The Roots of Political Correctness

By WILLIAM S. LIND November 19, 2009, 2:30 PM

In response to the killing of 13 American soldiers at Ft. Hood by an Islamic U. S. Army

major, a number of senior officials have expressed their fear, not of Islam, but of a possible threat to
diversity. Diversity is one of the many false gods of Political Correctness. But what exactly is
Political Correctness?
Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural
terms. Its history goes back not to the 1960s but to World War I. Before 1914, Marxist theory said
that if a major war broke out in Europe, the workers of every country would join together in a
revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with international socialism. But when war came,
that did not happen. What had gone wrong?
Two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary,
independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian
religion had so blinded the working class to its true (Marxist) class interests that Communism was
impossible in the West until traditional culture and Christianity were destroyed. When Lukacs
became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik government in
Hungary in 1919, one of his first acts was introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools. He
knew that destroying traditional sexual morals would be a major step toward destroying Western
culture itself.
Lukacs became a major influence on a Marxist think tank established in 1923 at Frankfurt
University in Germany, the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School.
When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Frankfurt School in 1930, he set about in
earnest to do Lukacs bidding by translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms. Other
Frankfurt School members devoted to this intellectually difficult task were Theodor Adorno, Eric
Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Theirs was not the Marxism of the Soviet Union
Moscow considered them heretics but it was Marxism nonetheless.
The Frankfurt Schools key to success was crossing Marx with Freud. They argued that just
as under capitalism everyone lived in a state of economic oppression, so under Western culture
people lived under psychological repression. From psychology they also drew the technique of
psychological conditioning. Want to normalize homosexuality? Just show television program
after television program where the only normal-seeming white male is homosexual.
In 1933 the Frankfurt School moved from Germany to New York City. There, its products
included critical theory, which demands constant, destructive criticism of every traditional social
institution, starting with the family. It also created a series of studies in prejudice, culminating in
Adornos immensely influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, which argued that anyone who
defends traditional culture is a fascist and also mentally ill. That is why anyone who now dares
defy PC gets sent to sensitivity training, which is psychological conditioning designed to
produce submission.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Marcuse translated the abstruse work of the other Frankfurt
School thinkers into books college students could understand, such as Eros and Civilization, which
became the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s. Marcuse injected the Frankfurt Schools cultural

Marxism into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now that generations ideology. We
know it as multiculturalism, diversity or just Political Correctness.
That is the dirty little secret of Political Correctness, folks: it is a form of Marxism. If the
average American knew that, I suspect Political Correctness would be in serious trouble.
The Ft. Hood killings raise an interesting question: why would Marxists of any variety come
to the support of Islam? After all, if the Islamics took over, they would cut Marxists throats even
before they cut the throats of Christians and Jews. The answer is that cultural Marxism will ally
with any force that helps it to achieve its goals, destroying Western culture and Christianity.
Obviously, there is far more to the history of the Frankfurt School and its creation of
Political Correctness than I can cover in a short column. This is just a bare-bones outline. For those
who want to learn more (and I hope you do), you can find a short book on the subject, which I
edited, on the website of the Free Congress Foundation (www.freecongress.org). Free Congress also
produced a short video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, which Im told is available on
Youtube (look under Frankfurt School or under my name). The video is especially valuable because
we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, who was then
the chairman of the History Department at Berkeley (and obviously no conservative). He spills the
beans.
Most people in the U. S. military hate Political Correctness, but they dont know how to
fight it. The way to fight it is to find out what it really is, and make sure all your friends find out
too. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, which is to say intellectual Soylent Green. Here more
than in anything else, knowledge is a weapon!