Political correctness grew out of the Marxism of the first half of the 20th century, particularly via the “critical theory” obsessions of the Weimar-era socialist Frankfurt School. Similarly, with their purges, speech codes, and purity tests, college campuses in the 21st century are essentially a recreation of the internal terror wars of the Soviet Union under Stalin, without the left-on-left body count. At least not yet. (H/T: Ed Driscoll)
We may have won the Cold War but did the Communists / Socialists win the Long war? Go read the whole thing – grabbing just a couple of snippets does it no justice. This should, however, grab your attention as to how we have arrived at such a deplorable state of society (emphasis mine):
Dewey’s ideas percolated slowly through American culture and took off in the incendiary ’60s, with the free speech movement at Berkeley, the psychedelic dumbing down of the youth population, the takeover of the universities by student radicals, and the insidious inroads made by the destabilizing emigré Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse of “repressive tolerance” fame, who, in essence, popularized the Marxist theories of Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács. The world had to be purified by the exploited masses and remade in the image of youthful innocence, a revisionary project that inspired the young, the callow and the doctrinaire. These notions captured the American seminary and poisoned the minds of generations of students. After that, the die was cast, and America was on the road to becoming a European failure.
“Are we not witnessing,” asks John Agresto in Academic Questions (Vol.29, No.2), “something that looks to be the…purposeful eradication of what it has historically meant to be educated?” The mission of the university is now the inculcation of intellectual conformity, a duplicitous “inclusiveness” that banishes dissenting voices, “social justice,” and discursive closure, coddling students into a condition of protracted puberty as the academy devolves into “separate programs of grievance and outrage.” In this way, students, stunted in their development, become the shock troops of the new world order as they have been taught to see it. And as we know, and as university policies have made glaringly public, children throw tantrums and don’t like to be contradicted.
What we see today, then, universities as centers of leftist indoctrination, the shutting down of intellectual debate (cf. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind), a generation of “snowflake” students who are preoccupied with frivolities like trigger warnings, microaggresssons, transgender bathrooms, and “safe spaces” where they will never be exposed to an unfamiliar or conflicting idea, and the sniveling infantilization of the entire academic cohort—flows directly from Dewey and his followers. These pedagogical dissidents prepared the ground for the subversive agenda of the Frankfurters by engaging in an act of cerebral softening, that is, promoting the student over the teacher, the child over the man (or woman), and feeling over thought—hence the continuing prominence of the “self-esteem” movement that slashed-and-burned its way through the educational landscape.
In other words, completely ass-backwards and proud of it – and you will obey.
I am not given to coarse language by nature and action of my will but I bet that if I was a resident on campus, I’d probably outpoint a 30 year sailor simply out of frustration (and trying to win an Olympic gold in “micro-aggression meltdowns”).
