How many liberals are familiar with the Frankfurt School?

I have a theory.

Most modern liberals really have no clue where their beliefs originally came from. Whether or not they consciously realize it, many of them just soaked them up from the culture around them at a young age, internalized them, and never looked back. And by the time those beliefs were finally subjected to any kind of legitimate cross examination later in life, they already had too many years of emotion tied to them and were unable to change. This is why all the logic and evidence in the world doesn't budge them an inch on any of their positions. In fact, I routinely have discussions with liberals in real life that end with them admitting they cannot refute my points but that they're not changing anyway. This is how attached to their ideology they are.

So the question is; how many liberals are familiar with the Frankfurt School? How many of them know who Max Horkheimer was? Who Herbert Marcuse was? Who Theodor Adorno was? Who Erich Fromm was?

How many of them know who Antonio Gramsci was? How many of them have ever read Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky?

If these are not names that are extremely familiar to you, then I would advise you to do some research on them. Study up on your history. Because these are your roots. Everything you believe today came from these men, these institutions, and these books. And it was all calculated to make you think exactly like you think today. All of these men are dead today, and yet their influence from beyond the grave still impacts the way you view the world.

 

The social programs began with Bismarck.

 

Who knows how many people actually understand where their ideology comes from? It's not like being a liberal is the same around, or really anyone who studies politics in general. They don't necessarily have to read a book to think that people should have an equal chance in the marketplace.

 

Eh, I think most of them just use the talking points to forward their own direct personal and organizational interests, similar to the way biggov uses Keynes to do what it was going to do anyway, spend more money and sell more graft. They are like TV preachers in this respect. Very few of them have any real moral underpinning accompanying, just a desire for a paybump. What gives a chuckle is if the Frankfurt tools could see how their precious Marxist social deconstruction has been taken over by what amounts to a giant sea of establishment bureaucrats with pure capitalist motives, they wouldn't spin in their graves, they would do 30,000 rpm in despair. LOL.

 

Don't dodge. Answer the question honestly. If you don't know these names, it's okay. But you won't know how deep their influence really goes. So it will be easy to make a statement like the one you've just made from a place of naivety.

You have a very valid quote in your signature. That alone should pique your interest about this subject.

 

Stop (*)(*)(*)(*)ing telling us what we believe. We'll tell you what WE believe.

 

OMG..any influence is more positive, productive and humane than the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the brain worm talking points Frank Luntz.

 

I do have an intereset. It's just that I realize that we're not the same people as we were 100 years ago. We have changed a great deal. Yes it is nice for philosophers to have had their own ideas, but that doesn't mean they're going to be relevant now. Do you think that Conservatives know all of their roots as to where their ideology comes from? Or how about any ideology?

 

Yes, they are all greats.

And your point is?

 

You know the Frankfurt school was Jewish right?

 

Sorry to be a grammar Nazi, but you mean hypothesis.

A theory is a body of facts that have been observed and verified.

 

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Time for a little lesson, if you are not too close minded and hateful to learn.

Back in the 16th century a Catholic priest by the name of Martin Luther began to question the church. This led to what is commonly known as the Protestant reformation. This eventually led to a series of wars throughout northern Europe. A characteristic of these skirmishes was that the lord of each principality adopted one Christian sect or another. One of the effects of this was that the hold that the church and various monarchs had over the people began to break down. In all the confusion a loose group of intellectuals who called themselves Philosophes which included the likes of Denis Diderot and Voltaire began to write and influence the way people thought. The movement spread to England where the likes of David Hume, Emanuel Kant, and John Locke added and expanded on the ideas. Then it spread to America where the ideas were picked up injected into American thinking by people such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine.

This whole philosophical movement became known as the Enlightenment. Some of the characteristics of this movement was the rejection of a living god and the rejection of the authority of the clergy, the idea that leaders should be chosen by a vote of the governed, that people have individual rights, that laws should rule rather than the will of the sovereign, that there should be a separation of powers, that change can be made by peaceful means, that all people should be equal under the law, that reason should be valued over superstition&#8230;

Liberalism is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution. Liberals don&#8217;t have to spend day after day listening to talking mouths to figure out what liberalism is like conservatives do to know what conservatism is. Liberalism is America. Social Security is liberalism, the right to a trial and a jury is liberalism, and widespread voting is liberalism. The science that made it possible for you to read this on your computer is liberalism as is the science that allowed us to send probes out into space and to cure diseases here on Earth. Liberalism is why the west doesn't act like the middle east.

This is liberalism; this is where liberalism came from. Conservatism is a reaction to liberalism. Denis Diderot was said to have said the difference the Enlightenment brought was that knowledge was to come from empirical evidence rather than from authority. In this case, like every other argument you make, comes not from empirical evidence but form the authority of the talking mouths that feed you propaganda. That is why you are a conservative and I am a liberal.


PS Why is it that conservatives know so much about Marxists, 'Fascist, and Authoritarianism and dwell on them so much? I read Marx and rejected him a long time ago. Why can't conservatives get him out of their minds? Maybe they protest too much? I think so.

 

Wow.

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They say don't generalize but always generalize about conservatives, which is a double standard, and a special privilege.

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Pure historical revisionism and fallacious use of shorthand terms "liberal" and "conservative" as if they are permanent political historical philosophies.

 

How many wingnuts ever heard of Saul Alinsky before Fox Noise started using him as a code word in 2008.

 

Really?

How about Matthew 5-7?

 

I never cared much about Lefty Loons before 2008. Since one is trying to ruin America however, it's smart to arm yourself with knowledge about your opponent, so this travesty can never happen again.

 

You would have a point if what you claim is happening is true.

But it isn't.

The right wing noise machine promoted Saul Alinsky to its audience and made him a code word.

The OP is plainly ridiculous. He claims that liberals draw their inspiration from folks like Eric Fromm. But these people did all of their writing in the 50's and 60's.

Liberals were around long before that.

Claiming that turning Saul Alinsky's name into a code word for the bobble heads is "arming yourself" is ridiculous.

None of the bobble heads ever read Alinsky, or could tell you who he was.

For that matter, most liberals had forgotten him until his name suddenly started appearing on right wing talk radio and the trash blogs.

Peddling code words isn't intellectual armor. It's just propoganda.

 

Ahem! Darn, it's on the record. Pesky thing, history, eh? Obama TAUGHT the Alinsky methodology.

 

"the record"???

A right wing scream sheet peddling code words four years later is "the record".

 

In the U.S. liberal economic theory stems primarily from Keynes and his followers such as J.K. Galbraith. In terms of policy, the liberals are more influenced by non-Marxian socialism and the various schools of collective action that arose in the U.S. in the mid to late 19th and early 20th century. The same kind ideas that influenced people like Theodore Roosevelt on his social and economic policies.


As to the contribution of the Frankfort school, their major impact has been on the analysis of mass culture and how it has been controlled (in the west) by the corporate capitalist interests.

They rightfully have pointed out how the Nazis effectively used mass media and popular culture in Germany to suppress opposition to their rule. When members of the Frankfort School came to this country in the late 30's and early 40's the quickly saw that U.S. popular culture was used to support the ideology of the large capitalist corporate industrial and financial interests. All one needs to do is to look at the news media and entertainment industry of that era to see the values that the elites wanted to infuse into the general public. Current examples of this manipulation would be the various Koch Bros. financed groups such as the 60 Plus Foundation as a counter to the AARP, ALEC which writes boilerplate legislation to be introduced into state legislatures with the intent of crippling unions, advancing corporate interests over public interests, removing environmental protections and consumer protections.The Federalist Society, The Heartland and Hudson Institutes, the Manhattan Institute, and others which promote their brand of ultra right wing reactionary libertarianism.

The flaw in the basic analysis of the Frankfort School is that the mass culture is not as monolithic as it initially assumed, and as they have come to acknowledge, local grass roots type of movements can and have forced alterations in the overall narrative of mass popular culture. Examples would include the Civil Rights movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement and the occupy movement. Such groups are going to become more active and likely effective over time due to the nature of our modern communications system where people have easy access to the internet and to cell phones.

The analysis of mass culture and how it's influenced and controlled has been useful to both liberal and conservative groups. Anyone who fails to understand that Conservative groups such as the various tea party groups rely just as strongly on the understanding of how public culture is manipulated by various interests or Alinsky's riules for organizing as liberal groups do, is in denial. The Frankford School's big contribution isn't in the realm of policy, but in the realm of understanding how the process of changing public opinion actually works and why.

 

Conservatives get their philosophy from "Classic Liberalism." Classical liberalism is a philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_government .

 

Psssst . . . The Washington Post as a reference source is hardly . . . rightwing; not even in radical leftwing La-la-Land.

 

The majority of it, yes. Which is why it came to America in the first place. When Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, the Frankfurt Schoolers were forced to flee the country. Which brought all their nonsense to our shores.

 

It cant be all nonsense if so many people follow it. I hate communism but I give the communists credit that they are very good at accomplishing goals. My understanding is the Frankfurt schools main goals are 1) destroy our race 2) enact communism. I bet you that multiculturalism and diversity probably come from this school.