How the Frankfurt School Brought Us Here

As I’ve often written, the Long March through the Institutions sounds like a Bircher’s fever dream, but it was very real – and stunningly successful. So successful that we see its outcomes all around us, every day. When education has devolved to 12 years of non-stop left-wing indoctrination and when tilty-head judges turn foreign rapists loose with state pensions and taxpayer-funded hotel rooms, that’s the Long March left winning.

How do we know it’s real? Because they told us exactly what they were going to do, and how. In the 1960s, a young German Marxist radical teamed up with an old German Marxist radical (What is it about Germans and destroying Western civilisation?) and laid out the plan of the Long March in plain sight and with admirable and unusual clarity: don’t overthrow capitalism by revolution, simply spend the next couple of generations quietly white-anting all of its institutions. Get into positions of influence, where you can hire only other leftists and indoctrinate the next generation of leftists, who’ll busily recruit each other.

And… here we are.

Ground Zero of this astonishingly successful strategy was the Frankfurt School. Called “The Institute for Social Research”, it was founded in 1923, then fled to Columbia University in 1934, where they were about as grateful to Western civilisation for saving their arses as a Somalian defrauding millions from the US government or a Pakistani prowling the streets of the UK for some underage action.

They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.

They called the project Critical Theory, and the name was the programme. Everything existing was to be criticised and nothing was to be constructed in its place. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason itself – the same reason that produced Bacon, Hume and Newton, the scientific method and the rule of law – contained the seeds of Auschwitz, which is odd, considering that the Nazis were about as far from rational as it was possible to get and that the seeds of the great calamities of the 20th century – communism, fascism, and Nazism – were all in fact poisonous apples falling from the tree of socialism.

But, conveniently ignoring that they were using reason to try and dethrone reason, the Frankfurt School argued that reason had been abused. Reason, taken to its logical end, produced the death camp, which is what apparently passes for reason, in leftist circles.

This was not reformist critique. It was a death sentence passed on the entire civilisation.

Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it.

This is a classic Marxist gambit, as it happens. The Soviets used it with brutal efficiency: Marxism was ‘science’. Only lunatics argue with science. Therefore, anyone who argued against Marxism must be a lunatic. Dialogue became therapy, disagreement became evidence of illness and incarceration became the obvious response.

Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name.” Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

The students who absorbed these texts at Columbia, Berkeley and Yale went on to staff the universities, the media, the NGOs, the content-moderation departments, the bureaucratic machinery and even the churches and judiciary. In places like the UK – the police. They did not implement the programme cynically. They implemented it sincerely, because they had been taught it as high philosophy. That was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced generations of true believers in absolute bollocks.

French Theory then took the same tools and made them fashionable. Foucault rendered the critique of power literary (in between diddling Arab boys). Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity aesthetic. A political programme became a cultural sensibility: something floating in the air rather than written in a manifesto.

By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.

This is why cancel culture does not feel like censorship to the people practicing it. The journalist who demands a speaker be deplatformed genuinely believes she is defending free speech. The HR department that fires the employee for the wrong opinion genuinely believes it is creating an inclusive environment. They have been taught that this is what tolerance means. Marcuse taught them.

Western civilisation rests on three simple pillars: that truth exists and can be approached by reason; that good and evil are real and distinguishable; and that our cultural inheritance is worth passing on. The Frankfurt School attacked all three with deliberate, sophisticated thoroughness. It trained a class that knows only how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build and that sees power relations everywhere and beauty, excellence or obligation nowhere.

The final triumph was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect. Every restraint became oppression. Every act of preservation became reaction. Deconstruction turned into destruction, and became the default setting. From Red Guards burning three-quarters of China’s cultural heritage in the ’70s to Antifa toppling statues in the 2020s, the results are everywhere.

The answer is not another theory.

It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.

Become the thing they most fear: plant a tree whose shade you’ll never rest in.