Free The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh

voguish popularity among college students in the 1960s (he was the flip side of Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher,” who had nearly as great an influence on young conservatives of the period). Marcuse came up with the particularly nasty concept of “repressive tolerance,” a notion that has guided the Unholy Left since the publication of his essay by the same name in 1965 in A Critique of Pure Tolerance , by Marcuse, Robert Paul Wolff, and Barrington Moore Jr. It might be best described as “tolerance for me, but not for thee.” But let Marcuse explain:
    The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. . . . Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e., in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. . . . Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.
    This casuistry is deception in its purest form. In the half-century since Marcuse’s essay, “tolerance” has taken on the status of a virtue—albeit a bogus one—a protective coloration for the Left when it is weak and something to be dispensed with once it is no longer required. It is another example of the Left’s careful strategy of using the institutions of government as the means for its overthrow. Saul Alinsky precisely articulated this as Rule No. 4 in his famous Rules for Radicals : “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.” By casting human frailty as hypocrisy, Alinsky and his fellow “community organizers” executed a nifty jujitsu against the larger culture, causing it to hesitate when it should have been forcefully defending itself. And the shot at Christianity (there is no one “Christian church”) is a characteristic touch as well.
    Today, we can see the damage of such cheap sophistry all around us—in our weakening social institutions, the rise of the leviathan state, and the decline of primary, secondary, and college education. But destruction was always the end, not just the means. As Marcuse noted in “Reflections on the French Revolution,” a talk he gave in 1968 on the student protests in Paris: “One can indeed speak of a cultural revolution in the sense that the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of the existing society.”
    In the same year, in a lecture titled “On the New Left,” he went into greater detail:
    We are faced with a novelty in history, namely with the prospect of or with need for radical change, revolution in and against a highly developed, technically advanced industrial society. This historical novelty demands a reexamination of one of our most cherished concepts. . . . First, the notion of the seizure of power. Here, the old model wouldn’t do anymore. That, for example, in a country like the United States, under the leadership of a centralized and authoritarian party, large masses concentrate on Washington, occupy the Pentagon, and set up a new government. Seems to be a slightly too unrealistic and utopian picture.