[Bret L]

Review of Thomas Wheatland's The Frankfurt School in Exile, Part II:
The Critique of Mass Culture

Kevin MacDonald

October 28, 2009

"One of Wheatland’s strengths is his rich documentation of the strong connections between the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School. Both groups were predominantly Jewish (the first generation Frankfurt School exclusively so), and both were associated with the anti-Stalinist left. However, they had somewhat different theoretical perspectives and overlapping associations. It is common among intellectual historians (e.g., Eric P. Kaufmann) to view the New York Intellectuals as the most important group advocating cosmopolitan racial ideology in the post-World War II era.

Prominent New York Intellectuals include the art critic Clement
Greenberg, writer and critic Robert Warshow, philosopher Sidney Hook,
Partisan Review editors William Phillips and Philip Rahv, and several
forerunners of the neoconservative movement, especially Irving Kristol
and Norman Podhoretz. Wheatland shows that the some of the second-
generation New York Intellectuals (e.g., Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and
Nathan Glazer) were well acquainted with the work of the Frankfurt
School. Howe and Glazer had minor roles in the notorious Studies in
Prejudice series discussed in Part I of this review.

The Critique of Mass Culture

These linkages and cross-fertilization were especially apparent in the
analysis of culture. The Frankfurt School viewed contemporary Western
societies of the 1930s and '40s as “soft authoritarianism” — a phrase
also used by Tom Sunic in describing contemporary Western societies.
From their point of view, the basic problem was to explain the lack of
revolutionary fervor in Western societies. Quite clearly, orthodox
Marxism was wrong: The predicted revolution hadn't happened.

This lack of fervor was particularly problematic because there was a
considerable degree of personal freedom in Western societies:
Theoretically at least, people had the freedom to be revolutionary,
but instead they passively accepted the evils of capitalism.

These intellectuals developed the theory that control had shifted from
obvious forms of external control (like gulags in the USSR) to control
via the media — “secondary emanations of authority … namely
newspapers, advertising, radio, etc.” (p. 79). Because the media was
an expression of "late capitalism," it prevented people from seeing
the world as good leftists should, and as a result they were unable to
“break the cycle of injustice and domination” (p. 79).

Early on Erich Fromm gathered survey data showing that working class
Germans were not interested in revolution but were passive and prone
to escapism. (Incidentally, Fromm seems to have been the originator of
the most important ideas of the Frankfurt School. As noted in Part I
of this review, he also came up with the disastrous idea of explaining
ethnocentrism among Whites as due to family pathology.) The passivity
and escapism of the working class were viewed as due to the failure of
the culture, and particularly the media, to properly foment
revolutionary consciousness. For example, during the 1930s, Herbert
Marcuse wrote attacking “all bourgeois culture for its escapism,
repression, and concealment of capitalism’s harsh realities” (p. 160).
As discussed extensively by Elizabeth Whitcombe in TOO, the Frankfurt
School criticized culture because it upheld a reactionary status quo.

Eventually, there was a general understanding among both the Frankfurt
School and the New York Intellectuals that mass culture — whether in
the USSR (both of these groups were anti-Stalinist), National
Socialist Germany, or bourgeois United States — promoted conformism
and escape from harsh political realities; it “offered false pleasure,
reaffirmed the status quo, and promoted a pervasive conformity that
stripped the masses of their individuality and subjectivity” (p. 175).
Obviously this fits well with the Frankfurt School ideas on the
family: Again, there is a plea for individualists free from family and
ethnic ties and in favor of non-conformity with the status quo.

These intellectuals promoted modernism in art at least partly because
of its compatibility with expressive individualism, but also because
they believed that it effectively opposed the culture of capitalism.
Modernism was also seen as capable of alienating people from modern
Western societies. As Elizabeth Whitcombe points out, “Adorno’s desire
for a socialist revolution led him to favor Modernist music that left
the listener feeling unsatisfied and dislocated — music that
consciously avoided harmony and predictability.”

To be modern is to be alienated from the society of capitalism. The
alienation of the New York Intellectuals is legendary. Norman
Podhoretz was famously asked by a New Yorker editor in the 1950s
“whether there was a special typewriter key at Partisan Review with
the word ‘alienation’ on a single key.”

In short, they were trying to make all of America as alienated as they
were.

Both the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School had nothing
but disdain for traditional art. In Adorno’s words, they sought “the
end of the order that bore the sonata” — the end of European high
culture. And if the audience failed to appreciate modernism, it was
their fault. For example, Adorno wrote that the failure of the
audience to appreciate Schoenberg “pointed to widespread alienation
and irrationalism that were pervasive in society” (p. 29). Only the
revolution would make people psychologically whole again and in tune
with a genuine aesthetic sense.

The view that modernism would ultimately usher in the revolution
eventually faded when it became obvious that it would never be popular
with the great mass of people. The view that, say, Schoenberg, could
ever have become popular with the great mass of people can only be
described as amazingly naïve. We just aren't wired that way.

(Incidentally, it's intriguing that Tim Page, a major promoter of
avant garde music [e.g., Philip Glass], has acknowledged that he has
Asperger Syndrome, an autistic disorder associated with lack of social
awareness or interest in people, combined with obsessive, repetitive,
and [most importantly] idiosyncratic non-social interests. He is wired
differently. Unfortunately for the modernists, very few people are
wired like Tim Page. The fascinating question is how someone with a
psychiatric disorder that puts him outside normal human interests and
desires manages to get into a position to influence the cultural
tastes of the wider public.)

But of course realistic ideas about natural human penchants and
limitations have never been a strong suit of the intellectual left,
dedicated as they are to the proposition that people can be shaped
into virtually anything.

In reading the views of the Frankfurt School on the importance of
cultural control, it struck me that those of us attempting to preserve
the traditional peoples and culture of the West are in a similar
situation to the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals.
Their complaints about the American culture of the 1930s through the
1950s are mirror images of the complaints that we have now.

Whereas the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School felt
alienated from the culture of the West, now we are the ones with
feelings of alienation from the culture that has been so strongly
influenced by these Jewish intellectual movements.



We are dismayed at the failure of the media to properly address White
interests or even to allow expressions of White identity to be seen or
heard in the mainstream media.

We are well aware that when there is a failure of media self-
censorship (e.g., when media critic William Cash described the Jewish
media elite as “culturally nihilist” in the Spectator in 1994), there
are powerful campaigns to punish the guilty parties and to get them
to recant.

Just as the Frankfurt School theorized, the West has come under the
control of soft authoritarianism. But now the shoe is on the other
foot: Power resides in the soft totalitarianism of the multi-cultural,
multi-racial, anti-White left.

These Jewish intellectual movements decried the passivity, escapism,
and conformity of American culture. Those of us who are White
advocates are horrified that the vast majority of White people
passively accept media messages filled with distorted images of Whites
and their history. We are appalled that so many Whites are far more
interested in escapist entertainment, ranging from sporting events to
sci-fi thrillers, than they care about the future of their people. And
we are dismayed by the conformity of the great mass of Whites people
who are terrified of being called a racist or in any way violating the
current taboos of political correctness. We deplore the pathetic
conformists striving to uphold the rules of a society deeply hostile
to their own long term interests.

Rather than see a culture controlled by the "late capitalist" media,”
White advocates see the culture of the West as controlled by a hostile
media that advocates multiculturalism, the displacement of Whites, and
the culture of Western suicide. And many of us believe that a very
large influence on this culture stems not only from the influence of
the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals, but also from
Jewish ownership and production of the media.

There is thus a common ground between these Jewish intellectual
movements and those of us attempting to preserve the traditional
people and culture of the West. We all agree in the importance of
media control. As I concluded in an article describing the psychology
of cultural control, paraphrasing a Bill Clinton campaign slogan:
“It’s the culture, stupid.”

Control of the media is critical. If there were strong media messages
advocating White identity and the legitimacy of White interests,
things would turn around rather dramatically and rather quickly. This
is because the psychological power behind a movement of ethnic defense
is far greater than the motivation that can be mustered for a multi-
racial, multi-ethnic communist revolution.

Such media messages would be able to tap into the natural wellspring
of ethnic feeling. There is a deep psychological attachment to one’s
people and culture — even among us individualistic White folks — that
can easily motivate a mass movement of ethnic defense.

Often these feelings are implicit and unconscious rather than explicit
and conscious. They manifest themselves in moving to neighborhoods
where their children can attend school with other Whites. Or they
manifest themselves in activities where they are able to enjoy the
company and camaraderie of others like themselves.

But these feelings are nevertheless real. And they are potentially
very powerful. The revolution needed to reverse the cultural tides of
the last decades would therefore be far easier to pull off than the
communist revolution so ardently desired by the Frankfurt School.

If there is one central message from the post-World War II world,
ethnicity and race matter. As Jerry Z. Muller has shown, there has
been a strong trend toward ethnically based nations over the last 150
years, not only in the territorial adjustments in Europe following
World War II, but around the world.

It’s interesting that these leftist critics of the media completely
ignored the actual mechanisms of cultural control that were in place
during the period when they were writing. The controls on culture had
little if anything to do with the culture of "late capitalism."
Instead, the traditional Anglo-American culture managed to retain its
primacy during this period because of political activism on the part
of Anglos in defense of their culture, often quite self-consciously
directed against Jewish influence in the media.

Jewish influence on the media, especially Hollywood movies, weighed
heavily on the minds of people like Henry Ford early in the 20th
century. Public outrage at the content of Hollywood movies led to more
or less successful controls on the moral and political content of
movies until around the mid-1960s. The following passage from Chapter
2 of Separation and Its Discontents discusses this American
Kulturkampf (references omitted but are available here):

During the McCarthy era, there was concern that the entertainment
industry would influence American culture by, in the words of an overt
anti-Semite, Congressman John R. Rankin of Mississippi, “insidiously
trying to spread subversive propaganda, poison the minds of your
children, distort the history of our country and discredit
Christianity.”

The great majority of those stigmatized by the Un-American Activities
Committee of the House of Representatives (HUAC) were Jews, many of
them in the entertainment industry. A belief that “Jewish Hollywood”
was promoting subversive ideas, including leftist political beliefs,
was a common component of anti-Semitism in the post-World War II
period, and indeed the push for the HUAC investigation was led by such
well-known anti-Semites as Gerald L. K. Smith and Congressman Rankin.
For example, Smith stated that “there is a general belief that Russian
Jews control too much of Hollywood propaganda and they are trying to
popularize Russian Communism in America through that instrumentality.
Personally I believe that is the case.”

The substantive basis of the opinion of Rankin and others was that
beginning in the 1930s Hollywood screenwriters were predominantly
Jewish and politically liberal or radical — a general association that
has been typical of Jewish intellectual history in the 20th century.
The American Communist Party (CPUSA), which was under Soviet control
during the period, sent V. J. Jerome and Stanley Lawrence, both Jews,
to Hollywood to organize the writers and take advantage of their
political sentiments. Jerome argued that “agitprop propaganda was
actually better drama because Marxists better understood the forces
that shaped human beings, and could therefore write better
characters.” Writers responded by self-consciously viewing themselves
as contributing to “the Cause” by their script writing. “But as much
as the Hollywood Communist party was a writers’ party, it was
also . . . a Jewish party. (Indeed, to be the former meant to be the
latter as well).”

Nevertheless, during this period the radical writers were able to have
little influence on the ultimate product, although there is good
evidence that they did their best to influence movie content in the
direction of their political views. Their failure was at least partly
because of pressures brought to bear on Hollywood by conservative,
predominantly [non-Jewish] political forces, resulting in a great deal
of self-censorship by the movie industry. The Motion Picture Producers
and Distributors of America, headed by Will H. Hays, was created in
1922 in response to movements in over thirty state legislatures to
enact strict censorship laws, and the Production Code Administration,
headed by Joseph I. Breen, was launched in response to a campaign by
the Catholic Legion of Decency. The result was that producers were
forced to develop projects “along the lines of a standard Hollywood
genre while steering clear of both the Hays and Breen offices and the
radical writer who may have been assigned to the project.”

In addition, the HUAC investigations of the late 1940s and early 1950s
and the active campaigning of religious (Legion of Decency, Knights of
Columbus), patriotic (Daughters of the American Revolution [DAR]), and
educational (Parents and Teachers Association) groups influenced movie
content well into the 1950s, including a great many anticommunist
films made as a rather direct response to the HUAC investigations. The
result was, in the words of one studio executive, that “I now read
scripts through the eyes of the DAR, whereas formerly I read them
through the eyes of my boss.” Particular mention should be made of the
American Legion, described as “the prime mover” in attempting to
eradicate “Communist influence” in the movie industry during the
1950s. The list of sixty-six movie personalities said to be associated
with communism published in the American Legion Magazine caused panic
in Hollywood and a prolonged series of investigations, firings, and
blacklistings.

The point here is that there were strong controls emanating from
political conservatives and from religious and cultural
traditionalists that kept a lid on Jewish influence on culture through
the 1950s — doubtless much to the chagrin of the Frankfurt School and
the New York Intellectuals who prided themselves in their alienation
from that culture.

This all ended when the culture of the left finally triumphed in the
1960s. At that point, when the multi-cultural, anti-White left had
seized the high ground in the cultural wars, they had far less reason
to engage in the types of cultural criticism so apparent in the
writings of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals.
Hollywood and the rest of the American media were unleashed, and it
must have became apparent to many on the left that passivity, escapism
and (leftist) conformity weren't so bad after all.

Indeed, as Elizabeth Whitcombe suggests, there seems to have been some
realization among the Frankfurt School intellectuals in the late 1940s
and 1950s that popular culture could be utilized to “manipulate the
masses in the directions that they wanted — toward liberal
cosmopolitanism, breaking down racial barriers, and promoting Black
cultural icons.”

What would have surprised these intellectuals is that the culture of
the left could co-exist with capitalism. As Marxists at heart, at
least for most of their existence, they felt that it was necessary to
destroy capitalism in order to usher in a revolution in culture that
would affect the great mass of people.

But it turns out that capitalism was not the problem they faced any
more than it is the problem White advocates face now. It is certainly
true that capitalism requires control by a racially conscious
political and intellectual elite. In the absence of such controls,
capitalists may, for example, advocate mass immigration because of the
purely economic benefits for individual capitalists.

Political control over capitalism was certainly apparent during the
period from 1924–1965 when America reaffirmed that it was a nation of
Europeans. Capitalism remained on a strong leash — a leash motivated
by a deep desire for ethnic defense on the part of the great majority
of European Americans.

Even when the immigration law was finally changed in 1965, business
interests were notable for their absence. Far more important was
Jewish activism motivated ultimately by perceptions of ethnic self-
interest.

All of the great changes in culture over the last 100 years occurred
within the capitalist system. Capitalism co-existed with immigration
restriction from 1924–1965, and it co-exists with the open borders
reality of recent decades.

Ethnic interests and cultural traditionalism were far more important
than capitalism in defending the ethnic and cultural integrity of
pre-1965 America. And the ethnic interests of the nascent Jewish elite
were far more important than capitalism in undermining the traditional
people and culture of America in the post-1965 era.

As Eric P. Kaufmann shows, the best explanation for the enormous shift
in culture is that the left was able to seize the elite institutions
of society — the media, the universities, and the political culture.
In my view, this would not have happened without the intellectual and
political activism of Jewish intellectual and political activists who
not only identified as Jews, but also saw their work as advancing
specifically Jewish interests. Certainly the Frankfurt School and the
New York Intellectuals played important roles in this revolution.

The result of the countercultural revolution is that those who detest
the cosmopolitan culture erected by these movements are now on the
sidelines, feeling alienated, and decrying the passivity, escapism,
and conformity of the contemporary culture of Western suicide. "

End of Part 2 of 3.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...eatlandII.html