As Westerners, we stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants. A brief summary of the ideas that formed America's political institutions will support our project to discover new ones.

Before America's founding fathers were Americans, they were colonial Englishmen. They were heavily influenced by the enlightenment and British empiricist philosophy, which were very much en vogue in the mid to late eighteenth century. Free-market mercantilism was the latest fashion in economic thought in the Anglophone world, as pioneered by Scottish economist Adam Smith and later expanded upon by the cold utilitarianism of Britain's John Stuart Mill. To Smith, the free market was no mere playground for a wealthy elite, but a conduit for the very will of God[1]. America's founding fathers found Smith's economic ideas very compelling. Modern American conservatives still share Smith's quasi-religious faith in free-market economics.

At different times in history, Smith and Mill both were employed by the deeply corporatist British East India Company, which benefitted immensely from England's adoption of policies they advocated. England coerced free trade within its empire while erecting strict barriers to trade from the outside. No small number of wars were fought in defense of this system, and the British East India Company raked in historic profits for a considerable period of time. Uncoincidentally, its founders and early shareholders were all tied to the British crown[2]. It was the same company whose tea was destroyed to great fanfare in Boston Harbor in 1773, yet whose flag ironically inspired America's stars and stripes.

One of Smith and Mill's greatest intellectual influences was Scottish skeptic David Hume, also a pioneer of hardline atheism. Hume proposed a radical form of empiricism, arguing that we can never truly know our ideas are true, and so the best we can do is to observe that certain apparent causes reliably produce certain apparent outcomes. In Hume's system, no sure inferences can be made from them, though. Hume's extreme skepticism lends itself well to the scientific method, and every atheist who believes that only science can provide the answers to mankind's great questions are infected by his thinking, even if unknowingly.

Smith's free-market economics, paired with the political theories of Britain's arch-individualist John Locke, formed the bedrock of early America's governing philosophy. Thomas Jefferson enthroned Americas founding principles in the Declaration of Independence, borrowing heavily from Locke's Second Treatise on Government. Text from the Second Treatise will ring familiar to Americans. For instance, Locke asserted that "...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions,"[3] which sounds quite a lot like "all men are created equal and independent ...they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The common thread throughout the thought of Smith, Mill, Locke, and Hume is a healthy dose of skepticism regarding the ability to know that knowledge is true. Locke argued that government ought to maximize individual freedom, since no man has sufficient knowledge to dictate the behavior of another. His approach has some value, but it is limited in comparison to later thinkers. In opposition to the British empiricists, continental European idealist philosophers argued that knowledge of empirical data also can be mistaken and that the harmonious beauty of logical structure that is found through rationality is a more reliable form of knowledge. German philosopher Immanuel Kant resolved the erstwhile dispute between empiricism and idealism by categorizing the various situations that call for one approach to knowledge or the other. Later romanticist thinkers would build on Kant's integration of these two forms of knowledge and uncover an even higher third form of knowledge, based on the love of beauty.

The American state was founded on Lockean ideas to a great extent, and they have remained prominent in conservative political thought to the present day[4]. Locke's preference for individual rights affected an agreeably just judicial system, but the Lockean state also reinforces hyper-individualism, which creates many negative outcomes. Foremost among them, a society of self-interested individuals is cut off from the spiritual experience of belonging that can happen only within authentic community. Such people feel isolated, family bonds are weak, and loyalty to one's broader kin group is practically nonexistent. There is little to no truly shared experience, even within small towns, and much less so in the sprawling megalopolises that claim the majority of the population today. The logical conclusion of hyper-individualism is the world we now inhabit. In this isolated environment, an authentically patriotic movement is impossible, and for that reason, our new nationalism will seek to overcome it.

As early America matured and discovered its own identity outside the womb of English colonialism, the nation approached many philosophical questions pragmatically. Over time, the first and perhaps only uniquely American school of philosophical thought came to be known as pragmatism. Pragmatism was born in America in the late nineteenth century, founded by Charles Sanders Peirce, lecturer at John Hopkins University, and William James, who pioneered the study of psychology in America and was brother to the famous novelist Henry James. Pragmatism also heavily influenced the socialist architect of our national education system, John Dewey, and it remains influential today. One of America's best-known philosophers in the late twentieth century, pragmatist Richard Rorty, offered "neopragmatism" as a way to bridge the gap between the empiricism of the Anglophone world and the idealism of continental Europe.

Not unlike empiricism, pragmatism is skeptical of mankind's ability to form a complete understanding of the world, especially through wholistic philosophical systems. In order to operate in a world of unsure knowledge, pragmatists evaluate the validity of truth claims by their outcomes. Pragmatism measures the truth value of an idea by its usefulness in the physical world, rather than applying any epistemic theory of mental perception. James summarizes pragmatism thus: "you can say of it then either that 'it is useful because it is true' or that 'it is true because it is useful'. Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing." [5] In other words, the truth of a proposition should not be judged by whether it comports with a theoretical system of knowledge and its incidental rational arguments, as theories of knowledge and even rational arguments can be prone to error. According to pragmatism, the truth of a proposition should be judged by whether or not it bears out in the real world.

For example, pragmatists would not try to determine if an acorn grows an oak tree by asking fundamental questions about the nature of the acorn, or its end-purpose as a certain type of tree in nature. Instead, they judge the proposition by whether or not an acorn observably grows an oak tree in the real world. As a philosophy focused on physical outcomes and usefulness, rather than theory, pragmatism lends itself to ethical commitments that are flexible and utilitarian. In a pragmatic ethical system, the ends can justify the means. Pragmatism developed into a sufficiently elegant solution to difficult epistemic questions to put them to bed in the minds of many Americans. Mill would have approved.

Taking a pragmatic approach to economic policy has blessed America with a very prosperous, generally free-market economy. Pragmatic foreign policy takes the world as it is, rather than according to ideals we may wish to superimpose. Such thinking has resulted in the "realist" approach to international affairs that is perfectly compatible with the global American empire as it is practiced. Capitalism and realism are pragmatically useful in terms of their immediate outcomes, but their ethical ambivalence has rendered them incapable of withstanding the postmodern onslaught that questions the empirical objectivity on which they stand.

The pragmatists do have a point, in so far as the outcomes of actions certainly should factor into their ethical status, but outcomes cannot be the only consideration. In the case of economic policy, a just society cannot operate on purely utilitarian principles. Economic analysis is a powerful tool for predicting the outcomes of policy decisions, but it is morally agnostic. A healthy society must determine its ethical commitments first and then use utilitarian economic analysis to determine the best course of action to create an ethical outcome. For example, a good and just society likely would value the standard of living of the poorest 10% of the population above overall wealth. This society would have a poorer top 10%, but it would have better social cohesion and a much clearer conscience than one in which the poor are left to suffer in ghettoes. As a pragmatic country, America often has prioritized overall wealth, and especially the international power it generates, above the quality of life of those at the bottom.

Despite the pragmatic appeal of capitalism, not all philosophical pragmatists were capitalists. John Dewey's pragmatism primarily influenced in the American education system, but he was himself a committed socialist. Dewey and millions of other Americans seriously flirted with a socialist vision of America, powerfully so after the turn of the nineteenth century, but their advances were always turned away by the dominating hyper-individualism of America's founding reliance on British-style empiricism. Whatever their usefulness, neither pragmatism nor empiricism offers a clear way to adjudicate between competing claims to more complex truths, nor morality. How can one say that a particular outcome, or the means to achieve it, is better or worse, when we can never be sure of our knowledge and the resulting ethical commitments? This challenge ought to inspire us to discover a more solid basis for ethical commitments. Rather than rising to this considerable challenge, however, the postmodern West has shrunk back into moral relativism. In this way, postmodernism can be seen as the logical conclusion of enlightenment empiricism. Our modern America is, in effect, postmodern.

Postmodernism is a broad term with many diverse strands of thought. At its dark heart is a critique of modernism, the body of thought built on enlightenment empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism and rationalism certainly have their limits, but postmodernism throws rational the baby out with the rationalist bathwater. Rationality is extremely effective at dealing with inherently rational questions, and empirical analysis is effective for questions about the material world. For instance, to build a safe bridge, the tensile strength of steel is more important to consider than its aesthetic appeal. Empiricism and rationalism are well-adapted to scientific and mathematical questions such as these, but there is much more to human life than the math and science of the material world.

There is significant historical and biological evidence that meaningful religious experience requires the rational left brain to give way to the more intuitive right hemisphere[6]. All people have a deep spiritual longing for the intuitive mode of being, whether they cultivate it or not. Somewhat ironically, there is a degree of agreement with this observation in postmodernism. Postmodernism rightly critiques the tendency of modernism to discount the intuitive mind in favor of science and reason, but their philosophical project does not find remedy in the appreciation of the higher truths that are perceived by the spirit. Instead, postmodernism esteems irrationality, which is to say, nonsense. Rather than attacking the overreliance on empirical inquiry and rationalist interpretations, they attack rationality, itself. Postmodern academics dress up these silly assertions in pseudointellectual terminology to obscure their true shallowness. At its core, postmodernism seeks to destroy the bedrock of the rational world rather than to compliment it with a healthy appreciation for more poetic or spiritual approaches to knowledge.

The postmodern assault on rationality and the meaning of words has infected many young minds, but it has remained somewhat confined to the circus that has become American academia. Its impact is less pronounced in the political discourse, save for the odd politician claiming to "know my truth" and that he never touched that page boy. A more explicitly political school of thought that shares many far-left characteristics with postmodernism and has affected America profoundly is neo-Marxist "critical theory".

Critical theory, sometimes referred to as "cultural Marxism" or "neo-Marxism," is the intellectual battleplan for the multifront war on all things good and pure. The beliefs of the modern left will seem unpredictable and chaotic until their neo-Marxist core is understood. While these ideas dominate American left, and they also have extracted endless compromises from the American right, they are not native to our shores. Neo-Marxism immigrated to America in 1935 when the Frankfurt School was expelled from Germany and landed in New York, folding into Columbia's New School for Social Research. The New School was co-founded by John Dewey 16 years prior, as a safe harbor for progressivism. From its inception, it was bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation, whose namesake had longstanding ties to European banking interests and Old World nobility[7]. If neo-Marxist ideas are, as some believe, a tool to undermine and control American values and political systems, the relations of its financiers provide an important clue as to who is pulling society's strings and to what end.

The official name of the Frankfurt School was the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. It was founded in 1923 as a vehicle for World War I's victorious Entente powers to subvert traditional German culture and prevent it from seriously threatening England's eternal goal of maintaining the balance of power in continental Europe. Historically, that goal has translated into taking down whichever of France, Germany, or Spain grew too powerful to control. The Normans never have forgotten the lessons of their own victory in 1066. The more immediate prelude to the birth of the Frankfurt School was the shocking degree of violence and destruction of the first world war, the likes of which the world had never known. It was a time of great change, as many of the noble houses of Europe saw their power and privilege dramatically reduced or eliminated entirely.

It is well known that the insidious Bolshevik Revolution precipitated Russia's withdrawal from the war and likewise ended the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanov dynasty, but few are aware that imperial Germany suffered a suspiciously similar fate. As the war became increasingly unwinnable for the Central Powers in late 1918, Germany was rocked by internal social unrest and labor strikes, exacerbating the extreme war shortages, and even starvation, caused by the British blockade. The resulting disruptions in industrial output hastened Germany's inevitable defeat. After hostilities ended, but before official treaties could be signed, communist radicals Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebnecht, and Kurt Eisner launched the German Revolution of 1918-1919. It was the lowest point for the fortunes of the German people since the Thirty Years' War destroyed almost half of the population 300 years prior. Germany's communist civil wars ended the 500-year reign of the Prussian Hohenzollerns, and they paved the way for the liberal democratic Weimar Republic. The Entente powers took full advantage of this now decapitated Germany to coerce it into signing the ruinous Versailles treaty, which led directly to World War II.

Weimar is notorious today for its economic disasters and extreme monetary inflation. It was under Weimar that a loaf of bread came to cost a wheelbarrow full of Deutschmarks, but Weimar's libertine cultural experiments debased public morality in at least equal measure. By some accounts, large sections of Berlin became open-air brothels, as prostitution was deregulated and promoted. Around the same time, Magnus Hirschfeld and Arthur Kronfeld founded the Institute for Sexology, which operated from 1919 to 1933, pioneering the social acceptance of sex work, abortion, gay rights, transsexuality, and other perversions. Such "research" would have been unthinkable when the still-warm corpse of imperial German culture was alive, but it will be quite familiar to the modern reader. Hirschfeld invented the new terminology that we still use to normalize degeneracy, including the terms "transvestite" and "transexual". The world's first gender reassignment surgery was performed at the institute. As the Institute for Sexology degraded the German body, the Frankfurt School degraded its mind.

The Frankfurt School was to produce the intellectual ammunition that would obliterate Germany's traditional culture of orderliness and neatness. From among the ruins, the neo-Marxists used Germany as a petri dish to conduct infectious experiments on the culture. Every society has its deviants and radicals, and there are three primary ways of dealing with them. Various forms of repression are the most common response across cultures, but it was especially popular in many of the German-speaking states. Alternatively, some cultures tolerate or even celebrate them, which is much more fashionable, currently. But a third way is to recognize that such people suffer from a maladaptation to life and the world, and therefore one ought to care for them compassionately and to try to treat their problems, while also preventing them from upsetting the physical and psychological health of the collective. This third way is clearly the most humane and moral option, but Weimar Germany chose instead to celebrate them. The Frankfurt School gave a pseudointellectual patina to these destructive perversions to hide the true motives of the left and prevent a full revolt.

That the Frankfurt School was born in Frankfurt is a significant fact but one that is easily overlooked. The city of Frankfurt has a peculiar history as a center of extraordinary banking power and liberal ideas in Europe. Today it is only the eighteenth largest city in the European Union by population, yet historically it has been a nexus of banking power on par with Paris and London[8]. In fact, when the Bavarian government discovered Illuminist Adam Weishaupt's plans to foment revolution in France in 1784, it was to Frankfurt he fled, taking refuge in the home of the Schiff banking family[9]. And it was in this city that the Frankfurt School was founded at Goethe University Frankfurt. By hosting these intellectual parasites, the university did a great disservice to its namesake, the great German Romanticist poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Because the Frankfurt School's ideas are still very influential, and Marxism is generally unpopular in America, many neo-Marxists eschew the label of Marxism. But it is an apt name, once understood in the context of the development of Marxist thought. The goal of the neo-Marxist project was to salvage whatever aspects of Marxism could be saved after Karl Marx's economic and historical prophesies failed to come true. Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels believed that economic development was a deterministic science, as predictable and absolute as Newtonian physics. According to their model, communism was the stage of economic development that inevitably would follow industrial capitalism. Marxist historic and economic determinism rests on the atheistic belief that there is no reality beyond the material world, and everything that occurs proceeds from inviolable laws. Just as biological evolution is determined scientifically, the thinking goes, mankind's social and economic development also must evolve according to deterministic principles. This view, of course, denies that human beings possess free will, which has no place in the materialist universe.

Marx foretold that in the capitalist stage of evolution, money and capital would become concentrated in so few hands that the underclass of alienated workers eventually would grow so large and oppressed that they would be inspired to take all of society's resources by force, seize control of government and industry, and implement the ten tenets of the Communist Manifesto, initiating the socialist stage. Then, by some arcane magic, this all-powerful socialist state would wither away to become a stateless communist utopia, in which there would be no government and no money. The concept is about as coherent as the late work of John Lennon. Despite the absurd utopianism of these ideas, it is notable that the modern American state has enacted all or part of Marx's ten tenets.

By the end of the first world war, it was patently clear that Marx was wrong to predict that socialism inevitably would follow capitalism. Socialist revolutions failed to take power in any of the developed industrial countries, namely America, Britain, France, and Germany. Russia was the only country to fall to socialism, and it was the most feudal, least industrialized society among the major powers. The Marxist order of operations proceeded from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism. Instead, the only socialist state arose directly from feudalism. The working poor in industrialized countries proved less prone to the manipulations of the self-anointed socialist intelligentsia, in contrast to those of comparatively backwards Russia. Marx's core economic philosophy was thus repudiated by history. Regardless, the few pure Marxists who remain still prattle on about the inevitability of socialism.

Marxism was not a purely economic project, though, and his thinking had other utility for the left. Marx's critique of "capitalist" culture included art, religion, and the traditional family structure. In addition to his well-known aversions to sobriety and gainful employment, Karl Marx also despised healthy families. In this case, Marx practiced what he preached. Marx had an illegitimate son with his maid, whom he secretly abandoned to the care of Engels. On his deathbed, Engels confessed his role in obscuring the unfortunate boy's origins. In response, Marx's youngest daughter committed suicide in shame, the first of two of his daughters to do so[10]. It is no surprise, then, that Marx and his followers disdained the traditional family, deriding it as oppressive and capitalistic. To this day, Marxists and neo-Marxists wish to eliminate the patriarchal family unit in favor of a chaotic communal approach, ignoring the fact that genetic relations tend to care about and provide for each other better than anyone else. The Marxist "it takes a village" approach to family life would later inspire a book of that very title by Hilary Clinton's ghost writer.

The nuclear family was only one of many non-economic objects of Marx's ire. Practically every aspect of culture and social life was deemed capitalistic in nature and scheduled for termination. It was these cultural aspects of the Marxist project that the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School sought to revive. They coped with the historical repudiation of Marxism by reasoning that the cultural impediments to socialism needed to be removed before the inglorious utopia could come to fruition. Thus the Frankfurt School neo-Marxists downplayed Marx's economic thought, which relied heavily on the badly outdated labor theory of value, a perhaps ironic tenet of Adam Smith's economics. To the neo-Marxists, the insufferable bulwarks of capitalism are the family, the church, academia, art, and all other institutions of traditional culture.

Rather than reforming these institutions, they sought to destroy them. The neo-Marxist prescription for Western civilization was thus nihilistic. The family was to be undermined by public immorality, indecency, and in later years the proliferation of pornography[11]. The church would be undermined by the promulgation atheism and liberal theology. The latter was financed heavily by the Rockefeller Foundation's investments in seminaries the world over. Academia would be undermined by the infamous "march through the institutions". The march now is largely complete, again with the help of the Rockefeller foundation, as well as the Ford foundation, and many others. The remaining aspects of culture were undermined by a multipronged war on aesthetics, our intuitive appreciation for beauty. The Frankfurt School made considerable progress toward each of these goals in interwar Germany. What could not be accomplished through reason and debate was enforced violently by the leftwing terrorist organization, Antifaschistische Aktion, namesake of today's Antifa. Modern leftists excuse the obvious excesses of these assaults on decency by the eventual rise of Adolph Hitler, a blank check that seems never to run out of political capital to draw on.

Neo-Marxist ideas were quite welcome in Weimar Germany, but the National Socialist regime proved to be less hospitable. Because the majority of the leaders of the Frankfurt School were Jewish, and all of them were radical leftists, Germany had become a very dangerous place for them by 1933. They briefly moved to Switzerland before settling in America in 1935, where they were received warmly at Columbia University. From Columbia, they went on to exercise enormous influence on American culture and political thought, and their influence persists to this day.

The subversive ideas of the Frankfurt School crept first into American academia. Academic journal editors, department chairs, and administrative leadership increasingly fell in line with this new body of thought. Rechristened the New School for Social Research, its astronomical growth was bolstered by massive financial backing from the Rockefeller Foundation and others of the sort. Over time, funding would come from the seemingly bottomless pockets of the Federal Reserve Bank as well, via the American government. These ideas are now so pervasive that academics dare not transgress any radical leftist orthodoxy, no matter how absurd, for fear of reprisal.

The tentacles of neo-Marxism also extended into media and advertising through the powerful influence of the godfather of Madison Avenue, Edward Bernays. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, whom the Frankfurt School adored from its inception. Whatever his contributions to psychology, Freud had a perverse obsession with sexuality, believing it to be the root of all human behavior. Bernays's core advertising strategy was built on Freudian hypersexuality, setting the stage for the modern mass sexualization of American culture. These obsessions have culminated in a complete lack of public decency, which we now endure. But this dehumanizing sexualization is not intended merely to sell products. From the perspective of those who seek to control the population, and to do so with our passive consent, the primary purpose of hypersexualization is to transform the population into highly manipulable individual consumers of ideas and pre-packaged identities.[12]

As sinister as their attacks on public decency and the family are, the neo-Marxist assault on aesthetics destroys true art with equal vigor. One of the Frankfurt school's leading thinkers, Theodor Adorno, created a new branch of music theory dedicated to discordance[13]. Adorno came from a family of musicians, but in the typical arrogance of a radical leftist, he found the beauty and tradition of more talented composers to be mundane. Rather than striving to match the achievements of those who came before, Adorno wrote music that was atonal by design and aesthetically displeasing to hear. For some unfathomable reason, many composers went along with it. To this day, offensive postmodern "music" is performed alongside the most sublime symphonies of Beethoven and Mozart. Adorno's deeper motivations were known only to him, but the effect of his atonal music theory was the erosion of a great pillar of pride and unity for Western Civilization. Many among the modern American left would agree with the neo-Marxist idea that the transcendent experience of truly great art is inherently "bourgeois." In this case, the radical left not only pulls for the maggots; they are the maggots.

Neo-Marxism remains the guiding light of leftism in America and the world over. The recent Black Lives Matter political operation advanced the left's long-running strategic goal of undermining the artistic self-confidence of the West. During the BLM riots, enterprising academics from Oxford and elsewhere determined that classical music was "problematic," including its use of purportedly colonialist musical notation[14]. Classical music connects Western man with a spiritual experience of his own history and destiny, and all civilized cultures have come to appreciate its ineffable beauty. But because its forms are Western in origin, they must be denounced, erased, and forgotten for the leftist project to succeed.

Neo-Marxism is a strange aberration in the history of America's guiding principles, entirely foreign to who we are as a people. Yet, it remains predominant in many spheres of culture. Neo-Marxist radical leftism is in many ways, the polar opposite of our new form of patriotic nationalism, but it is by no means our only opposition.

Next: The Inevitable Failure of Conservatism

[1] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011

[2] Eustace Mullins, The World Order, 1984

[3] John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1689

[4] Mark Henrie, Understanding Traditional Conservatism, 2005

[5] William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907 (1975), p. 98

[6] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976

[7] Eustace Mullins, The World Order, 1984

[8] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966

[9] From AC Hitchcock SoS, but need a better source

[10] Socialism Research Center, The Heartland Institute, Remembering Karl Marx's Abandoned Son, the First Victim of Communism, 2020

[11] E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi, 2000

[12] Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, 2002

[13] Moya Mason, Theodor Adorno's Theory of Music and its Social Implications, 2013

[14] Craig Simpson, Musical notation branded 'colonialist' by Oxford professor hoping to 'decolonise' the curriculum, The Telegraph, 2021, Accessed July 2023