In a recent article at Chronicles, Glenn Ellmers correctly warns Christopher Rufo to avoid the dangerous temptation of declaring victory for the political right after the acquittal of Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely. He does not agree with Rufo’s “unwarranted conclusion” that this legal verdict reveals the American people’s rejection of leftist politics altogether. Even though Ellmers credits Rufo, a tireless opponent of Critical Race Theory and its influence on America’s universities and media, for expecting a continuation of the practical struggle to fix these broken systems, he faults his comrade-in-arms for ignoring the fact that leftism “as an intellectual and political force” has not been defeated. After all, as Richard Weaver liked to say, ideas have consequences too.

So far, so good. But Ellmers then seems to blame long dead German philosophers for producing the toxic ideas that persistently contribute to radical attacks on western civilization. After quoting from Leo Strauss on how the defeat of Nazi Germany did not entail the intellectual defeat of the German philosophies that contributed to Nazism, Ellmers writes:

What he [Strauss] meant is that while the Nazi Wehrmacht had been destroyed in World War II, we had not vanquished German philosophy—represented especially by Friederich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the original sources of academic postmodernism who continue to shape the thought of our intellectual class even today.

He goes on to cite his teacher Harry Jaffa, who studied with Strauss, on how the fall of communism did not put an end to the dangerous appeal of Marxism, whose influence continues to imperil western civilization. Ellmers warns that history may repeat itself if defenders of the West are just as complacent about the so-called defeat of “woke/CRT ideology” as their ancestors were about the impact of “German nihilism” and “cultural Marxism” on public discourse in America. He issues this warning:

Now that the left has suffered a temporary setback, we cannot rest on our laurels but must press forward and continue to wage the intellectual and philosophical battle on behalf of government by consent and the metaphysical freedom of the human mind.

Much as I sympathize with this goal, is Ellmers targeting the wrong enemy by pointing to nefarious German influences?

I do not intend to restate in detail the counterarguments of other voices on the traditional right who have disputed these claims about long dead Teutonic evildoers. In The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium, Paul Gottfried criticizes Allan Bloom for contending in his bestseller The Closing of the American Mind that the American left takes its bearings from a “German connection.” As Gottfried explains, Bloom, who also studied with Strauss, failed to provide any evidence that “antiegalitarian German villains” such as Nietzsche and Heidegger had blazed a trail for the New Left in America. Although Ellmers may respond at this point that he was not explicitly attributing a German lineage to woke/CRT theory, he strongly suggests this connection when he, like Bloom, points to the origins of “academic postmodernism” in the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who still influence “our intellectual class” in the present age.       

In fairness to Ellmers, his deliberations raise an important question: what exactly are the origins of radical leftist ideas that have taken root in America? In his study, Gottfried poses a more disturbing question: what if the radical egalitarianism of the left is indigenous to America and not seriously dependent on books by intellectuals with German accents? Are there other ideological influences that provide a better explanation for the influence of woke/CRT theory?

In his posthumously published opus Leviathan and Its Enemies, Samuel T. Francis provides a plausible answer to these questions. Building on the famous thesis of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, Francis contends that the managerial elite which gradually put an end to bourgeois freedom, capitalism, and constitutional government in the mid-20^th century justified its transformative program by adopting the ideology of environmentalism. To rationalize the unprecedented intrusion of statist and bureaucratic power into the private realm of life once cherished by bourgeois culture, this elite embraced the assumption that the studious deployment of state power could succeed in advancing social “progress” because human beings are malleable or passive effects of their environment. In short, the managerial control of institutions would alter the environment that caused social injustices, thus transforming human behavior for the better. In the process, the old bourgeois (and traditional American) assumption that human beings are free individuals with intractable natures had to be abandoned. Francis wrote:

The reformulation of liberalism consisted primarily in a retreat from or abandonment of the individualism that characterized bourgeois liberal society and a new emphasis on the social and collective nature and duties of human beings. The new liberalism in fact, if not always in formal theory, tended to see the individual not as the basic moral agent and unit of society but as a product of the social environment.

This new ideology, which was popularized by T. H. Green in England and Josiah Royce in the United States, further validated the prejudice that the bourgeois “environment” and its values of work, thrift, duty, and deferral of gratification were the chief “source of social evil” in dire need of extirpation.

Of course, ideologies by themselves do not explain their own success in the real world. By the 1960s and 1970s, the managerial elite aligned itself with the “underclass of the bourgeois order to extend material and psychic benefits on its clients. Such benefits were themselves made possible by the technical and managerial skills of the elite and the functions these skills enabled them to perform.” Examples such as the Ford Foundation’s generous funding of Black Lives Matter spring to mind here.

The anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois rhetoric of the radical American left, as Francis predicted, should not obscure the fact that this ideology serves the interests of the managerial elite who are determined to break down any remaining traditional moral barriers to libertinism and fluid or malleable identities: “So far from being a formula of rebellion, as [Herbert] Marcuse and [Norman O.] Brown believed, the hedonism of the counter-culture was the principal means of its assimilation within the mass economic apparatus and was part of the manipulative discipline that under managerial capitalism replaces the internalized bourgeois ethic of deferred gratification.” In short, a new identity becomes just another commodity in the managerial marketplace.

Although Francis did not live to see the rise of woke/CRT ideologues, it is a safe bet that he would have treated them as the latest bastard children or useful idiots of the dominant managerial capitalist regime, one that is bent on conducting a permanent revolution against what remains of the old bourgeois order. Tempting as it may be to blame malign foreign influences for these movements, they are homegrown phenomena.