A sad, internal emptiness fuels most cases of individual political enthusiasm. To belong to a tribe, to take part in a war between alleged good and alleged evil, to be stimulated by outrage, to harden perseverative obsessive repetitive loops in the brain, to have an all-consuming addiction that dulls reality, to have a socially acceptable license to hate, to claim moral superiority, to rationalize envy, to virtue signal, to organize all aspects of life, all make politics a life-saver.
Just not in the way we normally think. Neither “side” solves actual problems. Either side can slowly become evil.
But political involvement saves a person from the problem of how to live as an uncreative soul who presses their nose against the windows of perceived enemies.
THE CULTURAL MARXISM CONSPIRACY by A.J.A. Woods by the Marxist and far-left Verso Press is a tightly researched, not-so-tightly argued book that lays out how the cultural right discovered that the Frankfurt School of philosophy and sociology could handily be used as a baseball bat against the cultural left. Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and crew helped Paul Weyrich and William Lind explain how external enemies – these obscure Frankfurt School social critics who were critical of the West – transformed the family-friendly Western Civilization of the 1950’s and turned it into a nightmare of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll by 1970.
CULTURAL MARXISM shows how asinine both sides are. Politics is a high level schoolground fight, a hockey fight, a lot of gritted teeth. So is this book. It’s a book for committed leftists who have a certain set of ideas burned into their brain, wants them reinforced by rebar, and who will fight and argue for them just like a Nazi soldier will fight until death.
Nothing is more boring, useless, and ultimately dangerous than a firmly committed ideologue of any flavor.
The Frankfurt School did not cause the 1960’s. The political right is wrong about that. Woods takes it down handily. The problem is, Adorno and Horkheimer and crew are used as paper tigers to fuel yet another North Korean partisan rant yak-yak-yak for the heavily committed nut cases.
The right has their own rants. We don’t want or need rants of any kind.
You may have noticed that boring and repetitive and enraging political posts of all kinds – over and over and over again – on social media have alienated the vast center of politics. They turn off. They watch porn instead, or play video games, or are obsessed with sports and this new thing called FIFA, whatever that is. We no longer listen. That gets us to extremes of socialism or fascism faster than anything.
So why do people do it?
Emptiness. Political activism of any kind is a consumer product. I am what I buy. Until either the next product comes along, or until death breaks the addiction.
Politics was designed to be a compromise. A happy compromise.
Politics, at its best, is people with different ideas sitting around a table – or in a hot tub, or whatever – coming up with compromised solutions to solve complex problems. You know, like solar panels surrounding a nuclear power plant in the same field. Or raising taxes to pay off debt rather than not raising taxes and adding new programs.
But oh, no. Activists have to define what’s left of their lives by extreme positions, and they rationalize that by saying that the “other side” started it.
Madness.
