Breitbart on Marcuse:
[Marcuse] really hit his stride in 1955, however, with the publication of Eros and Civilization. The book essentially made Wilhelm Reich’s case that sexual liberation was the best counter to the psychological ills of society. Marcuse preferred a society of “polymorphous perversity,”–which is Just what it sounds like–people having sex every which way, with whatever,
It wasn’t so much the freshness of Marcuse’s message that made the difference (it wasn’t a fresh message) as his timing–the kids brought up with Fromm and Freud and Spock were coming of age. The misplaced guilt of the Greatest Generation brought forth a new generation free to embrace Marcuse. While similar philosophies of sex had failed in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, by the 1950s the men and women who had suffered through the Great Depression and fought in World War II were determined to raise privileged kids who would never have to actually fight for their country or work for their food. The result was a group of kids ready and able to participate in the sexual revolution promised by the Frankfurt School. Marcuse excused sexual promiscuity as the fulfillment of the need for the people to rise up against Western civilization and to free themselves of the sexual repression it created. Not a hard sell for teenagers.
It was no wonder that in a very real sense, his followers believed they were doing something special when they made love, not war (a slogan attributed to Marcuse himself)–they were using their sexual energy to bind the world together rather than destroy it, as sexual repression would do. While Marcuse may not have been the most important intellectual force behind the Frankfurt School, he was its most devious and effective marketer. The advertising adage “Sex sells” was applied to selling a generation on the idea that their parents’ values and ideals were repressive and evil. (Where geographically did Marcuse come to this nihilistic understanding? The picturesque cliffs of La Jolla, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.)
Marcuse carried his “critical theory” in another destructive direction as well: while repeating the Marxist trope that the workers of the world would eventually unite–he saw the third world’s “anti-colonial” movements as evidence that Marx was right–he recognized that in the United States there would be no such uprising by the working class. He therefore needed a different set of interest groups to tear down capitalism using his critical theory. And he found those groups in the racial, ethnic, and sexual groups that hated the old order. These victimized interest groups rightly opposed all the beauties of Western civilization "with all the defiance, and the hatred, and the joy of [p. 121] rebellious victims, defining their own humanity against the definitions of the masters."19
Marcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all “victim groups” in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse’s theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer’s critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement–Gender Studies, LGBT/“Queer” Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these “Blank Studies” brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies–except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are “exploitative” and “bad.”
Marcuse was widely accepted in the 1960s by the student movement–so much so that students in Paris during the 1968 uprising marched with banners reading “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.”
But he still wasn’t winning in America. Marcuse bad a big, big problem: America’s founding ideology is still far sexier than that of the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility. Even if Marcuse was promising unending sex, drugs, and rock and roll, most Americans were more interested in living in liberty with their families, in a society that values virtue and hard work rather than promiscuity and decadence.
So Marcuse had to find a way to defy the opposition. He found it in what he termed “repressive tolerance.” In 1965, Marcuse wrote an essay by that name in which he argued that tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish–and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down. “[T]he realization of the objective of tolerance,” he wrote, “would call for in tolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” America was experiencing a “repressive tolerance” under which dissenting viewpoints were stifled; what it needed was " partisan tolerance.20 In other words, if you disagreed with Marcuse, you should be forcefully shut up, according to Marcuse. This made political debate very convenient for him and his allies. This totalitarianism is now standard practice on college campuses, in the media, and in Hollywood–the very places that the Frankfurt School sought to control. The First Amendment–the same instrument that allowed the Frankfurt School to land a ll our shores and express their pernicious ideas in freedom–was now curtailed by those who had benefitted from it. Marcuse called for a tyranny [p. 122] of the minority, since the tyranny of the majority could not be overcome without a total shutdown.
There’s another name for Marcuse’s “partisan tolerance”: Political Correctness.
In fact, the term “political correctness” came from one of Marcuse’s buddies: Mao Tse-tung. …
David Horowitz on Marcuse:
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.
