The Left Is Eating Itself

    Jews are inexorably tied to and often synonymous with modern Progressivism and the Liberal world view; and, in fact, are largely responsible for creating it and the modern liberal democratic world order. Nevertheless, there are signs that the monster they created may be turning against them.

    It is well documented that Communism and the radical left has been closely tied Jews and Jewish thought, and, even ignoring Karl Marx (who was Jewish), that Jews dominated Marxist and Communist leadership until the post-Lenin purges. In "Lenin and Maimonides" by Gary Saul Morson and published at the Jewish Review of Books, the author relates:

    In fact, three of the seven original members of the Bolshevik politburo were Jews, not counting Lenin himself, who was one-quarter Jewish. Jews played a disproportionately large role not only in Bolshevism but in the whole Russian revolutionary/terrorist movement. The foremost historian of Russian terrorism, Anna Geifman, notes that early in the 20th century, the entire society was convulsed with terrorism. Between 1905 and 1907, 4,500 government officials and 2,180 private individuals were killed, as well as others being wounded. Between January 1908 and May 1910, authorities recorded just fewer than 20,000 terrorist acts (and they must have missed ones in remote areas). According to Geifman, murder became more common than traffic accidents.

    She notes that among the Russian Empire’s 136 million people, only 5 percent were Jews, but Jews constituted about 50 percent of the membership of revolutionary parties. In 1903, Chaim Weizmann explained to Theodor Herzl: “It is a fearful spectacle . . . to observe the major part of our youth—and no one would describe them as the worst part—offering themselves for sacrifice as though seized by a fever.”

    To avoid inflaming anti-Semitism, many revolutionary leaders tried not to use Jews to execute terrorist acts, but some of the most violent groups (so-called Maximalists and anarchists) had no choice because they were almost entirely Jewish. Geifman quotes the widely circulated witticism about the execution of 11 anarchists, 15 of whom were Jews.

He also adds:

Outside the Soviet Union, how Jewish were Communist movements? The answer varies country by country and decade by decade, of course, but sometimes the Russian pattern was repeated. When, in 1919, Communists proclaimed a Soviet republic in Hungary, Hanebrink notes, 30 of the 48 people’s commissars were Jews, including the regime’s head and its secret police director. By the time Communists took over Poland in the late 1940s, there were too few Polish Jews left to constitute much of the party, but 30 percent of the secret police leadership were Jewish, including not only secret police chief Jakub Berman but also the person running the department charged with penetrating the Catholic Church and the person Anne Applebaum has described as “the chief secret police interrogator” in Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, a work that contrasts instructively with Hanebrink’s. In Hungary, Applebaum notes, “all of the leading Hungarian communists . . . were of Jewish origin, as were many of the founders of the political police and the Interior Ministry.” One may surmise that this was Stalin’s way of directing hatred away from the Soviet Union, an age-old policy of using Jews as a lightning rod. Whatever the reason, it meant that Communist terror often showed a Jewish face in Hungary. 

(See also, e.g., "Was the Russian Revolution Jewish?" at the Jerusalem Post; "Commitment and Crisis: Jews and American Communism" by Tony Michels, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison). Focusing just on the United States, the Frankfurt School (which was composed entirely of Jewish scholars) gave birth to "cultural Marxism" and its bastard offspring: the "critical theory" school of thought that has grown to infest our nation. (See my review of  The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh). 

VIDEO: "PJTV - Bill Whittle - The Narrative - Political Correctness" (13 min.)

Discussing the history of the Frankfort School

    Scott S. Powell also discusses this topic in his article "The Quiet Revolution: How the New Left Took Over the Democratic Party." He writes:

    As Lenin was consolidating power in Russia, Antonio Gramsci was emerging as a leading Marxist theoretician in Italy and would found the Italian Communist Party in 1921. After being imprisoned by Mussolini, the Fascist prime minister of Italy, Gramsci authored what came to be called the Prison Notebooks, partially published in 1947 and in complete form in 1975, a legacy that made him one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. Gramsci argued that communists’ route to taking power in developed, industrialized societies such as Europe and the United States would be best achieved through a “long march through the institutions.” This would be a gradual process of radicalization of the cultural institutions -- “the superstructure” -- of bourgeois society, a process that would in turn transform the values and morals of society. Gramsci believed that as society’s morals were softened, its political and economic foundation would be more easily smashed and restructured.

    Cultural Marxism was also in vogue at the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Germany -- that is until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Many members of the “Frankfurt School,” such as Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkeimer, and Wilhelm Reich fled to the United States, where they ultimately found their way into professorships at various elite universities such as Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. In the context of American culture, “the long march through the institutions” meant, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, “working against the established institutions while working in them.”

    While the Frankfurt School was neo-Marxist, many of its adherents were less interested in economics and redistribution of wealth than in remaking and transforming society through attitudinal and cultural change. They incorporated Marxist class theory into sociology and psychology while also assimilating Freud’s theories on sexuality. Thus, Marx’s theory of the dialectic of perpetual conflict was joined together with Freud’s neurotic ideas, creating a sort of Freudian-Marxism. Their stated goal was a total transformation of society by breaking down traditional norms and institutions such as monogamous relations and the traditional family. This was to be accomplished by promoting and legitimizing unhinged sexual permissiveness with no cultural or religious restraint.

    The countercultural influence of radicals like Marcuse and Gramsci has been advanced more by insinuation and infiltration than by confrontation. Their “quiet” revolution to remake society was intended to be diffused throughout the culture gradually over a period of time. Gramsci argued that alliances with non-communist leftist groups would be essential to the collapse of the capitalist bourgeois order. Marcuse believed that radical intellectuals needed to ally themselves with the socially marginalized substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and ethnicities, the unemployed and the unemployable.

    While the influence of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School and Marxists like Gramsci was greatest in intellectual circles in a strategic sense, Saul Alinsky arrived on the scene in Chicago in the 1930s with the tactical tools for the foot-soldiers of social and political revolution -- the community organizers and non-academic labor and single-issue activists.

    Alinsky had a certain charm and appeal to wealthy funders, ...

    Alinsky also had other benefactors in Washington and Wall Street. ...

* * * 

    Alinsky's tactics had more in common with Gramsci and Marcuse than the revolutionary and violent approaches of Russian Marxists Lenin and Stalin. Alinsky, too, believed in gradualism and subversion of the system through infiltration rather than confrontation and revolution.

    Alinsky believed that politics was war by other means, stating specifically that “in war the end justifies almost any means.” But he was more than a nihilistic progressive revolutionary. Alinsky’s handbook, Rules for Radicals, first published in 1971, included an admiration for the prince of darkness, Lucifer, noting that he was “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom…”

    By the 1960s Marcuse and Alinsky were recognized as two of the most influential leaders of the New Left, which gained strength and numbers by taking a leading role in the anti-Vietnam War movement. However, Alinsky and Marcuse were critical of the violent and confrontational tactics of many of the anti-war radicals, such as Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, preferring instead that radicals work behind the scenes and bore into the establishment. This was seen later in the 1960s with Alinskyites positioned to take advantage of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs, to direct federal money into various Alinksy projects.

    Alinksy succeeded in what would be a crowning achievement: the recruitment of young idealistic radicals -- Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- who would go on to climb to the top of political power in the Democratic Party. Hillary wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College in 1969 on Alinsky’s methods and remained a friend of Alinsky until his death in 1972. A decade later, Barack Obama was trained in the methods and Rules for Radicals in the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago.

    Camouflage and deception are key to Alinsky-style organizing. When Barack Obama was organizing black churches in Chicago and was criticized for not attending church himself, he pivoted and became a regular church attendee, ultimately becoming a member at Jeremiah Wright’s radical Trinity United Church of Christ.

* * *

    By winning “cultural hegemony,” the acolytes of Gramsci, Alinsky, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School believed that the wellsprings of human thought could be largely controlled by mass psychology and propaganda. One of Alinsky’s unique contributions, explained as the seventh Rule for Radicals, was the tactic to avoid debate on the issues by systematically silencing, ridiculing and marginalizing people of opposing views. At the same time, allies in the media provided cover and a framework of acceptance for radical issues and leaders. Traditional values of morality, family, the work ethic and free market institutions were made to appear outdated -- even reactionary, unnecessary, and culturally unfashionable. Ultimately this evolved into what has become known as political correctness, which now envelops the culture.

    By 1980, the counter-cultural alliances would include radical feminist groups, civil rights and ethnic minority advocates, extremist environmental organizations, and advocates of liberation theology, anti-military peace groups, union leaders, radical legal activist organizations like the ACLU, human rights watch-dog organizations, community organizers of the Alinsky model, national and world church council bureaucracies, anti-corporate activists, and various internationalist-minded groups. Working separately and together, these groups could count on a sympathetic media and favorable coverage, which facilitated building bridges to the Democratic Party and becoming vocal constituencies deserving attention and legislative action.

    The New Left in America realized that it was neither necessary nor desirable to own the means of production as originally envisioned by Marx. Redistribution could be accomplished through progressive taxation that was enshrined by an enlightened Democratic Party. Corporate priorities could be redirected through sensational and biased media exposure, proxy contests, mass demonstrations, boycotts, activist lawsuits and regulatory actions. No need to be responsible for the means of production, when you could advance Marx’s anti-capitalist agenda from the sidelines by indicting individual corporations and the system of capitalism itself.

    It didn't end there. Some of the most damaging spy rings, including the Rosenbergs who transferred nuclear weapon secrets to the Soviet Union, where Jewish. And Jews formed the leadership of terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground and provided support to Black nationalist groups. John Beaty's book, The Iron Curtain Over America, describes how left-leaning Jews--often immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia--were widely inducted into the foreign service and federal departments involved with finance under the administrations of FDR and played an outsized role in American foreign policy and economics following WWII. And any long time reader of this blog or practically any other conservative blog or news site will be familiar with George Soros and his work to elect woke and liberal district attorneys, open borders to a flood of immigrants, and otherwise undermine the West.

    This isn't to say that all Jews were Marxists or supported what they did. The articles above make clear that support was not universal among the Jewish community, but that doesn't remove the Jewishness from the movements. Moreover, as I've noted before, a super-majority of American Jews voted Democratic reflecting an overall Leftist political philosophy among the group. 

    Thus it is with some astonishment that I see the Cultural Marxists and other radical leftists turning on Jews. One of the most recent articles I've see on this topic is "The Vanishing: The erasure of Jews from American life" by Jacob Savage at Tablet Magazine. Savage writes:

    Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing.

    You feel it like a slow moving pressure system, an anxiety of exclusion and downward mobility. Maybe you first noticed it at your workplace. Or maybe it hit when you or your children applied to college or graduate school. It could have been something as simple as opening up the Netflix splash page. It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.

    For many Jews, the first instinct is to look inward: We blame intermarriage, assimilation, the loss of the immigrant work ethic. This is, of course, a cope. Because the most significant cause of the decline isn’t Jews themselves, but that American liberalism, our civic religion, has turned on us. Where Jewish success was once upheld as a sign of America’s strength and progress over its prejudices, Jewish “overrepresentation” is again something to be solved, not celebrated.

    A tenure-track humanities professor at a prestigious public university tells of the finalists for her department’s next graduate school cohort. Of the 20 or so candidates, four to five are Jews. One is a working-class yeshivish applicant with an incredible backstory and even better recommendations. He is passed over for not being “diverse” enough. Of course our professor doesn’t complain— her own tenure is at risk. In the end, not a single Jew is offered admission.

    Another Jewish professor applies to work in the UC system. In his mandatory diversity statement, which he describes as “the most shameful piece of writing I’ve ever done,” his sole aim is to convey the impression that he hopes to be the last Jewish man they ever hire. He still doesn’t get the job.

    And why would he? Using YouGov data, Eric Kaufmann finds that just 4% of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish (compared to 21% of boomers). The steep decline of Jewish editors at the Harvard Law Review (down roughly 50% in less than 10 years) could be the subject of its own law review article.

    The same pattern holds across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s—likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors—and then a purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo.

    Museum boards now diversify by getting Jews to resign. A well-respected Jewish curator at the Guggenheim is purged after she puts on a Basquiat show. At the Art Institute of Chicago, even the nice Jewish lady volunteers are terminated for having the wrong ethnic background. There’s an entire cottage industry of summer programs and fellowships and postdocs that are now off-limits to Jews.

One of the starkest indicators of what is happening is the declining percentage of students admitted to Ivy League schools that are Jews--less now at several schools than at the height of the anti-Jewish enrollment caps that such schools had adopted in the mid-20th Century. (Don't feel too bad, the article notes that a Jews still make up 15%-20% of the undergraduate student body at elite institutions although Jews only account for 2.4% of the total population of the country). 

    A few other excerpts:

• In New York—the seat of American Jewish political power—there are almost no Jews left in power. A decade ago the city had five Jewish congressmen, a Jewish mayor, two Jewish borough presidents, and 14 Jewish City Council members. Today just two congressmen and a single borough president remain. Only six Jews now sit on the 51-person City Council. Shelly Silver, the corrupt Orthodox former State Assembly leader, was replaced by Yuh-Line Niou, a pro-BDS “progressive” whose oligarch father was featured in the Panama Papers. Not even the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is recognizably Jewish anymore.
• Younger Jews are being excluded from the liberal organizations their parents and grandparents helped create. Identitarian meltdowns roil the progressive world. The Women’s March, the ACLU, and the SPLC all get rid of Jewish leadership. There will be no more “Mighty Iras” in our lifetime. Not even the Jewish president of the Audubon Society is safe.
• Of the 114 federal judges appointed by Joe Biden (as of this writing), just 8-9 appear to be Jewish—in a field that’s historically been at least 20% Jewish. Liberals worship Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a magical Jewish Teletubby, but they wouldn’t dare nominate another “white woman” to the highest court anytime soon. We are back to the single Jewish seat on the court.
• Speaking of LA, a decade ago there were 22 Jews on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual list of the Top 50 Showrunners. In 2022, that’s down to 13. Other than the half-Jewish (and already famous) Maggie Gyllenhaal, you’d have to go back six years to find a single Jew on Variety’s annual list of 10 Directors to Watch.

He concludes that "Because what is framed as a backlash against America’s 'white' centers of power is in many cases a clever sleight of hand. Jews are being disproportionately purged from liberal institutions because Jews disproportionately exist within those institutions." In other words, Frankenstein's monster has turned on the good doctor.

Related articles:

• "Even in Bay Area, Jewish residents face ‘drumbeat’ of antisemitism"--San Francisco Chronicle. 
• "The New Jew: The Beginning of a Jewish Political Realignment" by Karol Markowicz, Real Clear Books. Explaining how the new anti-Semitism is, slowly, pushing Jews toward the Republican party.

    First, I would suggest that Savage is engaging in stereotypical Jewish/Middle-Eastern hyperbole. The sky is not falling on the Jews. The elite institutions--the Ivy League universities, Hollywood, the State Department and other federal bureaucracies--still contain disproportionate numbers of Jews, particularly in the highest ranks of power. 

    Second, although Savage's article is hyperbole, it is possible that it is the beginning of a trend--something that was inevitable from an eschatological perspective. The Jews--the descendants of the Israelites that remained in Judea and not the 10 tribes in the northern kingdom that have been lost to history--were foretold that they would return to Judea in the last days. Not New York, Florida, or California. But while a sizable number of Jews founded and have returned to Israel, the larger portion of the Jewish diaspora still live outside Israel and, in particular, the United States. I believe that eventually something will happen that will cause the majority of the dispersed Jews to move to Israel. Perhaps this is part of it.

    Finally, reading Savage's article, I have to wonder if this is a prelude or precursor to what is described in Revelation 17 when the Beast turns on Mystery Babylon.