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.
Fertile Ground
While the New Left was not particularly successful in overturning the political and economic system in the United States, they were much more successful in achieving their objective of eliminating the family as a viable institution. While Kengor astutely explains the leftist and progressive push to undermine the traditional family, I wonder if he understates the impact of the sexual revolution on that process. In the introduction he asserts that the damages the institution of marriage suffered before the advent of "gay marriage" were "mere pinpricks that hurt marriage but could not redefine it" (11). Really? Just pinpricks?
In the wake of the sexual revolution—and before "gay marriage"—our society came to accept and even approve of easy divorce and remarriage, cohabitation without marriage, having children out of wedlock, fatherless (and/or motherless) families, and other non-traditional forms of marriage and family. I consider these major blows—not mere pinpricks—to the family structure.
Further, many of the children whose lives have been wrecked by growing up in broken families since the 1960s have gone on as adults to contribute to a downward spiral of even more sexual immorality and broken families. Sociological studies have unsurprisingly shown that children of divorced parents have higher than average incidences of premarital sex, higher levels of cohabitation without marriage, and higher subsequent divorce rates themselves. Indeed, this demolition of the family structure through the sexual revolution and widespread divorce has laid the foundation for "gay marriage," which would be unthinkable in a society that insisted on premarital virginity and marital fidelity, as our society did (for the most part) before the sexual revolution.
Kengor is right, however, to insist that "gay marriage" is a radical move—indeed an innovation that was unheard of (and even unthought of) in every culture throughout all of world history, until just a couple of decades ago. Even in past societies where homosexuality was considered acceptable, no one ever thought about calling such relationships marriages. However, in many respects, "gay marriage" follows from the sexual revolution's insistence that any form of sexual activity—no matter how degrading or immoral—be accepted. Kengor points out that even leftists intent on destroying marriage and the family, such as Soviet Communists, often opposed homosexuality (until the last decades of the twentieth century, when most leftists rushed to embrace it).
Dionysius & Destruction
The anti-family perspective of leftists and progressives is not just a theoretical exercise based on abstract ideas about liberation. Kengor demonstrates that one of the forces influencing their anti-marriage and anti-family stance has been their own penchant for sexual immorality. While avoiding titillation, he provides some shocking examples of the sexual immorality of leftist and progressive leaders and thinkers.
Margaret Sanger, for instance, advised her sixteen-year-old granddaughter to have sex three times per day. I doubt this was a serious proposal, but it still illustrates Sanger's perverted mentality. (She also said in a letter to Clarence Gamble that it was her goal "to exterminate the Negro population.") Wilhelm Reich was also obsessed with sex, as was Mao Zedong. In their zeal to destroy the family, the Soviet Communists relaxed divorce and abortion laws soon after coming to power. By the 1970s the USSR was averaging seven to eight million abortions
per year.
Kengor's tour through the anti-family thinking of leftist and progressive ideologies over two centuries suggests that the breakdown of the family was not just a chance event precipitated by social or economic forces, as important as these developments might also be. Prominent intellectuals were arguing for the destruction of the family for over a century before they made serious inroads through the sexual revolution. Their arguments were embedded in a wider worldview that promised liberation, not only politically, socially, and economically, but also sexually. When these leftist experiments were put to the test—in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere—the promised liberation never emerged; rather, the result was oppression and misery for multitudes.
The sexual revolution has already produced millions of casualties through broken families and broken relationships, but rather than abandoning the failed experiment, its proponents think the solution is to intensify sexual immorality by introducing "gay marriage." The political left has often responded this way, however. Stalin, with his first Five Year Plan and his collectivization program in 1929, or Mao, with the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and later the Cultural Revolution, thought that by intensifying their Communist program, they could finally break free of bourgeois norms, refashion human nature, and produce utopian bliss.
Few today associate Stalin and Mao with bliss. Nor will the breakdown of marriage and the family in our society produce peace and happiness. However, many people today who have had the blessing of growing up in an intact, loving family do associate their family with bliss—and for good cause. Leftists and progressives often have noble goals, but they cannot replicate with their government programs the most important thing that families can provide: love. •
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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