Book Review
Enemies on the Left
Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage
by Paul Kengor
WND Books, 2015
(256 pages, $18.95, paperback)
reviewed by Richard Weikart
Those who have been fighting in the trenches against the breakdown—and even redefinition—of marriage and the family since the sexual revolution of the 1960s would do well to step back and figure out how we came to this sorry state. In his provocative new book, Paul Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College, provides just such historical perspective.
Unfortunately, however, Kengor opens his book on a rather pessimistic note, explaining that it is intended merely to provide a diagnosis of the malaise of the American family: "Readers will wonder if I am looking to halt the redefinition and transformation, if I am endeavoring to help change the mind of American culture on gay marriage with this book, to which I respond: Are you kidding? . . . Nothing short of a major religious revival will save [America]" (12–13).
I think he is selling himself short here. Surely a good diagnosis should impel us to seek a cure and should also provide guidance about the way forward. Kengor's analysis certainly does this, and hopefully it will also bring us to our knees, where, as he suggests, the real solution lies.
An Old Story
One of the most important insights in Takedown is that the attack on marriage and the family is not just an isolated social and political issue that can be solved by providing better philosophical arguments or generating sociological data directly related to marriage and the family, as important as these may be. Kengor repeatedly shows that the left's assault on marriage is integrally tied not only to its political ideology but also to its anti-religious agenda. Indeed, one of the reasons nineteenth-century socialists such as Robert Owen in Britain and Charles Fourier in France opposed the family was that they did not want parents teaching their children allegedly retrograde ideas about religion (meaning Christianity, of course).
But that was not all. In rejecting God's authority, leftists were generally rebellious toward any kind of authority, including that of husbands and parents. The socialist drive for liberation included not only political and economic liberation, but also sexual liberation and freedom from all authority structures, including the family.
Many of the examples in Takedown, such as the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who became one of the leading mid-twentieth-century proponents of cultural relativism and sexual immorality, show that the attack on the family has been integrally related to the rise of moral relativism. Not only did leftists over the past two centuries seek to undermine religion, but they also wanted to dismantle the dominant moral standards of the day, which they considered bourgeois.
Kengor details how Marxists in the mid-twentieth century—especially those associated with the Frankfurt School—blended Freudian sexual ideas with a flexible cultural Marxism to pave the way for the rise of the New Left and the sexual revolution in the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, who imbibed Freud and Marx in post-World War I Vienna, synthesized their two ideologies in his influential plea for The Sexual Revolution.
The Frankfurt School theorist with the greatest impact in the United States, however, was Herbert Marcuse, whose Eros and Civilization (1955) became the bible of the New Left, influencing a host of leftist activists in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and the terrorist group the Weathermen. Two leading feminist and abortion rights advocates, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, were Marxists who promoted the sexual revolution as an integral part of their push for political and social liberation.
Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany and Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (both from Palgrave Macmillan). Some of his writings can be found at www.csustan.edu/history/faculty/weikart.
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