MESOP NEWS RESEARCH : ADORNO & MARCUSE & ANDREW BREITBART WITH STEVE BANNON (NEW YORK TIMES ) – Full story
“Andrew Breitbart, whose foundational philosophy is pretty thoroughly detailed in his autobiography, ‘‘Righteous Indignation.’’ A lot of the book is your run-of-the-mill memoir, with stories from his childhood in suburban California, but the conceptual core of the book comes in Chapter 6, in which he argues that America was permanently transformed by the arrival of a handful of German philosophers in the 1930s.
I won’t delve into all the twists and turns in this theory, but the underlying contention is that a few refugee intellectuals from the Frankfurt School — Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse — were lucky enough to escape the Nazis for sunny California, and being constitutionally incapable of happiness, promptly began complaining. Their grousing and moaning and general sourpuss disposition soon filtered into academia, Hollywood and the media, then into the upper echelons of American snobbery, a.k.a. the Democratic Party. So today you have, per Breitbart, a ‘‘Democrat-Media Complex’’ whose principal aim is to disparage everything quintessentially American, by which he really means Americana — think Norman Rockwell archetypes and whatever social conventions they imply. This is extraordinarily reactionary stuff, but not especially political in the sense of electioneering. (…) Breitbart met Bannon in 2004 at a screening for a documentary that Bannon made about Ronald Reagan. In the meet-cute version that Bannon tells, they immediately embraced in a bear hug, and Breitbart bellowed: ‘‘Brother, we got to change the culture!’’