The conventional definition of patriotism is love for and loyalty to one’s country. A 2023 survey published in the Wall Street Journal found that only 38% of respondents thought patriotism was very important to them, down sharply from 70% when that question was first asked in 1998.While 59% of seniors 65 and older feel that way today, only 23% of adults under 30 do.
I vividly remember America’s 200th birthday in 1976. Patriotic activities and celebrations abounded across the country leading up to a grand finale on the glorious Bicentennial Day. What has doused that American spirit? The American left.
It’s been a long slog but I’d trace its roots to the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of what came to be called the “New Left.” Violent political demonstrations from Vietnam War protestors and bombings from the radical Weather Underground were a fertile breeding ground. A major ideological inspiration for the New Left was Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher in what was called the Frankfurt School in the 1920s, a collection of Marxist academics and intellectuals who sought to take Karl Marx’s theories to a higher level and perfect its imperfections.
Rejecting Marx’s pathway to socialist utopia, Marcuse believed the “proletariat” would not rise up in revolt to overturn capitalism. He later emigrated to the U.S., and while teaching at Harvard in the 1950s told leftist students to forsake violence and instead engage in a “long march through the institutions,” especially educational institutions which could be a refuge for radicals. Many of his followers later became the tenured left and two generations of their ideological spawn have now fully taken over higher education, fulfilling Marcuse’s dream.
Another legacy of the Frankfurt School is “critical theory,” the application of Marxist social justice and identity politics to all kinds of things like the law, history, race, economics, and culture. One of its early outposts in the U.S. was at Harvard Law School within a department of radical leftist professors spewing Critical Legal Studies. So called “critical thinking” instruction in K-12 with a distinct leftist spin, and Critical Race Theory are offspring. Beware when you hear the term “critical” attached to almost anything.
The left’s poisoning of American history is blatant propaganda. To be sure, slavery is anywhere an abomination but why single out the U.S.? It’s as old as the dawn of humankind and has been ubiquitous. In 6800 B.C., Mesopotamia’s captured enemies were enslaved as laborers. There was slavery 5,000 years ago in Egypt, and later in Ancient Athens, throughout the Roman empire, Asia, in Europe and Africa. American Indians enslaved captured whites and captives from other tribes. It should be noted that that U.S. and Britain were among the first nations to abolish slavery it in the 19th century. America paid for that with treasure and blood, our Civil War taking the lives of 620,000 soldiers on both sides and ending slavery here.
Yes, slavery is a stain on our history, as it is on most every nation in the world at some time in their history. History can’t be reversed, nor should it be forgotten. But the full measure of our country must also consider its virtues and achievements which are second to none in so many fields of human endeavor. Just one of which was our dominant role among our allies in saving the free world from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II.
The left denigrates our history. They sanctimoniously and unfairly judge the culture and standards of those who lived long ago in far different eras through a modern lens, thereby condemning our ancestors. And they undermine American patriotism. The method to their madness is to create a mentality of guilt and self-loathing about who we were and who we are in order to dismantle our foundations, values and culture, to replace it with their socialist paradise on Earth.
The ultimate death blow was laid out in a 1966 article in the far-left “Nation” magazine by Richard Clowen and Francis Fox Piven, a duo of Marxist revolutionaries at the Columbia University School of Social Work. Their strategy to create a new socialist state, here, was to overwhelm the system by creating crises only the government could solve with enormous spending programs, the weight of which would bring on fiscal collapse. In the aftermath, a popular revolution would follow led by Marxist activists in the name of the poor and legions of dependents on government handouts.
In 1996, that may have seemed crazy. Today, with our national debt at $34 trillion and climbing who’s going to stop it? Certainly not Joe Biden and progressive Democrats.
Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com.
