Recall Barack Obama’s presidential campaign statement at University of Missouri campus, Columbia, Missouri, October 30, 2008: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Mr. Obama is descriptive of an almost perfect example of a man who embodies the cumulative effect of America’s slow but sure march to political collectivism. Contrary to much opinion, however, he is the result not the cause of our present peril because politics is only a manifestation of a deeper and more severe cultural malaise.
A culture is a national identity encompassing education, arts and entertainment, science, health, leisure activities, friend and family relationships, ambitions . . . everything that constitutes the shared core values of any country. Individualism is the common denominator linking all aspects of our own cultural distinctiveness; it is what makes The United States “America.” Sovereignty of the individual is America’s exceptionalism; therefore, it is the erosion of that concept that warrants concern because the underlying disease invading the mental health of our populace has spread not from government directly but from the injection of deleterious ideas into our individualistic social-economic system.
Proposals suggesting the “transformation” — destruction — of Western civilization’s hallmark values of reason, responsibility, honesty, productivity, independence, and individual worth were first put forth in America by several intellectuals at the dawn of the 20th century.
H. G. Wells tickled popular readers’ imaginations with his Sci-fi novels (e.g., “The War of the Worlds,” 1898), but his 1901 nonfiction tome “Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought” is what took hold intellectually. Transporting Darwin’s biological theory of natural selection of the fittest into the practical-political human realm, he advanced the idea of an elite class to be in control of the world via global governance.
Herbert Croly’s 1909 book “The Promise of American Life” became a blueprint for the liberal “progressive” movement that thrives today in the Democrat Party’s “Economic Equality” scheme. The United States is framed as a constitutional republic to be governed equally by laws and not by men, but Croly introduced the notion of redistribution of wealth to achieve that “equality” not before the law but twisted to mean equality-as-the-same-as-other-men’s social status. He shrewdly entwined the “everyone-is-equal-in-a-democracy” idea with a federal concentration of executive power that would do the re-distributing of wealth to make everyone “equal.”
Such books demonstrate that an ideological undercurrent demeaning American individualistic values and love of independence was a beneath-the-surface influence very early on. Theodore Roosevelt started the Progressive Party in 1912, a movement that initiated the political expression of these intellectual persuasions into the expansion of administrative power in the federal government along with a host of “changes” for transformation. By introducing anti-individualism concepts, Wells, Croly, and other like-minded writers (aided by Roosevelt, et al) primed our unsuspecting population to accept the decisive tidal wave that broke upon our shores to instigate the deliberate “transformation” of the entire culture by The Frankfurt School.
Established after the 1917 Russian Revolution, this Marxist group realized that Europe was not ready for a similar revolt; plus, Hitler was on the rise in Germany: fascism not communism. Then, too, most members were Jewish, so they decided to sell their ideological wares in America and came to a welcoming Columbia University in 1935.
The Frankfurt School imports were quick to grasp that by infiltrating popular culture they could inject their intellectual poison into the very soul of Americans and accomplish collectivist goals via mental manipulation. Hollywood, the entertainment industry, the news media, and university/public education were specifically targeted for “re-education programs,” i.e., propaganda. A whole-society-oriented “critical theory” method of criticizing and then altering belief systems through subtle psychological methods were utilized, effectively dislodging an individual’s deep-rooted value system and creating a void into which seeds of unrest and victimization could be sown. University “Studies” programs instituted and remain academia’s breeding grounds for instilling tribal-mentality-group-think in college students. Classes titled “African” studies, “Women’s” studies, “Gender” studies, etc. bind birth or lifestyle commonalities into political-group-movements attacking America’s individualism. New definitions of “equal rights” demanded a “leveling of the playing field” and instituted the Political Correctness that muzzles Americans today. These strategies paved the way for Chicago’s notoriously successful Saul Alinsky, whose Community Organizing tactics pitting the “Haves” and the “Have-nots” against each other would directly mold the careers of both former-President Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Frankfurt School team worked patiently and passionately to consciously construct and carry out a diabolical scheme to destroy the Enlightenment values of Western civilization, starting with the internal dumbing-and-dimming-down of the shining beacon that is America.
At present, all of these “transformers” have finally succeeded in turning leftist liberals into true progressives, the most lethal of all collectivist systems because it combines communism and fascism but sounds so forward looking — “progressive” — that it fools the foolish into its ranks (such as pseudo-intellectuals like Barbra Streisand, George Clooney, et al.), while it is led officially by cartoon-character politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The Frankfurt School scholars must be smiling in their graves at university “Free Speech Zones” and “Hate speech” used as a euphemism for criticism.
It is not too late. . .yet. . .for freedom loving Americans to stand against this now fearsome tide of tyranny that would engulf our entire population, nearly half of which is already underwater (students and Bernie Sanders supporters). It is vital to remember that times of crisis are also times of opportunity, but Right can win over Might only if true Americans take the moral high ground and become active against the current flood of indoctrinating policies in schools and lawless government regulations from the federal level right on down to municipal “management.” If we are informed and act prudently but decisively, we can redirect America’s path from destruction and darkness toward rebirth and light by holding firm to our founding values and speaking out against (and voting out) those who would enslave us.
This is a clarion call: if “average” Americans do not speak up and fight for their rights, our greatest free country in the history of humankind will surely be “transformed” into an elite-powered dictatorship for all.
[Originally Published at Newsmax]
Alexandra is the founding president of American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART), a NYC-based 501 (C) (3) nonprofit educational foundation devoted to a rebirth of beauty and life-affirming values in all of the fine arts.
