Okay, the Frankfurt School was a pretty formative part of my education -- for what it's worth -- so I was scratching my head when I first saw attacks upon them come up in Republican boilerplate. Still more was I scratching my head when I saw the publicity around Mark Levin's book "American Marxism." Levin thinks he has something as regards the "Franklin School" that he can write a book-length screed against it, even though he misnamed the Frankfurt School. (Expect a whole library full of books, now, to come out about the "Franklin School.") It appears to be really easy for the repeaters of this boilerplate garbage to blame a few philosophers who are read by a tiny and shrinking group of graduate students. But the haters of this stuff ALL -- from Donald Trump to Ron DeSantis to Jordan B. Peterson -- repeat this boilerplate, as the video below well demonstrates.

An important footnote here: "critical race theory" is -- today -- the main object of attack for Republican educational policy. And Lind claimed that critical race theory came from critical theory. But this claim is patently untrue, as is the claim that they teach critical race theory in the schools.

So at any rate the Republicans are all spouting this Nazi-inspired blather -- which has as its nexus in the US the writings of William Lind, whose blather inspired the mass murder spree of the Norwegian fanatic Anders Brevik.

The Ted Cruz comment in the video is pretty amusing: "the socialists are in charge of the White House." Cruz, for his part, now agrees with the White House in funding Nazis in Ukraine.

In the video at about 7:25, the narrator brings up Lind's approach, saying that he "brings up a few Marxist academics," namely Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. And here I must strenuously disagree with the characterization of the academics in question. None of the people named in the video were actually Marxists. They did read Marx carefully, but they weren't really Marxists. Being a Marxist is a very specific thing, just like being a fascist used to be a very specific thing back in the day even though today "fascism" has become synonymous with "I don't like it" and soon you will hear or read of children telling their parents that being asked to eat your vegetables at the dinner table is a fascist thing.

Horkheimer and Adorno were -- deeply and sincerely -- pessimists, which disqualified them from being Marxists in the way in which Marx himself was a devout optimist. Marx, you see, thought that life would get better once capitalism was gone, which inevitably he thought it would be. Horkheimer and Adorno, on the other hand, could find no force in society capable of serious anti-capitalism. Marcuse, for his part, wrote some anti-Soviet propaganda for the ancestor-organization of the CIA. So, yeah, they weren't Marxists. You have to be amused by a cult of American haters -- the Republicans -- who show with their every blathering that they not read the stuff they most virulently hate. Unfortunately, it appears that the narrator of the video hasn't read these writers either. So I will, too briefly, give the interpretation of these guys a try here.

Back in 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a short book titled Philosophiche Fragmente, which three years later became Dialectic of Enlightenment. They wrote many other things but this was their most famous work. Here I am going to offer a really brief explanation of this book as an initial shorthand for "the Frankfurt School." Marcuse, as I've discussed him previously, deserves another essay of his own. I fully recognize that doing this will result in a rather drastic oversimplification of the Frankfurt School, which can perhaps be remedied later.

At any rate, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment during World War II, as German exiles living in greater Los Angeles. The fundamental point of Dialectic of Enlightenment was a critique of "the concept of enlightenment," the title of the first chapter. In that chapter, the authors started from the premise that "the program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world, the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy." The process, however, resulted in the triumph of domination, domination over nature and over people, because in the end myth was merely supplanted with calculation. "Enlightenment is totalitarian," the authors argued (6). This chapter was written at a high level of abstraction, and so the readers must guess -- to some extent -- as to what is meant by "enlightenment." My guess is that, for Horkheimer and Adorno, "enlightenment" began with writers such as Voltaire and Diderot, rationalists who thought that religion had too much power over people, and advocates of science such as Francis Bacon, who thought that nature was like a big machine.

The most famous essay within the Dialectic of Enlightenment is titled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." The point of this essay was that, under the conditions of modern society, culture has been made into an industry -- the industry of mass-produced entertainment -- and that the culture industry is so pervasive that "the whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry" and that "real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies" (126). Moreover, Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the products of the culture industry was that they weren't actually pleasurable, but that they merely prolonged the promise of pleasure without actually delivering. In other words, for them the culture industry produced crap. The culture industry was also skewered in the essay as being an agency of control by those at the top of the economic pyramids. This control, however, was not depicted as occurring through propaganda but rather through the subtle manipulation of the minds of consumers. "In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination." (140). The end-result of being controlled by the culture industry was -- they said -- that "the misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities" (134).

There is a concluding chapter to Dialectic of Enlightenment titled "Elements of Anti-Semitism" in which the authors use the principles they established in the book to critique Nazism. Perhaps it was this chapter that led Lind to hate the Frankfurt School, because Lind's own beliefs were aligned in some way with Nazism. It wouldn't surprise me if this were the case.

At any rate, to blame the Frankfurt School for "cultural Marxism" or "wokeness" or "political correctness" is ridiculous. First off, the level of education required to understand the writings of the Frankfurt School is far above that of any of the participants in the debate about "critical race theory," "cultural Marxism," "wokeness," or "political correctness." The argument against the Frankfurt School appears to have become popular through American society's failure to think carefully before speaking or writing. The Frankfurt School had an extremely well-thought-out critique of society -- most pointedly American society, as they wrote their most famous work as German exiles living in El-Ay. They believed in "dialectics," but their pessimism -- post-1940 -- was deep and profound.

Perhaps the Frankfurt School haters don't like the Frankfurt School because the Frankfurt School suggested that the haters' stuff is ineffective crap. The whole cultural complex around Lind, the Republican Party, CPAC, Jordan B. Peterson, Tucker Carlson, and so on, has definitively lost the culture wars. As a cultural power, for instance, Ron DeSantis appears as a mere Fay Wray when considered next to the King Kong that is the Disney Corporation. The Republican Party, moreover, constitutes a slowly-declining portion of the electorate over time (though one can imagine that Joe Biden will -- if anything -- make Republicans of us all merely for the sake of getting him out of the White House). What the Frankfurt School haters have succeeded in doing, however, is in getting control of a certain portion of government, especially in the Great Plains and the states which once belonged to the Confederacy, and spreading chaos from there. Laws against abortion, for example, are powerful agencies of chaos.

We might argue that the Frankfurt School showed that what you see in the Frankfurt School haters is irrational, in the same way in which Republican boilerplate propaganda appears totally unhinged. But neither Horkheimer nor Adorno suggested that there was any way they could change the irrationality of society, which they thought was going to increase over time.

Perhaps the Frankfurt School haters would in fact agree with the Frankfurt School's critique of society if they knew what it was. Of course, for such people really to know what the Frankfurt School critique was, they'd have to read up on it, which is unlikely to happen. At any rate, Lind's concepts have been subjected to a great game of "Telephone" in which Lind once said one thing, but after the message was communicated from person to person several times over, the message itself changed. What hasn't changed, however, at least since Reagan lived in the White House, is the cultish nature of the present-day Republican Party. This is obvious in the personality of someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it goes way beyond her.