Posted on 05/06/2009 1:26:18 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
The GOP platform in 1996 stated: "The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education." President Bush let Ted Kennedy write his education bill and he outspent Bill Clinton. I wonder what happened to undoing Roe v. Wade...what happened to getting rid of AMTRAK? It seems to me that the GOP abandoned limited government during 8 years of George Bush and now with a full blown socialist like Obama...is Conservatism politically dead? In 1962, a Madison Square Garden arena was filled with 18,000 conservatives and Goldwater predicted a wave of conservatism, but it is impossible to imagine 18,000 conservatives gathering in Madison Square Garden today.
Hey clown, Newt's contract called for defunding the Left. From Planned Parenthood, NPR, your name it, all were to be left with no taxpayer $.
A bigger reason is that social/religious “conservatives” decided that anything and everything was worth sacrificing, for even incremental advancement of their anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-gay, and anti-sex-outside-of marriage agendas. Since taken together, this group of anti- agendas are unacceptable to a substantial majority of voters, a large percentage of voters who would otherwise prefer to vote for candidates supporting drastic shrinking of the federal beast, end up voting for whoever the Democratic candidate is, and a large percentage of “conservatives” vote for and eagerly support any candidate or elected official who at least pays lip service to their social agenda, no matter how many additional billions of tax dollars that candidate or elected official pours into various federal schemes.
The nation would be a lot better off if conservatives tossed these social issues off the political cliff, and relocated these debates to homes and churches and synagogues. Socialist strategists are having a field day keeping the masses on both the left and right focused on these social issues, which easily provoke irrational emotional responses from both sides, and keep them distracted from the much more important issue of how government is appropriating ever larger chunks of the lives of all productive citizens, through ever larger schemes of taxation and regulation.
Oh God. Art History. Who would admit to that?
Sputnik scared the crud out of most Americans. It raised the specter of Russian control of space for military purposes. Eisenhower's response was to say that we needed federal aid for science education in the public schools.
I vaguely remeber the Russo/Sputnik/science connection in my Boston public school (I was born in ‘48), but waaayyyy too young to get the politics of it all.
I think you are absolutely wrong. You exhibit a tendency that many libertarians exhibit...you thrash social conservatism...even though you point out that on social issues that all social conservatives get is lip service...much like we get with smaller government talk. I’m socially conservative...very much so...and I have very strong libertarian views on government and I’m tired of hearing how I must abandon the culture war...it is a false dichotomy. Rockefeller republicans are just as hostile to social conservatism as they are to limited government. I’m baffled by how you’d abandon the fight against what is essentially cultural marxism and throw our efforts “off the cliff.” So it may be that you hypocritically give in to an agenda that ensures we are culturally wed to socialism to achieve limited government! You dream!
once the Dept. of Ed. takes direct control of all higher education financing (and is able to grant loan forgiveness and other favors as needed) you can forget ever getting rid of them.
We, the people, have to demand that government be small. How? http://pushbackuntil.com
We have to codify the amount of money we let government spend. No more can we trust any one person or party - it has to be up to us.
Government has done nothing but expand geometrically during the decades since “social issues” became the center of “conservative” political debate. We are being dragged towards socialism because “social issues” that have nothing whatsoever to do with socialism are being allowed to dominate the political landscape. Who cares how other people are living, as long as they’re not doing it with our money? Instead of being dragged into an idiotic fight over gay marriage, conservatives should be working to get government totally out of the marriage business, and focusing on dismantling the huge web of socialist wealth redistribution programs that are tied to government control of marriage. Nobody is saying that you have to abandon the “culture war” — just fight it outside of the political system. Of course, getting rid of welfare programs will have the effect of drastically reducing a lot of social problems, such as teenage girls having babies by a series of unemployed and unemployable men, and college students wasting four years and boatloads of taxpayer money “studying” things like “Queer Literature” and “Black Studies” — but the political focus needs to be on the financial side of the equation.
There is no such thing as “cultural marxism”. Marxism is an economic political philosophy which has its foundation in state ownership and control of all property and means of wealth procuction. Preventing government from having that control absolutely precludes the practice of Marxism. Living as a homosexual couple or having an abortion are not forms of “Marxism”; they are private choices made by private citizens, who should not have access to taxpayers’ money to subsidize those or any other choices (including heterosexual marriage and/or childbearing).
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”—John Adams
Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as “multiculturalism” or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as “multiculturalism.”
Cultural Marxism began not in the 1960s but in 1919, immediately after World War I. Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow capitalism and create communism. But when war came in 1914, that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in 1917, workers in other European countries did not support it. What had gone wrong?
Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interest that Communism was impossible in the West until both could be destroyed. In 1919, Lukacs asked, “Who will save us from Western civilization?” That same year, when he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, one of Lukacs’s first acts was to introduce sex education into Hungary’s public schools. He knew that if he could destroy the West’s traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture itself.
In 1923, inspired in part by Lukacs, a group of German Marxists established a think tank at Frankfurt University in Germany called the Institute for Social Research. This institute, soon known simply as the Frankfurt School, would become the creator of cultural Marxism.
To translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the members of the Frankfurt School - - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name the most important - - had to contradict Marx on several points. They argued that culture was not just part of what Marx had called society’s “superstructure,” but an independent and very important variable. They also said that the working class would not lead a Marxist revolution, because it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie.
Who would? In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question: a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals.
Fatefully for America, when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School fled - - and reestablished itself in New York City. There, it shifted its focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in the United States. To do so, it invented “Critical Theory.” What is the theory? To criticize every traditional institution, starting with the family, brutally and unremittingly, in order to bring them down. It wrote a series of “studies in prejudice,” which said that anyone who believes in traditional Western culture is prejudiced, a “racist” or “sexist” of “fascist” - - and is also mentally ill.
Most importantly, the Frankfurt School crossed Marx with Freud, taking from psychology the technique of psychological conditioning. Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like “normalize” homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School’s key people spent the war years in Hollywood).
After World War II ended, most members of the Frankfurt School went back to Germany. But Herbert Marcuse stayed in America. He took the highly abstract works of other Frankfurt School members and repackaged them in ways college students could read and understand. In his book “Eros and Civilization,” he argued that by freeing sex from any restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the reality principle and create a society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined the phrase, “Make love, not war”). Marcuse also argued for what he called “liberating tolerance,” which he defined as tolerance for all ideas coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from the Right. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief “guru” of the New Left, and he injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America’s state ideology.
The next conservatism should unmask multiculturalism and Political Correctness and tell the American people what they really are: cultural Marxism. Its goal remains what Lukacs and Gramsci set in 1919: destroying Western culture and the Christian religion. It has already made vast strides toward that goal. But if the average American found out that Political Correctness is a form of Marxism, different from the Marxism of the Soviet Union but Marxism nonetheless, it would be in trouble. The next conservatism needs to reveal the man behind the curtain - - old Karl Marx himself.What is Cultural Marxism?
Our smiley faced socialism is actually big grin socialism.
As I recall, when LBJ was in college, his professor asked him to write an essay on the subject. He wrote this big long treatise and his professor returned it as “wrong.” The constitution didn’t say anything about education. So of course he, LBJ, was going to see to it otherwise.
I think the story is in Paul Boller’s Presidential Anecdotes.
As recently as the 1980’s, it was possible to attend college on a National Defense scholarship, and never study one lick of science.
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