It’s Marcuse, Not Alinsky

(The Originator of the Double Standard)
By Michael P. Tremoglie
Tremoglie's Tea Time Blog

This past year Saul Alinsky replaced David Ayers as the radio talk show host’s favorite radical liberal professor. They inveigh against his ideas repeatedly during their monologues.

I would like to proffer the name of another liberal college professor – Herbert Marcuse.

His philosophies, his ideas, are particularly relevant because of the actions by the Obama Justice Department to drop prosecution for voter intimidation of white voters, in Philadelphia, by members of the New Black Panther Party.

Herbert Marcuse was a German – Jewish immigrant who came to the United States in 1934. He taught at Columbia University and Brandeis University among others. His teachings were quite the fad at one time.

He believed that oppressed minorities could never have parity with the majority unless they had superior rights. He once said, “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”

Marcuse proffered a similar concept about free speech. He felt that free speech only served to reinforce the status quo since the Establishment had better access to the media then progressive groups.

For this reason Marcuse believed that whites in America should not have the same rights of free speech as minorities because that would just ensure the maintenance of the status quo.

This philosophy of Marcuse evolved among academics as the intellectual rationale for these liberal tenets:

• First, government neutrality in speech is a myth.

• Second, politically powerful groups are granted exceptions to free speech.

• Third, resources are unequally allocated so only the powerful are heard.

Marcuse’s ideas are manifested by the modern double standard that exists in the media about conservative speech. They are also manifest – as we have recently learned – by attorneys in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), who do not believe in race neutral enforcement of voting rights laws.

According to an article in National Review Online, a DOJ attorney who worked in the Civil Rights Division, was astonished that some of his colleagues believed voting rights cases should not be brought against blacks accused of violating the rights of whites because of the socioeconomic differences between blacks and whites.

The attorney, who purportedly said this, was involved in the voter intimidation case in Philadelphia as well as a similar case in Mississippi.

I was once furnished, by a Philadelphia high school teacher, an instructional course in racism to be used by him in a course about racism. The course was developed by a civil rights organization. This was in 1996.

It was called "Understanding Racism." The thesis of this text was remarkable. It stated that a white person experiencing racism was not seriously affected by it. However, a black person or other minority would be.

My response to this was that a white person shot dead by a black person because he was a white person walking through black neighborhoods, as occurred in Philadelphia, experiences just as much suffering as a black person shot dead by a white for racist reasons.

Fortunately, the teacher rejected the proposal to include it as part of the curriculum.

Since then, I have often heard liberals state that blacks cannot be racist because they have no power. Again, my response is that maybe among the white, Americaphobic, limousine liberal, penthouse Bolsheviks, blacks do not have power. Maybe among those who refer to blacks as Sen. Harry Reid would this may be true.

However, for the survivors of the white cable television salesman who was shot dead by a black person because he was “a white person walking through a black neighborhood” black people certainly do have power.

Besides the definition of racism as a function of power is a fallacy. Racism is the belief in superiority because of one’s race.

Racism is not a function of power. After all, one does not have to be the CEO of a corporation – or even the President of the United States - to be a racist.