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The revolution, he told his young followers, would not be achieved through LSD or guerrilla warfare. They had failed at the ballot box and failed in the streets, but there was still one thin glimmer of hope: returning to the origins of the critical theories—the universities—and rebuilding the revolution from the ground up.
--America’s Cultural Revolution, by Christopher Rufo, describing Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy late in life.
Christopher Rufo’s book has been an eye-opener for me. Admittedly, I am only partially into the book, but the early part of the book focuses on the romantic ideas of Herbert Marcuse to initiate armed revolution against the U.S. He achieved his fame (and some would say notoriety) through his books and while teaching at San Diego State University. Eventually his reputation spread far and wide.
The New Left, which wanted to carry out this revolution and was exemplified by the Weathermen, created havoc in their time:
During a fifteen-month stretch between 1969 and 1970 alone, police recorded 4,330 bombings that resulted in 43 deaths. The militants, drawing on Che Guevara’s foco theory of revolution, which held that focused action could inspire a broader movement, believed they were on the cusp of a national revolt.
I knew about the Weathermen, but didn’t know the degree of political violence they were engaged in. I was especially intrigued to learn why the organization essentially disappeared.
Rufo explains in his book that there were a number of important factors which played a role in halting the effectiveness of the Weathermen. First, the public, rather than joining forces with them, felt angry and alienated. Richard Nixon called on the law enforcement agencies to step up, and they killed or captured several of the members; the rest of them went into deep hiding. The movement had been decimated and discouraged by these events.
But we have seen in recent years that their revolution has been taken up by the universities, where Marcuse recommended that they rebuild their forces. Unfortunately, we have to wonder if there’s much resolve to stop them. The universities continue to teach Marxist propaganda, evading restrictions that governors have tried to enact. The government and corporations have followed in their footsteps. Open borders draw gangs and cartels who indulge in lawlessness. Crime is rampant across the country. And the very people who should be protecting us—our President, the FBI, the Secretary of Homeland Security, local law enforcement and the border patrol—either have their hands tied or look the other way. The state of the nation is turbulent and angry.
Revolution might be on the brink of breaking out. Herbert Marcuse would be proud.
Discussion (59)
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Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
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Is another history of these crazy times when I was too young to really remember. It boggles the mind to see how much political violence there was and reminds me that to the Left, violence is just another tool in their arsenal.
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That sounds like another great book, David. What I like about Rufo's book is that it was just published last year; the inroads the Left has made are alarming.
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Bill Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground, participated in the bombings of the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol, the HQ of the NYPD, etc. He then had a career as a professor at University of Illinois - Chicago. He also infamously helped launch Barack Obama's political career.
Looks like Marcuse was right.
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Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were, or maybe still are, married. She was the head of SDS, a radical leftist organization closely associated with the Weathermen, headed by Bill Ayers. Later in their lives, they were "Mahjong buddies" with another valued Chicago couple named Obama. Both Ayers and Dohrn made the FBI's top 10 most wanted list at the height of their careers.
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Days of Rage is older ('15) but when I read it in '21, I was astounded at how much political violence was used in the late 60s and early 70s and how it mapped directly to what we saw from '16 through '21. As a person who was in the low single digits during the time covered in these books and thus do not have direct memory of most of it (I vaguely remember Patty Hearst and the SLA but honestly, that is about all I directly remember), at first I was like...how was this tolerated, but then after watching the "Summer of Fire" in '20 I start to really understand it. Political violence is a tool of the Left just like get-out-the-vote efforts and campaign ads. For them, using violence is accepted and expected to get their way. They have a remarkable ability to see political violence as a dial that can be turned up and down at a whim to achieve their goals. The Right has traditionally seen Political Violence as an on/off switch that goes from nothing to full-on revolution, though that is changing as can be seen by the Jan 6th riot. It's one reason that the story that the Left and the Media (but I repeat myself) proclaimed that this was an insurrection was so easily accepted by so many initially. For most on the Right, the idea of Political Violence is that "break glass in case of emergency" option that releases the whirlwind that sweeps everything away both good and bad, and thus truly is the last resort. While there may have been a vanishingly small number of people on J6 who thought that there was about to be a revolution, it appears, to me at least, that this was a group of people who felt that their voices were being ignored and wanted redress of their grievances with the gov't (the entire purpose of the First Amendment after all, and part of the Declaration of Independence). There are some real parallels between the Colonials and the J6 people in that being able to bring your concerns to the gov't only to have them ignored isn't a redress of grievances. A gov't that refuses to listen to the concerns of the people isn't a representative gov't. Since our form of gov't derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, it begs the question, how does a citizen withdraw their consent?
I was listening to the Three Whiskey Happy Hour and recently they have been having some fantastic discussions. One is about the Right to Revolution which is one of the core founding principles of the United States. Our very gov't is founded on the idea that when the King of England refused to listen to the people, they dissolved his governing of him and formed a new gov't. J6, to me, was similar to the Boston Tea Party in that it was people who felt that the normal channels for their protests were not being heard and they took illegal actions to demonstrate to the rulers that they were not happy with the situation and that things needed to change. In both cases, the rulers ignored their pleas, and in the former, it led to the War of Independence, what will J6 lead to?
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