family, sexuality, gender, all of that in a much more general sense, has been slowly working its way through the culture for decades, if not at least a century.