Banned Thoughts: Critical Theory
Why are would-be government censors (pretending to be) so interested in "the Frankfurt School"?
Just as people know or feel that advertisements and political platforms must not be necessarily true or right, and yet hear and read them and even let themselves be guided by them, so they accept the traditional values and make them part of their mental equipment.
-Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964)
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (quoted by Adam Morgan on Twitter)
Today, Adam Morgan is the chair of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus, a small group of relatively inexperienced lawmakers who have managed to draw outsized attention to themselves using the same tactics as the national Freedom Caucus. Morgan is also running to unseat fellow Republican William Timmons for US House, at least in part on the platform that Timmons was wrong not to support the US House Freedom Caucus ouster of former speaker McCarthy.
But in February of 2022, Morgan was just a standard freshman South Carolina House member, and after an exchange on Twitter related to his support of a series of “anti-CRT” bills, he agreed to visit my AP Seminar classroom and talked to my students for a very long time on a range of issues, but mostly about school censorship laws based on the Chris Rufo template.
At the time, the onslaught of Heritage and National Association of Scholars legislation was primarily focused on the bogeyman of “Critical Race Theory,” and it was fairly new. My students and I wondered how banning what rightwing legislators were calling “CRT” (and which even Morgan acknowledged might not match the most common academic definitions of Critical Race Theory) wasn’t just viewpoint discrimination, and whether it wasn’t a dangerous precedent for lawmakers to decide which thoughts were “good” and which ones were “bad”.
Morgan had some relatively nuanced thoughts about this— or, at least, much more nuanced than we’re likely to get from his current persona as a firebrand right-winger out to unseat establishment “RINOs” in the “uniparty”— but one thing he said stuck with me over the intervening years, because it seemed like such an obvious fallacy. Morgan claimed the problem with “CRT” in particular— a problem that perhaps even justified banning it while continuing to discuss countless controversial theories and ideologies— was that it derived from “the Frankfurt School,” the right’s preferred name for a group of post-Marxist thinkers at the Institute of Social Research in 1930s Germany.
What is “the Frankfurt School”?
Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.
-Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Ideas are exceedingly powerful.
-Adam Morgan
While Morgan and others have attempted to paint the “School” as some kind of unified attack on Western values (or something), the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out that, “The ‘Frankfurt School’ is not really a school at all. It is a loosely held together tradition constituted by ongoing debates among adherents about how best to define and develop that tradition. This includes disagreements about methods, about how to interpret earlier figures and texts in the tradition, about whether past shifts in focus were advances or dead ends, and about how to respond to new challenges arising from other schools of thought and current social developments.”
What is Morgan’s beef with the “Frankfurt School”?
At one point, Morgan referenced a professor who had testified at one of the hearings against one of the “anti-CRT” bills. The professor, he said, was (understandably) concerned that the bill’s broad language could prevent all discussions relating to the concept of “oppressor versus oppressed” (something Rufo, Morgan, and others have claimed is a central tenet of Critical Theory). He told my students at that point, “That’s one of the fundamental things of Marxism. Most of the world is oppressors versus oppressed. That’s critical theory.”
Without getting into the weirdly reductive explanation Morgan, a proponent of several bills intended to censor CRT, was giving to my public school students during class about another controversial philosophy, I did point out that the bizarre thing about the bill was that it specifically targeted Critical Race Theory. Why was this theory so uniquely dangerous, but not any other? (Of course, Chris Rufo’s answer would be that CRT is a catchall term that stands in for all leftist/ progressive/ liberal thought.)
Morgan first said nothing in the then-current bills prohibited teaching about various concepts, but then acknowledged that an ongoing budget proviso with nearly identical language probably did actually prohibit discussions of CRT: “I think it was geared toward CRT,” he said.
When I shared that many districts had already explicitly prohibited discussions of “CRT” because of the proviso language, Morgan laughed and said it was a good idea for me not to say the words “CRT” in my class. (I responded that “in five years, no one’s going to care about CRT,” and I think I have been proven right. We have now shifted to anti-“wokeness” or some derivation thereof. I also told him, “It seems like the goal is not to take bias out [of the education system] but to put the ‘right’ bias in.”)
In response to the idea that people might not be talking about CRT in five years, Morgan had this to say (click links to jump to specific parts of the video referenced):
I understand that sentiment, but my opinion on that, and I think a lot of people’s opinion on that would be, and maybe everybody’s would be, that ideas are exceedingly powerful. Certain ideas. Certain ideas, you can have a theory, [unintelligible], put it into practice, and suddenly it changes everything.
Morgan argued, and has argued since, that the language banned “indoctrination” of various concepts, not the concepts themselves. A student then asked, “Then why is it [the bill] labelled ‘CRT’?”
Morgan credited the student with making a good point, and acknowledged that some of the bill was about “CRT” and some had “nothing to do with CRT” and that many would argue that at least part of the definition of CRT used as the premise for the bill was inaccurate.
But Morgan pushed back on the idea that CRT was just “an obscure legal theory from the 1970s”:
This bit [he indicated the words “Critical Race Theory” on the bill, which was projected on the board] might be specifically a legal theory from the ‘70s, but actually CLS was the legal theory, uh, from the ‘70s. This [Critical Race Theory] has been expanded to an economic, political science, business, I mean, everywhere, this is in the pop culture now. There have been multiple books written about both this and how it relates to other concepts, such as antiracism1, [unintelligible] and a lot of other things. So, I mean, while it might be something that originated— it didn’t even originate in the ‘70s, it originally originated in the ‘20s with critical theory, and then it was expanded to race from the Frankfurt School…
There are some people who do think we should ban Critical Theory. Critical Theory, from the Frankfurt School… In the 1920s, is, the Frankfurt School’s development, it’s the rebirth of Marxism… [Note: I think he tries to name Heidegger2 at this point, but can’t recall the name, which fair enough!] a bunch of German political scientists who said that, looking at things objectively, we want to come up with a political agenda and figure out how we wanna make it work and advocate to change the world. [Note the framing of a school of Jewish philosophers as a conspiracy to “change the world”. I’m not sure Morgan himself is aware of how much this sounds like earlier anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.] And they came up with that oppressor vs. oppressive system3… the point of it is to look at all systems, all institutions, and figure out where they go wrong.
To deconstruct them, and say, if all of these things are wrong, they need to be completely fundamentally changed or maybe even overthrown, and replaced with new institutions. And that’s all institutions. Critical theory gets applied beyond just race… Critical theory will look at the family structure, the business structure, capitalism [Note: Marcuse, for one, specifically critiqued communist systems, as well], representative forms of government, and all the issues with that, with gerrymandering, with all that stuff. All of these systems, therefore, because the [will] fall apart at some point, they’re Bad, and there might be other superior ones so let’s go ahead and completely change them.
And while it’s an interesting theory to discuss, to come in and say that this is true, it starts hitting on if the education system is completely flawed, why should I trust that? Why should I be in school? Why should I obey my parents? Why should I obey the police? If all of these structures are fundamentally flawed and screwed up?
[Italicized comments are my words, not Morgan’s.]
Protecting the status quo.
The end of Morgan’s argument, especially, is fascinating to me: it suggests that the problem with criticizing current systems is that doing so may lead to questioning and disobeying them. This seems to presume, as I believe Morgan does, that whatever status quo is currently in place is a fundamentally good one. But of course a real philosophical investigation of these issues would start with the question of what that status quo is, and would examine what its impacts are, before drawing conclusions about whether it is worth preserving. (And, fascinatingly, Morgan has built his own career explicitly on the Freedom Caucus narrative that the mainstream Republican Party is, itself, a decrepit institution defending, you guessed it, “the status quo”.)
Marcuse was, to be fair to Morgan, also heavily invested in challenging the status quo, but the status quo he was challenging, specifically in America in the 1960s, was one that included deeply entrenched racism and racial segregation, supported by law. It included widespread disenfranchisement of, and violence against, minority groups. It included a vastly unpopular war in Vietnam. It included, to Marcuse’s obvious horror, a growing acceptance of nuclear armament, potentially leading to the end of life as we know it, as essentially the cost of doing business in the modern world. It would soon include several examples of the United States National Guard shooting peaceful student protesters.
Was it wrong for students then— or now— to question their schools, their government, or even their parents? Perhaps the answer for Morgan is “yes,” but such an opinion alone can’t justify depriving students of First Amendment rights to receive information, or placing gag orders on teachers, or specifically targeting groups of intellectuals or schools of philosophy. And one of Marcuse’s central— and for me most compelling— arguments in One-Dimensional Man is that framing an intellectual question in a way that only allows narrow interpretation of that question is a form of repression4 (an idea which Rufo, Morgan, and others seem to have willfully repackaged as a conservative talking point when they’re criticizing “the Left” or “RINOs”, while also explicitly seeking to outlaw specific ideas and frames of reference).
Morgan might have had some valid critiques of the Frankfurt School as he claimed to understand it, and he tried his best to show my students and I that he was willing to engage with “both sides” of the CRT issue— something I had explicitly challenged him to do on social media, which is the primary reason he was visiting— but he never really justified the focus on CRT in the bills and in his own public comments.
Why target the “Frankfurt School”?
If you’ve followed the anti-CRT panic, as specifically engineered by Chris Rufo, you may have heard the “Frankfurt School,” “Critical Theory,” and perhaps even Marcuse attacked before. Such attacks seem tailor-made to scare a specific part of the American political spectrum. “Frankfurt school,” to some ears, might sound at once elitist (!), foreign (!!), Jewish (!!!), and Leftist (!!!!!). I don’t think it’s an accident that Rufo prefers to attack foreign Jewish intellectuals somewhat directly as a way of attacking American Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter activists indirectly, and it tells you everything about his perceived audience that he has chosen this strategy.
Rufo’s neo-Southern Strategy perhaps builds on the Lee Atwater’s observation that in America, you have to talk about race without talking about it— Atwater memorably recalled that when it became unfashionable to use the N-word and direct attacks on Black Americans, political operatives like Atwater and Nixon switched to talking about more “abstract” signifiers.
Rufo’s version of this strategy is to (haphazardly, and in bad faith) trace contemporary concerns about police brutality and systemic racism back to 1960s radicals who had the same concerns— people like Angela Davis, who was a student of Marcuse— and then to essentially find the first non-Black (and, perhaps not coincidentally, first Jewish) person. Then make the old “fruit of the poison tree” argument to suggest that if Marcus was a Marxist (which, arguably, he was, though he criticized Marx lightly and the Soviets heavily), and Marxism is fundamentally Evil, and Angela Davis studied under Evil Marcuse, etc. etc.
Of course this argument is illogical. It’s a faulty syllogism, and if we took it seriously, it would essentially force us to ban all or most serious thinkers, philosophers, cultural or literary critics, and even historians, from school because every strain of thought can be traced back to something controversial or problematic, whether on the Right, Left, or some other part of the spectrum. As I pointed out to Morgan, one consequence of this kind of reductivism is that we could label all conservative thinkers as fruit of the fascist/ Nazi tree (which is absurd).
Even he seemed to acknowledge this could create problems, but perhaps the allure of political power is more seductive than the allure of intellectual honestly.
Anti-Frankfurt School folks often leave out a central part of the group’s story: the reason many of the mostly Jewish members ended up at Columbia University in the 1930s is that they had to flee Europe to escape the Nazis— who, not incidentally, rose to power on the strength of conspiracy theories about secret cabals of powerful Jews, Communists, and Jewish Communists trying to conquer the intellectual and economic life of the West (which, arguably, is what Rufo and other spreaders of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory5 he lazily repackages want us to think about “Critical Theory” now). And it seems unfair to pretend to engage with their approach to progressive reform without keeping mind that they had just witnessed the terrifying rise of violence and fascism in their home countries.
Ironically, Morgan has himself quoted Hannah Arendt, who like Marcuse, was a student of Heidegger, and was also a Jewish intellectual who fled the Nazis. Marcuse broke with Heidegger, at least in part, because of Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism. (Arendt, for her part, evidently carried on a love affair with Heidegger while she was his student, but spent her later life analyzing the horrors of totalitarianism. All three were connected in substantive ways to the “Frankfurt School”.)
The point is that writers and thinkers should not be judged wholly on their intellectual forebears. Why not engage with ideas, even (and maybe especially) “extremely powerful” ideas, on their own terms?
But Rufo’s strategy seems to have worked on Morgan, or at least on the persona he was playing in my classroom that day. (Morgan did suggest he had read Marcuse, and perhaps he had, but he and the Freedom Caucus have a long history of repackaging simplistic talking points about complex arguments— notably, boiling thousands of pages from Ibram X. Kendi to an out-of-context quote used to essentially brand Kendi as a racist, all in service of bringing a frivolous lawsuit against a South Carolina school district.
Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man
I didn’t really know much about Critical Theory or Marcuse until Rufo types started bringing them up. (This is a great example of the Streisand Effect!) But reading some of his work, including the influential-at-the-time One-Dimensional Man, it becomes clear (if it wasn’t before) that Rufo and his followers don’t actually care about Marcuse, and aren’t interested in critiquing specific philosophical ideas on their own terms.
If Rufo learned anything from Marcuse, it may be that it’s easier to simply take 1960’s Leftist slogans and philosophical ideas and use them like MadLibs to create your own slogans and surface-level ideas.
In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse is confronting the same reality that James Baldwin confronted the previous year is in his “A Talk to Teachers”: that is, a world that feels a hair’s breadth away from apocalyptic nuclear war6. In the previous year, Dr. King had been arrested; in jail he wrote “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which shares some broad themes with Marcuse’s book. (King’s 1968 “Drum Major Instinct” sermon would also share some of Marcuse’s vision of advertising as a weapon of mass control.)
While Marcuse had been around for a long time at this point in the philosophy world, the idea that he somehow is the evil genius behind all attempts to describe and oppose racism, subjugation, or unthinking support of atrocities, is obviously silly. In fact, for someone wanting a fairly accessible introduction to many of Marcuse’s ideas, from someone who didn’t seem to struggle as much with how to label his own philosophy, I’d recommend reading “A Talk to Teachers”.
But in any case, Marcuse has some interesting things to say in 1964 which seem sadly applicable in 2024. One of the central points of One-Dimensional Man is that a society with a certain minimum high standard of living for most people can be structured in a way that makes people accept injustice and atrocities. Certainly, the West has largely come to accept that many antagonistic countries have stockpiled huge arsenals of nuclear weapons and aimed them at one another. America at large accepted it to the degree that under the Trump administration we pulled out of the Paris Accord treaty aimed at reducing Iran’s nuclear arsenal.
And Marcuse’s observation that the police and army will be used to crush whatever small amount of dissent is left over seems hard to argue with in the wake of the 2020 BLM protest and the ongoing and sometimes violent crackdowns on student protests at multiple American universities.
To be fair, One-Dimensional Man feels very much like a product of its time. Its analysis is deeply Freudian, in a way that feels dated and sometimes inaccurate. It is ambivalently Marxist, in a way that reflects a disillusionment with early 20th century purists who felt Marx was a prophet rather than a historical observer, and which reflects the way Stalinism had become essentially a funhouse mirror image of capitalism, a state which seemed to hold out the promise of worker control of the economy while brutally crushing dissent and apparently intending to maintain state control over that same economy until the end of time.
It’s also very wordy, and explicitly and intentionally avoids giving many specific examples.
I think what scares Rufo’s followers— those who are actually scared of anything, and not just grasping at power through the first effective means— is really the broader and more grassroots protest context around Marcuse. While Angela Davis might have studied under Marcuse, it’s much more likely that most 1960s radicals were adopting their stances in conversation with one another, and in response to the very real, physical threats to themselves and others. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred two years before Marcuse’s book was published, and a year before Baldwin’s essay. The Vietnam War threatened to become a Forever War. Police were cracking down on Civil Rights protesters with intense violence. Lynch mobs murdered Black Southerners in broad daylight7.
Marcuse may be a convenient target precisely because almost no one reads him, and so it’s easy to project almost anything onto him. Morgan can argue he was a supporter of tearing down American society, and its hard for most people to argue against or contextualize that. Rufo can suggest that because Marcuse taught Angela Davis, whatever vague and scary ideas and schemes Marcuse may have had can also be automatically attributed to Davis. (That he doesn’t just attack Davis more directly speaks probably to her own enduring appeal to intellectuals, to young people, and to progressives. But Marcuse is dead and little-read and can’t defend himself.)
Just as in the 1960s, the would-be censors rely on the premise that “Leftist” radicals somehow captured every major institution in America (and yet somehow conspicuously failed to achieve most of the reforms Leftist radicals were pushing for in the 1960s). They conveniently ignore the much-more-likely scenario that 1960s students and “radicals” liked Marcuse and that 2020s students and “radicals” like Kendi because those writers— whether you agree with them or not— offer explanations for the world which actually make sense in the context of their lived experiences.
Are kids actually exposed to any of this?
In my own experience teaching high school students, almost none had read Kendi and certainly none had read Marcuse. In fact, they were generally reticent to bring up issues like structural racism, and often didn’t have “academic” vocabulary to discuss it when they did.
But as they grew more comfortable, they shared examples of being racially profiled at school, of being threatened at home for gender identities, of being afraid to be pulled over by the police, etc. And so when they did encounter “radical” thinkers— often because they read about them in the news in the context of book bans— they were open to the thoughts of those thinkers, probably because of their own lived experiences, and not because some evil teacher Clockwork Oranged them with Critical Race Theory.
For example, one of my AP students decided to read Jason Reynolds’ Stamped, a commonly challenged/ banned book based on Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, only and explicitly because she read an article about how the book had been challenged across the country. The Streisand Effect strikes again!
Not shockingly, the preferred worldview of folks like Morgan— fundamentalist, traditionalist, and supportive of an idealized status quo where being conservative, in itself, is an ideal that never needs to be justified with any kind of appeal to the realities faced by minorities— has very little to offer these students, or anyone interested in a progress defined by changes to the system that benefit marginalized and historically marginalized communities. (For example, it’s easier to embrace “the philosophy of ‘colorblindness,’” as the Freedom Caucus does in its weird filing against Lexington School District One, if you are an all-White group of powerful legislators, than it is if you are an objectively disadvantaged minority.)
Morgan’s reductive take on Marcuse and “Critical Theory” was essentially that critical theorists start from a premise that society must be reformed, rebuilt, and improved. Implicitly, Morgan seemed to be saying, society didn’t need to be reformed because it is already its idealized form. Again, this is presumably easier for a presumably well-to-do, rising figure in South Carolina Republican politics to believe than it would be for essentially anyone else standing in that classroom that day.
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How would a Critical Theorist interpret this?
My probably simplistic understanding of Critical Theory and later Critical Race Theory boils down to what I find to be a very generous interpretation of individual behavior: racism, oppression; and other easily-observed destructive aspects of human behavior, can best be explained not by individual human malice, but by a system that benefits from preserving itself.
This rings true for me. When I’ve had experiences with “bad bosses,” we were usually both caught up in a work culture that rewarded the boss for the bad management behavior. While I’ve had and observed both “good” and “bad” interactions with police officers or other authority figures, these systems often seem to succeed or fail based on large-scale institutional decisions and actions, and it’s fairly obvious why Critical Race Theory (or simpler but related ideas like antiracism) might enjoy renewed appeal in the wake of a wave of public police shootings of unarmed Black people. That is, it offers a more compelling and likely explanation for the phenomenon than “a bunch of individual cops happen to be racist and/ or reckless with the use of force, but policing as a whole is generally not the problem”. (This doesn’t prove that Critical Theory has everything “right”— it can’t, not least of all because individual theorists don’t even agree— but it’s also a better explanation for why it attracted young people, both in the ‘60s and today, than “young people are stupid and/ or brainwashed by their teachers”.)
While anti-CRT interests like the Heritage Foundation (which wrote at least some of the language in the bills Morgan was defending) frequently claim that Critical Theory labels everyone as an “oppressor or oppressed,” that leaves out the context that these are not permanent, preordained states, but part of an ongoing negotiation. When these critics assume someone can only exist as an unchanging “type,” maybe they are telling on themselves.
I think this is Morgan’s way of tying “CRT” into the Freedom Caucus’ tortured argument that Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist”— a book that saw a massive increase in popularity in the wake of the 2020 protests against police brutality— is somehow an exemplar of “Critical Race Theory,” and also Marxism, and also is the centerpiece of a plot to indoctrinate children.
In an especially important example of the lack of ideological rigidity of the “Frankfurt School,” Marcuse and other philosophers associated with the “School” had broken forcefully with Heidegger over his embrace of the Nazis in 1933.
I don’t think Morgan’s summary is completely accurate, but it is in line with the Heritage Foundation/ Chris Rufo narrative, sometimes almost to the word. Heritage essentially reduces all of Marxist and post-Marxist thought (including philosophers who explicitly broke away from traditional Marxism— like Marcuse— to one line from the Communist Manifesto (itself, of course, not a philosophical work but a pamphlet intended to rile up socialists throughout the world, and, while we’re being pedantic, probably shaped more by Fredrich Engels than Marx, anyway).
(Another of the rightwing censorship movement’s favorite targets, Paulo Freire shares this in common with Marcuse, explicitly arguing in Pedagogy of the Oppressed—a book which did, in fact, have at least a brief spurt of popularity in some teaching colleges— that effective teaching is a collaboration with students, who have to drive instruction. Again, if you don’t subscribe to the notion that nothing a person from [political group X] says can ever be right, this seems like a pretty obvious and useful truth for teachers who want to connect with and actually help students.)
More on “cultural Marxism” as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in this analysis.
The opening lines of Baldwin’s essay: “Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within.”
“From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by NAACP.”
Great analysis, Steve. It is just interesting to see the systematic takeover of the right in so short a time. It's frightening what next year may bring people don't vote.
Thank you, Steve, for this analysis of the coded racial politics of the anti-CRT movement. I got interested in Chris Rufo back when all this started and dug into the Manhattan Institute—his institutional “home.” To my vast surprise, I discovered it was allied with the Kochs and much of their activity was aimed at … climate change denial? Which puzzled me at first and then, as I thought more about it, actually began to fit. Because if people are thinking about racism in society and broadly advocating for reform, they might start noodling around into the issue of environmental racism… and that could end up opening a whole other can of worms as young people start asking questions about the future their elders are depriving them of by pursuing the filthy riches of the carbon-greedy economy. You’re doing great work. Thank you for being a lone voice of sanity in a place that often seems more like a lunatic asylum than one of the 50 states.