meet angie nixon. angie is a member of DSA. angie just won the democratic party primary for US senate in florida.
she is, by the standards of more reasonable and civil times, both boorish and bananas, an uncivil person driving uncivil society without regard to reason or discourse.
hers is simply a tack of shouting down and disallowing the speech of any with whom she finds fault.
this is what it looks like when you think that suppressing any ideas but yours is justice.
it will be a praxis familiar to anyone who was watching american universities circa 2020.
no room full of actual adults would tolerate this.
draw such conclusions as seem appropriate about the rest of the folks in the chamber (this is the florida state house of reps).
one of the questions that seems to percolate up from all this is “how did we get to here?” how did we get to a place where so many people, students, faculty, politicians, even dinner party guests feel not only entitled but compelled to seek to suppress the speech of others? when did this become not only OK but cast, at least in the minds of its practitioners, as virtue, even duty?
how did we reach a point of not only budding but eager thought police seeking “dirt on journalists” as a means to silence information?
these people are not telling themselves “we’re censorious tyrants.” they think that they are the forces of goodness and light. they truly, at marrow level, believe themselves, abject fascists, authoritarianists, and dictators all, to be “social justice warriors.”
how do you get there? what was the path, the story?
it starts in frankfurt.
and therefore so shall we. this is a wonderful piece upon which i cannot improve but which i will seek to extend.
it lays out an excellent description of the frankfurt school and how it came to america in the 1930’s and how it and its descendants set about their long march through our institutions, educational and otherwise.
the full text is below. you can read it online here. you should follow krzysztof. he’s excellent.
The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.
The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.
1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.
2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.
3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it.
This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.
4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but "in its name." Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.
6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.
7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.
The answer is not another theory.
It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.
The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.
Prove it wrong.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.
this is my favorite line:
It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
it’s exactly this. we lionize the wrecker and attack the builder, laud the parasite and criticize the host. we lose the ability to imagine anything better.
that is death.
no truth, no reason, no objectivist good or evil, nothing to pass on, only shame for ever having made something of value.
that is death.
it’s also why these movements tend to be so hideous aesthetically. ideas of “objective beauty” fail without ideas like objective good or virtue and ramming the ugly down the throats of the unbelievers is a great way to enforce participation in hallucination.
that too, is death.
it all piles together into one unpleasant heap.
this is why “everything you made is evil, you owe contrition, your reason and objectivism are “anti-human”” is always the mantra used to mask the fact that their pretense to moral breadth is, itself, an inevitably narrow and oppressive brand of objectivist imposition dressed up as the very empathy and fluffy bunny pluralism it destroys.
it’s why they demand that it must be your polestar (or else).
these ideas are so good that they must be mandatory.
inherent in this alleged support of egalitarian support of the marginal and the weak is embedded a most intense form of elitism. you are not “X” and as such you cannot understand. we claim special situational or intrinsic knowledge arising from our position and our traits and you may not know it, only submit to it.
if that’s not the definition of “an aristocracy of the worst” i’d love to hear people’s views on what would be.
this leads to the same abuses of all “divine right aristos.”
suppressing and punishing dissent is justice because we are right and you are wrong.
anything not “just like us” must be destroyed.
we have axiomatically defined it as evil.
what is one to call that is not “a fundamentalist religion spreading dogma by holy war?”
this is the extension i’d like to add to krzysztof’s ideas:
the jihadification of the post modern ideas of derrida et al.
deconstructionism was self-disassembling. you deconstructed the dominant paradigm, rendered it semantically incoherent through pixelation, became, in turn, the dominant paradigm, and in turn, were deconstructed. hence, it all devolved into either dada or nihilism and in either event wound up confined to the parlor and the symposium. there was nowhere for it to go.
what changed and metastasized this was the introduction of the "non-interrogatiable salient." you add a payload to the philosophy that generates a “punch no punchbacks” zone from which all else may be criticized of disassembled past coherence but that, itself, may not be subjected to such.
you take an idea like:
"all relations are about power and all power is about race/gender/sexual identity/marginalization/privilege”
and demand that it be the axle around which all else spins.
this provided a ready made swap in for "wealth/class" that took the longstanding marxist playbooks for societal conquest and rebranded them as social justice.
same attack vector, new brand book.
this allowed the original idea of "critical theory" to come to final form: "you may deconstruct anything but our core dogma," rendering that core payload at once dishonest, arbitrary, and unfalsifiable while also forbidding anyone from trying to do so.
the whole thing became a kafka trap where criticism of doctrine proves doctrine and is used as evidence that one is not "woke" and must be re-educated. it turned the french parlor game for intellectuals into a dogmatic secular jihad whose core tenet was to take power through relentless and savage attacks on those it branded apostate and where dissent was "evil" and thus all actions, however vicious ot illiberal, justified to suppress it. it is not a coincidence that some many of these idiots, useful or otherwise, seem to lionize mao. “how do we justify tossing you into a struggle session?” was always the question foremost in their minds.
i suspect this was many of the ideas of frankfurt drifting to the fore. those who disagree with me cannot be in their right mind. they are sick. they need help. for their own good. taking from them their agency would be doing them a favor. see? where the good people here, empathtic and concerned and desirous of helping the ill even if they cannot themselves see that they need it. jospeh heller wept. joseph goebbells stood up and applauded.
perhaps rather than the french merely rendering the inversion ideation that “tolerating wrong ideas itself is oppression” aesthetic, they provided a linkage between marx and marcuse and that this new "marxcusian" system became a sort of joining of the tribes who all wished to pull the west down.
(i suspect that islam recognized this so readily because it is their praxis as well and islam has a long history of using marxist vanguards to get the ball rolling before turning on them and imposing true theocracy. (ask iran how that worked out))
couple these techniques and ideology to government schooling as indoctrination factory and the systematic over-education of mid and submidwits through debt or state funded "higher education" to overproduce ersatz cargo cult elites and you get a cauldron of misapprehended activism that perceives its own stupidity and inequity as the evil of others.
and the worse they become, the more they blame you for it. they have been left no other outlet save the realization that their own carefully constructed external identities devoid of objective ideas of virtue or progress are not only invalid but outright oppressive and sinister. but they cannot do this because they have been raised on the idea that good and evil, virtue and vice are all simply matters of opinion and that that opinion is determined by whoever holds the whip hand.
truly moral relativism is the universal solvent of civilization.
moral relativism cannot exist in a system of freedom, it’s inherently incompatible.
someone always winds up saying “my morals preclude yours and because your right to have them is not absolute, i say you cannot.”
there is no higher reason or ethics, only the views of whoever is ascendant.
some would say this is true of the social contract as well and that it and the idea of a rights based republic are just another imposed set of ideologies dictated upon others, but both reality and philosophy point to the falsity of this claim:
observe what happens. do these systems of rights and consent lead to human flourishing and liberty? do marxist systems lead to penury, privation, and subjugation by violence? there’s your answer. the laws of social organization are no more optional than the laws of physics.
ask “what happens if you say no?” one may always opt out of a social contract and having done so, the proper outcome is “being left alone” so long as one remains peaceful. one is free to enter into other contracts, social and otherwise and so long as they are consensual, the social contract has no objection. found a commune or collective and share, pool your efforts and assets, invite or hire others based on whatever reason you like. no one has a right to stop you. (obviouly, the criticism that the US departed radically from this in the early 1900’s is substantive.)
but no morally relative system of collectivism or dominance can tolerate the right of free people to say “no” both because it needs the coercive power to demand that you submit to its ideas and because those who do so submit will fare so much visibly worse than those who do not that it may not tolerate the comparison to exist.
as a matter of basic survival, such systems must go to war against “anything that works, that leads to wealth and flourishing and liberty.” (anything beautiful tends to get lumped into the belligerents list as well)
this is why the idea of “those who hold the wrong beliefs must be silenced and expunged” must always go hand and hand with marxism and collectivism.
absent this, it dies by comparison. pretty hard to keep the faithful faithful in their prostration and penury when the heretics next door are wealthy and free.
and so marx found in marcuse a new and more polished pretext for the same negative sum games.
there is no accident here, only exigency.
and in our apathy and trust, far too many fell for it.
intolerance for tolerating any thought deemed “regressive” or “counter to the movement” or for any speech supporting exiting power structures or uncaptured institutions (or even the idea that institutional capture is bad) is cast as justice. that’s marcuse 101. we must be the only ones speaking. they turn the idea of tolerance inside out and claim that censorship is tolerance because speech against us not only intolerable but evil. it usurps the semantics of liberty to support tyranny. it’s the triumph of goebbels over heller. catch 22 becomes life and accusing the other side of that which one is guilty justifies it. inherent in the core rests the secular religious dogma of “this is the truth, none may question it, and burn in the name of the all forgiving and empathetic humanist movement any heretic who dares try.”
it’s pretty grim stuff.
allowing these people to dominate academia and education has been a dire mistake.
education is not too important to be left to free markets and private actors, it’s too important not to be.
did you seriously think that state schools would not teach statism?
wake up and smell that which is being shoveled before they finish burying you in it.
calling that which you held beautiful “ugly” and “oppressive” is a tactic.
none of this is “normal.” it’s inversion, domination, and capture. it’s conquest.
normalizing normalcy involves repudiating this absurdity, in striking foundationally at it’s core ideas and in reclaiming our own.
again, i think krzysztof gives us a useful (and poetic) framework here: (numerical bullets mine)
A civilization stands on three pillars:
truth exists and is accessible to reason;
good is distinguishable from evil;
and there is an inheritance worth transmitting.
and every one of these things stands correct and vital.
the attacks on these ideas are deliberate for they are the method by which the functional is erected and preserved.
foremost, this lies in resilience, confidence, faith (deistic or philosophical/systemic), and always and of cruelest necessity in power and therefore in the final calculus in the capacity for violence.
our framers knew this.
they codified it into the very justification for our nation and our desire to stand free.
such ideas carry a price and the cost is accounted for in the blood of patriots and tyrants.
longtime readers of discerning cattitudes know that i love the term “ungovernable” but it’s easy to miscast that meaning.
ungovernable does not mean ungoverned.
it means government by the consent of the governed because the state is (rightly) more fearful of its people than the people are of the state.
the ungovernable may be (and should wish to be) both peaceful and ordered. they should wish for and demand institutions that they may trust and that stand conducive to such peaceful order.
but such peace and order must always be underpinned by the capacity for the alteration or abolition of a government or institution destructive to such ends.
when this relationship inverts and the citizen lives in fear of a state and its legal plunder and usurpation of rights and agency, tyranny becomes a way of life and a class of tyrants inevitably emerges and invents pretexts to cast their plunder as virtue.
in the end, a state that knows its people cannot resist it is unlikely to long remain trustworthy.
there is no “special morality” whereby acts that would be immoral for an individual somehow become ethical for the collective. it’s very much the opposite. states must be held to higher and more restrictive standards in order to be worthy of the authority those consenting to be governed by them cede.
the ability to restructure or replace an oppressive state irrespective of the desire of the systems of that state is at once civic duty and civic safety.
anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.
(and it’s probably subjugation)
yeah, this boils down to trying to police reality and make empirical knowledge/evidence seem as though it's bigotry,etc.
I've always looked at voting as who will leave me alone.
That's why the last time I voted was for Ross Perot.
All the rest have been the same damned thing.
Folks like Angie Nixon should be deconstructed, with a baseball bat.