The Blue Voice

«Home | Next: Goodbye Ann, I'm Gonna Miss You Like Hell»

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Mainstreaming the radical right's concepts

There are different kinds of "mainstreaming". As high school kids learn in their civic classes, third parties in America tend to fade out because when they start getting significant support, the two major parties start addressing their issues. There's enough truth in the idea that it's not totally misleading.

David Neiwert is one writer who pays attention to the ways in which not just particular issues, e.g., illegal immigration, are picked up, but the way in which radical-right framing of a problem and the proposed solutions regularly migrate from the far-right gutter to today's authoritarian Republican Party.

I was reminded of this today when I came across this blog post from our friend Brother Al: When Tolerance Doesn't Mean Toleration 09/0706.

Brother Al has discovered that a Jewish Marxist, the "New Left" philosopher Herbert Marcuse of the famous Frankfurt School, is a major source of what the Republicans sneeringly calling "political correctness", by which they mean liberal ideas that they themselves consider politically *in*correct. That particular equation of "politically correct" and "things I disagree with" could be an example of Freud's observation that words often take on opposite meanings. Maybe also of particular clinical phenomena that would interest Freud or other psychologists. But I digress.

Here's what Brother Al writes:

Forty years ago, the radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse penned an essay entitled "Repressive Tolerance." In that essay Marcuse offered what has now become a familiar argument about tolerance - all opinions and belief systems should be tolerated, except those that are not uniformly tolerant.

In other words, only liberal positions and belief systems were to be tolerated, since "repressive" beliefs did not deserve toleration. So much for tolerance in toleration.

Marcuse, who died in 1979, must be smiling at the statements offered by an influential Unitarian Universalist minister. Responding to Sam Harris's book, *The End of Faith*, and his proposal that all religious belief systems are inherently dangerous, this minister proposed that religious liberty should be extended only to liberal belief systems ...

He goes on to quote Rev. Dr. William R. Murry saying:

I get a little impatient with the concept that we should tolerate all religions because people are entitled to their own beliefs. If a religion is based on ignorance and irrationality and totalitarianism, there is no need to stand aside and pretend that that's OK. What I would say about tolerance is that we cannot tolerate intolerance.

I actually take an interest in Marcuse's work, which is better known and, in my impression, better published in the German-speaking world than in America, though a number of his books are still in print here (One-Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization, An Essay on Liberation, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics [something tells me Brother Al hasn't read that one], Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory , Counterrevolution and Revolt). Various collected papers have been published over the last decade or so, too.

Earlier this summer, I did a series of posts at Old Hickory's Weblog on the 1965 book of three essays in which Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" was first published, *A Critique of Pure Tolerance*. It also included essays by Robert Paul Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr.

Those posts provide a look at how far off base that Brother Al is in his characterization of Marcuse's essay. What he argued was that the processes and class structure of American society produce conditions in which the *forms* of tolerance are preserved - with some glaring exceptions - while the critical substance and value of tolerance to society is actually neutralized. It's an argument that actually requires some thought and so is not easily reduced to a catch-phrase on a bumper-sticker.

I've also posted before at Old Hickory's Weblog about how this particular notion has made the journey from white-supremacist fringe to "respectable" conservative opinion: Conservatives can be strange 10/04/05. I'll illustrate here with some different material.

I'm generally reluctant to link to hate-sites. But since the point of this post is how an idea like this migrates virtually undiluted from the far-right to respectable Repbulicanism, it's hard to avoid it. In the final sentence of this article from the neo-Confederate, white-supremacist American Renaissance magazine (via some rightwing blog), The Origins Of "Racism": The Curious Beginnings Of A Useless Word by Sam Francis American Renaissance Sept 1995:

It is time that the enemies of racial, national, and cultural consciousness like Hirschfeld and the Frankfurt School cease to be able to claim a monopoly on rationality and sanity and that the obsessions and motivations that seem to shape their own ideologies and political behavior be subjected to the same scrutiny they apply to the societies and peoples whom their thinking could destroy.

Neiwert describes Sam Francis as "the late neo-Confederate who had a habit of writing for white-supremacist organs like the Occidental Review."

A version of this from another hate site: What Is the Frankfurt School? by Eleanor Sixth Column blog 03/28/06. At this writing, the site includes a sidebar, "Here's to the Founding Gringos of the United State of America!" This is the kind of site where you feel you've been slimed when you read it.

Actually, standards are so sloppy there, that the article is apparently by one Gerald Atkinson, "What is the Frankfurt School?" 08/01/99:

...Who in America today is at work destroying our traditions, our family bonds, our religious beginnings, our reinforcing institutions, indeed, our entire culture? What is it that is changing our American civilization?...

Just such a core group did, indeed, exist. That is, history identifies a small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes, and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presently observe every day in their culture. Observations, such as those made in this series of essays, can be directly traced to the work of this core group of intellectuals. They were members of the Frankfurt School, formed in Germany in 1923. They were the forebears of what some proclaim as 'cultural Marxism,' a radical social movement that has transformed American culture. It is more commonly known today as 'political correctness.'

'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. While here, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and California at Berkeley). These intellectual Marxists included Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, 'make love, not war,' during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

* By promoting the dialectic of 'negative' criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society's belief system, the Frankfurt School 'revolutionaries' dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed. "Their Critical Theory had to contain a strongly imaginative, even utopian strain, which transcends the limits of reality." Its tenets would never be subject to experimental evidence. The pure logic of their thoughts would be incontrovertible. As a precursor to today's 'postmodernism' in the intellectual academic community, "...it recognized that disinterested scientific research was impossible in a society in which men were themselves not yet autonomous...the researcher was always part of the social object he was attempting to study." This, of course, is the concept which led to the current fetish for the rewriting of history, and the vogue for our universities' law, English literature, and humanities disciplines - deconstruction...

There's lots more drivel along those lines, although "Eleanor" does get around to naming Marcuse as one of these villains. Also remember when reading stuff in this paticular kind of sewer that they often use "German" as a euphemism for "Jewish". Why, I'm not sure. The racist fringe tends to have their own vocabulary, e.g., "macaca", although Virginia Sen. George Allen has now mainstreamed that one, as well.

Also, keep in mind that sites like this are even more fact-free zones than FOX News. The idea that Marcuse invented the phrase "Make Love, Not War" is a new one to me, and almost certainly untrue; not that it much matters either way, it's just that rightwing Republicans are obsessed with "culture war" images of the 1960s.

Getting back to Brother Al's post, it's a sign of the level of scholarship in fundamentalist seminaries that the president of a leading Southern Baptist seminary like Brother Al is pimping such pseudo-scholarship. Neiwert has a good post (Multiculturalism under fire Orcinus blog 01/20/03) in which he argues that if there's an identifiable intellectual who can be credited with originating the concept of multiculturalism, it would be anthropologist Franz Boas. Niewert reminds us that the conservative jihad against "multiculturalism" in America is identified with "the return of white nationalism".

Aside from the weirdo ideological associations involved with the now-Republican notion of the Frankfurt School as the godfathers of multiculturalism/"political correctness", it's also historically very questionable. Also keep in mind that for the Republican political paranoids, "multiculturalism" is a repressive ideology that has resulted in the persecution of the pore conservative white folks, and a Jewish "war on Christianity (and Christmas)". Neiwert cites this paper, Race, Pluralism and the Meaning of Difference by Kenan Malik New Formations Spring 1998, as giving a good account of the intellectual development of the concept.

Brother Al's post also illustrates a couple of other things which make the whiny-white-folks discourse often hard to decipher by those not familiar with it. For instance, he seems to be relying on some obscure definitions of common words, as in the title, "When Tolerance Doesn't Mean Toleration". What is the difference between "tolerance" and "toleration" he's referring to? Beats me.

Also, he offers us this conclusion which is at least as obscure as an explanation of why Ezekiel 38 directs the Cheney-Bush administration to sell cluster bombs to Israel:

True toleration exists when all persons are free to express their own deepest beliefs and to argue for the truthfulness and superiority of their beliefs, while respecting the rights of all others to do the same. This is chartered pluralism - an honest exchange of ideas, beliefs, and arguments in the public square - not ideological pluralism that denies that truth can be found, or the false tolerance that tolerates only what it likes.

It seems that in Brother Al's linguistic universe, "toleration" is good but "tolerance" is bad.

And has anyone reading this ever encountered the phrase "chartered pluralism" before? I'm no First Administration scholar. But I've read a fair amount about the history of democracy and free speech issues. And I really don't recall encoutering this phrase before. (If this article by Eduardo J. Echeverria is to be believed, Nature and Grace: The Theological Foundations of Jacques Maritain's Public Philosophy Journal of Markets and Morality Fall 2001, it's a concept based on the ideas of the Catholic thinkers Maritain and John Courtney Murray.)

These weird word games facilitate the approach Brother Al takes in this post in criticizing the Sam Harris book, which is to blur the differences between tolerance as a political/legal concept, tolerance as social practice and intellectual tolerance in the context of critical thinking. And blurring those differences is a standard feature of the "Christians in America are persecuted" schtick.

In this case, I first thought from Brother Al's brief description that what Harris was discussing was how more liberal or moderate Christians should relate to Christian fundamentalists. Actually, a quick look at the book at Border's showed me that Harris' book is an atheist pamphlet aimed at a general readership. His main goal is to make the standard atheist argument that religious claims have no truth-value of any significance and that the social functione of religion is clearly more negative than positive. A look through the opening and concluding chapters and consulting the index didn't turn up any references to wanting to abolish freedom of religion, though. (It's specifically William Murry that Brother Al quotes and characterizes what he said as wanted to abolish religious freedom.)

In any case, it's worth remembering that Christian Right Republicans tend to code any kind of criticism of their religious views or practices as a call for governmental suppression and persecution.

Although it's not Harris' focus, it's pretty clear from the quote Brother Al gave that William Murry was focusing on the challenges that fundamentalism does present for ecumenical-minded Christians: how does an ecumenical Christian theology regard rigidly-exclusionary Christian fundamentalism? Do we ignore their theological ideas? Try to argue against them on theological grounds? Argue only on the basis of real-world effects of policies favored by those who advocate theological persepctives like "premillenial dispensationalism"?

How does that extend to official church life? To personal attitudes toward individual fundamentalists? How difficult this social dimension can be is discussed in several books I've read recently, including Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005) and two books by Fisher Humphreys: Fundamentalism [with Philip Wise (2004) and The Way We Were (2002). All three of these books deal with the real-life battles within the Southern Baptist Convention between fundamentalists and "moderate" evangelicals.

In light of Christian Right hostility to science, it's particularly ironic - and misleading - when Brother Al says he opposes "not ideological pluralism that denies that truth can be found, or the false tolerance that tolerates only what it likes". The Christian Right's current posture on issues like creationism is to demand that scientists pretend to accept crackpot notions like that *as science*. Brother Al and his ideological shipmates believe *scientific* truth can be found in the Christian Scirptures, as interpreted by inspired individuals like Brother Al, of course. Intellectual tolerance in science means that realistic arguments that are consistent with scientific methods and the current state of knowledge should be considered. It doesn't mean that scientists should accept any fool idea just because religious lobbyists support it.

In the end, Brother Al's post is a "respectably" worded Christian Right version of the white supremacist/John Birch notion: The Jew Commies are coming to git us!!

posted at 3:26:00 PM by Bruce Miller

| +Save/Share | |