Your reference to Nietzsche gives me the excuse I need to revisit one of my favorite themes which is the influence of The Frankfurt School. Someday a political/cultural historian with the perspective of time will draw a straight line from Nietzsche through The Frankfurt School on to Cloward and Piven, connecting all to The Alinsky School, and finally culminating in Barack Obama. The influence of Nietzsche and the ultimate nihilism of The Frankfurt School are force multipliers in prying open the mind and the soul to the kind of narcissism which now inhabits the Oval Office.
I am going to exploit my excuse and lay out now and old post which sought to remind us of the path that got us here. I only wish I had started at Nietzsche as you did. Here is the old reply:
We are in a place in America today in which virtually every institution has been co-opted by the left. The infiltration is broad and deep and not one major institution has escaped. Our great universities, our teaching down through kindergarten, our great charitable foundations, our courts, and the guilds associated with the courts such as the American Bar Association, the establishment churches, like the United Church of Christ, the Girl Scouts, the League of Women Voters, Hollywood, the publishing industry, the advertising industry have not one of them escaped. This list is by no means complete and it is growing daily under the predacious appetite of the Obama administration which has swallowed whole our industries such as automobile, insurance, banking.
The administration marches from industry to industry and from conquest to conquest in a series of usurpations and intimidations which have effectively seized control and sometimes ownership of America's great industries. We have seen corruption in America before on a national scale in the administrations of Grant and Harding. We have even seen usurpations and intimidations and thuggery in America before but isolated to a local scale in places like Chicago and not federalized nationwide. If the Obama administration continues unchecked at its present pace it will have destroyed the fabric of our Great Experiment before it can be turned out of office.
I think the problem goes back to even before The Alinsky School to The Frankfurt School which was the precursor to the cultural subversion which has come to America and which found expression in Alinsky's school and political consummation in the election of Barack Obama. It is not by accident that all these institutions have fallen into the hands of the left. The left has generated a new eschatology, a whole new way of thinking, which rejects the logic and and culture that was the common or majority experience in America at least through the Eisenhower administration.
The Frankfurt school was explicitly created to undermine those institutions which tended to hinder the much desired triumph of communism. These included the nation state, the church, the family, and the "liberal" tradition in education. So they devised means to undermine patriotism and combined that with wholesale immigration as methods of undermining the nation state. They assaulted the churches and made expressions of Christianity in the public square either illegal or boorish, that is, politically incorrect. To undermine the family, they belittled the father, labeling him "authoritarian," derided paternalism, and encouraged abortion. They have had unimagined success in undermining our school system from kindergarten to postgraduate work. But these instances are but merely the symptoms and the venues of the dirty work.
The main problem that comes out of The Frankfurt School is that it changes the way we think. If one legitimatizes relativism then one can begin to talk about George Bush as the moral equivalent of Hitler. If one says that there is no such thing as historical reality, one has destroyed the very underpinnings of civilization. If one espouses and sells a "critical theory" one has made all other forms of analysis except downright cynicism look naïve and unworthy. Describing the methodology by which the The Frankfurt School "deconstructed" our epistemology is truly frightening.
The media invariably a half step ahead of society in this process behaves the way it does because that's the way it thinks and it thinks that way because that is the way it has been brought up. And all of this goes back to The Frankfurt School. [And now I might add, Nietzsche]
We are at a crisis in the moment because of the person of Barack Obama. We must bend every effort to prevent him from achieving the ultimate victory sought by The Frankfurt School and its disciples, Saul Alinsky, Cloward and Piven, William Ayers, and the rest. But if we survive this crisis we must then as patriotic conservatives undertake the restoration of "liberal" common sense and biblical morality (but not necessarily religiosity) to our culture. That means we have to change the way people think, the way they see the world, their whole value system. That is what has been done to us and if we do not undo it we will always be one election away from the next Barack Obama.
