Daniel Henninger, "Hillary Talks About 'It': Would she defend Rush Limbaugh's speech rights against the left?" The Wall Street Journal, editorial, Oct. 11, 2007 (full editorial)

Who threw the first stone in these media-driven bloodlettings? Good question. But to my knowledge the right has no equivalent to "repressive tolerance," the aggressive theory of scorched-earth political argument laid out in the hothouse years of the 1960s by the late left-wing political philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Just last November, in an admiring essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the left polemicist Stanley Fish aptly summed up Marcuse's assertion that "liberal" notions of tolerance for political speech should be overturned. [copy of Fish's Dec. 8, 2006 Chronicle essay; book he discusses]
The rationale for this notion is that standard tolerance is rigged against the left. In practice, tolerance extends only to the ideas and beliefs of the powerful, while it shuts out ideas on behalf of the weak or "marginalized"--the poor, minorities, women and the rest. Mr. Fish says liberals fail to see "the dark side of their favorite virtue."
Prof. Fish has an alternative to traditions of tolerance, and to anyone awash in American politics today it will sound familiar: "That is to say, and Marcuse says it, anything the right does is bad and should not be tolerated; anything the left does is good and should be welcomed." This would explain the emotional intensity and animosity in politics now: The other side no longer deserves minimal respect.
It's not enough to disagree with conservative viewpoints; one has to undermine and delegitimize them. Mock them. Put them beyond the pale. Incidentally, Marcuse, Fish and others on the left who want to "withdraw" tolerance from the speech and ideas of their opponents count centrist Democrats among them. That is what happened to Joe Lieberman.

---

Digital technology now fixes someone's random remark forever in the ozone amber of the Web or YouTube. It's easy to make anything anyone may say, such as "macaca," a weeks-long campaign to diminish or even destroy the sayer. Wherever the nonbeliever Marcuse is now, this tool would have put him in heaven. I find it putting us closer than I'd like to be to an American "Lives of Others," media monitors always listening for the vulnerable spoken word.'
Sen. Clinton this week told the Post, "I intend to build a centrist coalition." That may depend on how one defines centrist. For her progressive bloggers at Media Matters the center on tolerating speech likely falls closer to Prof. Marcuse than John Locke. So which is it? This summer Sen. Clinton said she was a founder of Media Matters, and this week she said she was a centrist. That doesn't compute. Perhaps in a year we'll know which side she's on.

This is good evidence of the continuing relevance of Herbert's notion of repressive tolerance.

David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006), xxxvii f:

Herbert Marcuse, a professor at Brandeis and a veteran of the famed "Frankfurt School" of European Marxism, was another figure whose writings flourished with the new radical presence on university faculties. His famous essay on "Repressive Tolerance," written in 1965, is a justification for the suppression of conservative speech and access to cultural platforms on the grounds that the views of right-wing intellectuals reflect the rule of an oppressive and already dominant social class. Marcuse identified "revolutionary tolerance" as "tolerance that enlarged the range and content of freedom." Revolutionary tolerance [p. xxxvii] could not be neutral towards rival viewpoints. It had to be "partisan" on behalf of a radical cause and "intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo." This was a transparent prescription for not hiring academic candidates with conservative views. In this view, a blacklist was a potential tool of "liberation."

According to Marcuse, normal tolerance "granted to the Right as well as the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity ... actually protects the machinery of discrimination." By this logic, repression of conservative viewpoints was a progressive duty. Evaluating conservative academic candidates on their merits, without regard to their political and social opinions, was to support discrimination and oppression in the society at large.

Marcuse's "dialectical argument" exerted a seminal influence in academic circles in the 1970s and provided a powerful justification for blacklisting conservatives in the name of equality and freedom[56] The same argument would also justify the exclusion of conservative texts from academic reading lists, which is an all too common practice on liberal arts campuses.

(see also: longer excerpt from Horowitz's The Professors with introduction by Harold Marcuse)

http://www.liberallunacy.net/dossiers/HerbertMarcuse.htm
by "Beckwith copyright © 2005" [accessed March 12, 2006, waybackmachine has pages since March 2005, but not Herbert's]
offers the following assessment of Herbert (I find that the first two paragraphs actually show a good understanding of Herbert's arguments, while the third goes off the deep end):

Herbert Marcuse believed that people are not free because they function within systems such as the economy. If people were really free, they would be free from these systems. For example, people would only have to work as little as possible to provide for their needs, not an established amount of time. He states that only when people are free from these systems can they determine what they really need or want. Because we are not yet free, we have "false needs". These needs are exemplified by the range of choices which we are offered in our economy. However, each of these choices reinforces the social norms that exist. Because each choice has the same result (reinforcement of social norms), there is no real choice.

Marcuse contended that highly advanced societies are welfare/warfare states. Welfare states restrict freedom because they limit free time, access to necessary goods and services, and citizen's ability to realize true self-determination. The warfare state hinders a true analysis of society because it keeps people focused on fighting the "enemy" instead of focused on internal social problems.

Marcuse aregued in his book "Eros and Civilization," that by freeing sex from any restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the reality principle and create a society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined the phrase, "Make love, not war")[note by Harold Marcuse: Herbert did not coin this phrase, although he certainly endorsed and used it]. Marcuse also argued for what he called "liberating tolerance," which he defined as tolerance for all ideas coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from the Right. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief "guru" of the New Left, and he injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America's state ideology.
[note by Harold Marcuse: if it were only so easy to inject cultural Marxism ... but is it really the state ideology of G.W. Bush's United States?]

Kors, Alan Charles and Silverglate, Harvey A., The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 415 pages. [source is again the 'more free speech for white males on campus' site, www.namebase.org]

"Alan Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties attorney in Boston, compiled this comprehensive account of what's been happening on American campuses over the last 15 years. It seems that the First Amendment is out of favor, and campus administrators have instituted kangaroo courts to enforce speech codes that protect the sensitivities of women, minorities, and gays. This has led to numerous prosecutions of straight white males -- both faculty and students -- for speech or expressive behavior that would have been considered legally protected on campuses just 25 years ago. Even today, as soon as one steps off campus, courts are consistently striking down these repressive speech codes. The problem is that students don't have the resources to pursue their rights off campus, which can take years of effort. This book is peppered with dozens of case histories and incidents on dozens of campuses, which are then juxtaposed with First Amendment case law in the real world (off-campus). What's going on here? The authors trace the problem back to Marcuse's theory of "repressive tolerance," which turned into "progressive intolerance." Not likely; it's rather a case of quotas and multiculturalism gone amuck. The "diversity administrators" on campus are buzzword thugs who know little of Marcuse or the 1960s -- sometimes they seem barely even literate."

Bill Lind, "The Origins of Political Correctness: An Accuracy in Academia Address."
Variations of this speech have been delivered to various AIA conferences including the 2000 Conservative University at American University

And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.
Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute.
...
One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of "polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do it," and "You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war." [note by Harold Marcuse: I am fairly sure Herbert did not coin this phrase, but if he did, power to him!] Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s."

March 23, 2002 [guestbook entry on this site: marcuse.org]:

Name: A defender of Freedom and Liberty, as spelled out inthe Constitution of the United States
From: The United States
LinkIn: Read "Oppressive Tolerance". Was shocked at the hypocracy and search google; found this site.
Website: www.freerepublic.com
Comments: Marcuse was a fascist. He supported an extreme ideology that, simply put, promoted his own thought, and wished to stiffle any an all opposition. Read on:
In their recent book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses, Professor Alan Charles Kors of the University of Pennsylvania and civil liberties attorney Harvey A. Silverglate trace the recent phenomenon of campus speech codes to 1960s Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In “Repressive Tolerance,” a 1965 essay [full text], Marcuse wrote that free expression is actually “repressive.” By his logic, the powerful and wealthy elite keeps the great bulk of the population “manipulated and indoctrinated” so that they “parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters.” In this environment, tolerance of all views serves to entrench the status quo power structure.
“Liberating tolerance,” Marcuse wrote, would consist of “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” Assailing the “sacred liberalistic principle of equality for `the other side,” Marcuse advocated “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.” After all, Marcuse opined, “there are issues where . . . there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense.”
Kors and Silvergate observe that while Marcusian logic has been rejected by the “real world,” it has enveloped the academy. They point to the rise of speech codes on campus. But Marcuse's ideas are even more pervasive in universities: Marcusian logic has invaded the curricula and educational programs of American universities.
This is scary. Thank God he didn't have the power to enforce his views on the rest of us. Funny, too, that here in the USA, he had freedom of speech to deplore freedom of speach!

Was Herbert a capitalist Reagan Republican?

March 27, 2002 [guestbook entry at marcuse.org]
Name: A Concerned Citizen
Comments: Herbert Marcuse was a fraud. When he died he left a $40 million estate that included $10 million in General Dynamics stock. He was no socialist. Socialists are fools. Herbie was a good Reagan Republican.

April 23, 2002 (link to guestbook page)
Name: Peter Marcuse, Herbert's son.
Comments: Regarding the March 27 guestbook entry by “A Concerned Citizen,” my father's estate was worth about 1 percent of that amount [$400,000]. There was no General Dynamics stock in it. Part of what he did leave has gone to help in the publishing of material from his archive in Frankfurt, in the series that is now coming out with Routledge, edited by Doug Kellner. (see Papers page; Nachgelassene Schriften page)
And as far as the claim that Herbert was a Reagan Republican goes, the documentary film *Herbert’s Hippopotamus* has three minutes of wonderful footage from and about governor Reagan’s May 1969 press conference about UCSD and Herbert, starting at minute 25:00 in the 56- minute film. It’s available on the internet at:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/media/herbieshippo.ram
Reagan, who was trying to silence Herbert, certainly didn’t count Herbert among those supporting his agenda!
Where do people get these ideas? It would be interesting to know the source.

I learned that the origin of this – only whites can be racist - philosophy is the socialist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was a German – Jewish immigrant who came to the United States in 1934. He taught at Columbia University and Brandeis University among others. His teachings were quite the fad at one time.
Marcuse was very dogmatic. A fanatical classist, racist, sexist, and politicist, he once said, “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
Marcuse proffered a similar concept about free speech. He felt that free speech only served to reinforce the status quo since the Establishment had better access to the media then progressive groups. For this reason Marcuse believed that whites in America should not have the same rights of free speech as minorities because that would just ensure the maintenance of the status quo.
There was no satisfying Marcuse. Economic parity, even if undeserved, was not a benefit to society. As far as Marcuse was concerned it just confirmed the hegemony of the Establishment. He was someone who was obsessed with power. Just as Marxists believe that economics drives people’s behavior, Marcuse seems to believe that political power is the determinant.
This philosophy of Marcuse has now evolved among academics so that free speech should be denied those who speak of things that “ethical people” would hate. As the intellectual rationale for this tyranny, liberals state three tenets. The first is that government neutrality in speech is a myth since hate speech and pornography endorse racism and sexism. Second, politically powerful groups are granted exceptions to free speech such as copyright laws. Third, resources are unequally allocated so only the powerful are heard.
There are several fallacies here. First, copyright laws have nothing to do with political discourse. They concern protecting the theft of intellectual property in order to foster creativity. Second, the First Amendment restricts the government’s activities, not those of private citizens. Therefore pornography and hate speech are neither endorsed nor prohibited by the government. Third, the only inequality is that the mainstream media is biased in favor of people like Marcuse.
In Marcuse’s ideas one can notice the origin of the modern double standard that exists in the media about conservative speech. The claim of hate speech directed against conservative speakers has nothing to do with hate per se. It does have to do with the fact that conservative speech may represent the views of the majority. Liberals believe this perspective should not be permitted to be expressed. That is why liberals can be allowed their diatribes accusing conservatives of horrible things and that is not considered hate speech. Yet if a conservative criticizes – even mildly – a liberal it is hate speech.
This is the essence of modern American liberalism. A doctrine that states that only liberals are capable of judging what is good and what is bad. The rest of us are just wandering in a moral wilderness. Therefore only liberals should be heard.

James Atticus Bowden, September 8, 2004: "Why They Hated the RNC Convention," at:
http://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=bowdenja&date=040908
James Atticus Bowden has specialized in inter-disciplinary long range 'futures' studies for over a decade. He is employed by a Defense Department contractor. He is a retired United States Army Infantry Officer. He is a 1972 graduate of the United States Military Academy and earned graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University. He holds two elected Republican Party offices in Virginia.

The Liberals-Democrats-Media are upset, still, about Republicans not following the Democrat script for the Republican National Convention. How unfair. The Republican ‘moderates’ (we Conservatives call them ‘Our’ Liberals) didn’t attack the conservative planks in the platform against partial birth abortion and homosexual marriage or, as we see it – for the sanctity of life and marriage. Furthermore, no Conservative boogie man, except the man who is and will be President of the United States of America, spoke in prime time. The Republicans didn’t get, and clearly aren’t following, the memo on Speech Codes from the Liberals-Democrats-Media.

The basic PC speech code is based on Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance”.
[full text of 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance"] Liberals can say anything because they are PC tolerant. Conservatives can say nothing, unless they agree with the Liberals, because they are PC intolerant – by definition. When Liberals call names, it’s okay. When Conservatives name issues and cite records, it’s hate speech. Actually, anything Conservatives say is hate speech.

James Pinkerton, "Saving Marcia Angell From Herself," Sept. 15, 2004, on the site:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/091504D.html ("Where Free Markets Meet Democracy"), in a rant about Angell's book The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to do About It.
James Pinkerton is a Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. A contributor to Fox News and columnist for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times, Pinkerton is also a member of the Board of Contributors for USA Today. He is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and served as an aide in both the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Marxism, by way of the 20th century "Frankfurt School" -- those 20th century Marxists who fused Marx with Freud to explain how people could happily participate in the evil of capitalism. Herbert Marcuse et al. came up with elaborate theories of "alienation," "false consciousness" and "repressive tolerance," all of which sought to explain why a system so rotten could be so resilient.

Daniel Flynn, author of Why the Left Hates America, and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas, interviewed by Chris Banescu (attorney, university professor, and public speaker who manages the conservative site www.OrthodoxNet.com) on the site: http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15282. [found Oct. 4, 2004 on google news, dated Oct. 6, 2004]

Banescu: Which three intellectuals in your book do you think will be the hardest and take the longest to debunk?
Flynn: A lie is easier to counteract than an entire system that embraces dishonesty as an integral part of its program. Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Leo Strauss spawned intellectual movements that incorporate dishonesty as an endorsed method of discourse.
Herbert Marcuse, the guru of the New Left of the 1960s, waged war on language by renaming intolerance as tolerance [full text of 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance"], violence as nonviolence, and dictatorship as democracy. Marcuse’s Newspeak led to the Left rationalizing censorship, acts of violence by radicals, and support of totalitarians like Castro or the Palestinian terrorists—all while claiming to advocate tolerance, non-violence, and democracy.

Flynn's book was also reviewed by Timothy P. Carney on Sept. 28, 2004, on the site:
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=5199:

Just as enlightening as his treatment of the celebrated heroes are his demonstrations that less well-known writers, such as Herbert Marcuse, have provided the foundations of modern leftist orthodoxy despite their unsavory beliefs and evil motives.

Ike Morgan, "Western civilization comes under attack,"
Bangor Daily News, Thursday, February 10, 2005
from the page: http://www.bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=108645&z=35

I have often wondered what goes on in the minds of the "blame America first" crowd. Rarely does a day go by without the left and our local peace studies/centers valiantly attempting to convince us that America is what's wrong with the world.
Where did this vision come from and why is it such an integral part of how the left is defined?
After reading Ilze Petersons' Jan. 15-16 op-ed ("People's inauguration builds on peace, human rights"), I think I may have stumbled on an answer. It seems their infatuation with every misdeed of Western civilization comes from the success of a little known weapon of the left called Critical Theory. What is this innocent sounding "theory"?
Critical Theory is best described by one of its adherents, "... it is the essential destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, morality, sexual restraint, patriotism, convention, and conservatism."
Critical Theory has its roots in the Germany of the 1930s. Several members of the avowed Marxist, Frankfurt School, fled to America soon after the rise of Adolf Hitler. Most notable among them was Herbert Marcuse who would soon become the poster boy and influential leader of the "cultural Marxism" movement.
Marcuse and his cohorts were well aware of the failure of old fashion Marxism as a revolutionary approach to transforming a culture. They realized its emphasis on violence and terror to foment revolution and compel strict obedience from the masses did not work. Instead of violent revolution, cultural Marxism seeks victory through the slow destruction of Western culture. Only then will it be possible to peacefully transform existing values with the new values of revolutionary Marxism.
A long, slow process but one that is highly effective.
With the aid of Columbia University, Marcuse and his cronies established the New Frankfurt School in New York City. Years later the ideas of Critical Theory were prevalent at many of the nation's teachers colleges. The 1960s saw the fruition of Critical Theory where traditional values and morals were discarded en mass without consideration of their worth.
In order for Critical Theory to succeed it was necessary to repeat constantly that Western societies (and especially America) are bastions of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and fascism. Petersons and her colleagues at the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine are willing participants in this repetition.
To be successful the cultural institutions must be infiltrated. Theatre, the arts, schools, universities, seminaries, and newspapers become prime targets and eventually succumb to the invasion. Critical Theory ideas have burrowed so deeply into these institutions that one is rarely aware they exist; a ringing in the ears that eventually goes unnoticed.
The constant drumbeat of negativism has a purpose: to promote "cultural pessimism" among people who enjoy the most freedom and prosperity in the history of civilization. Once this "pessimism" takes hold it is easy to instill new values to replace the old.
The time tested traditions of Western civilization that had provided us with the freest, most tolerant nation on Earth are now replaced by nihilistic notions of free love, abortion, euthanasia, drugs, gay marriage, hatred of religion, and divorce.
Political correctness acts as the protector of the ideas. Those who would dare speak out against the new orthodoxy are branded as fascists, or mentally ill. Words of opposition are treated as hate speech. Mandatory "sensitivity training" attempts to fix those with the "wrong" attitude. Repeated opposition to these ideas brings with it charges of racism, sexism, homophobia and a "presumption of guilt."
If there is any doubt that the Peace & Justice Center has bought into this intellectual model one need only visit its Web page (www.peacectr.org) or peruse its many publications.
It does a masterful job of cloaking its real agenda using the usual seductive vocabulary and terminology of the left ("peace," "social justice," etc.), but the cultural Marxist, anti-American, anti-capitalist fervor is ever present.
Calls for revolution, denigration of the military, tired worn out slogans of Marxism and socialism, repeated references to America as "evil," and of course the obligatory picture of the heavily armed American soldier threatening an innocent citizen, all right out of the Critical Theory play book.
These are not evil people and they have every right to believe and say as they wish. But one has to wonder how such a fatalistic vision survives in their minds.

Ike Morgan is a resident of Exeter.

Date: Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:44 PM +0100
From: "P. Jones" <@yahoo.co.uk>
To: marcuse@history.ucsb.edu
Subject: Herbert Marcuse.

I presume you wrote to me because you would like a response or to engage in dialog about this. I am in fact curious about how people come to hold ideas such as the ones you express.

I seriously doubt that Herbert and the Frankfurt School could have had or will ever have such influence as to bring down Western Civilization As We Know It. Especially when most people have neither read nor heard of what they wrote, and even many of those few who have read their works don't embrace their arguments.

With that said, however, I must say that I would be thrilled if masses of people did indeed read, understand and embrace their analyses. So there is no need for you to feel any pity for me. Nor am I offended that Herbert represents 'True Evil' for you. As far as his ideas about fatherhood (in my case grandfatherhood, actually) go, I have no regrets in that regard.

Your use of words like "Fatherhood," "warped" and "perversion" make me think you see sexual liberation as the main cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and political liberation movements in Asia and third world countries. Is that indeed the case? I would be interested to hear your views at greater length.

sincerely,
Harold Marcuse

• Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (Encounter, 2000). Amazon's Kimball page calls him "one of the Right's most articulate writers."