Recently a court in Pennsylvania ruled that two young children have three legal parents: their birth mother, her former partner in a lesbian civil union, and the man who donated sperm to his lesbian friend. The donor was active in the children’s lives, and when the lesbian couple broke up, a nasty custody and child-support battle ensued, with the result that all three adults involved have been declared legal parents. This is part of a trend; City Journal has a long and fascinating article on related phenomena here.

Families provide a support structure for individuals. When families become impermanent and indefinable, the support structure vanishes, and the individual turns elsewhere. Formerly such unfortunates (the widows and orphans of scripture) would turn to church and community, but when family and social breakdown is widespread, individuals look to the government for help, since the layers of society between the citizen and the state have been removed. Autonomous individuality removes the extra-legal bonds between people, leaving nothing between the cold power of the state and the naked citizen; no gentle drapery of custom, no robe of tradition, no clothing of family and community. If the family is amorphous and evanescent then civil society will collapse, leaving only law as our relations to others are contractual, not customary.

Reducing family to a state-sponsored contract between individuals is to reverse the proper order of human being. The state exists for families, not the other way around. The family is not a creation of the state, but a precondition of it. And while it might sound a nice sentiment to say (as so many do) that a family can be made of anything, the necessary implication is that family means nothing. A term with infinite mutability is meaningless.

In America, the hour is late—the forces seeking to destroy the family have conquered much. The schools have led the way in this, promulgating doctrines designed to destroy our society, militating against belief in the transcendent and the customs and taboos that are necessary to keep a society from barbarism. Multiculturalism, the official creed of the educational system, seeks to destroy the loyalties and bonds of culture and country. Educators believe it is their raison d’etre to challenge and criticize Western culture, not transmit it to their pupils.

How, conservatives wonder, did it come down to this? In his final book, Cry Havoc!: The Great American Bring-Down and How it Happened, Ralph de Toledano, the late great conservative journalist and polemicist, provides part of the answer: it was a communist plot.

This answer may seem a relic left over from the fringes of the Cold War, something from a John Birch Society pamphlet. If so, it’s got some odd supporters. William F. Buckley, Jr., who helmed National Review when it wrote the Birchers out of the conservative movement, gave the book an enthusiastic blurb.

Cry Havoc! doesn’t peddle crackpot theories about Ike being a closet commie. Rather, de Toledano explains how the Communist International founded and guided the Frankfurt School, and how the neo-Marxism/neo-Freudianism it preached came to dominate the American academy and elites, and hence much of American culture.

The attitudes and ideas the Frankfurt school and its pupils and allies spread among the intellectuals have seeped deep in American culture. A man who cheats on his wife, divorces her and neglects his children is not a conscious student of neo-Freudianism or neo-Marxism, but those ideologies have enabled his actions. Anti-family ideas among the cognoscenti are simplified and broadcast by the schools and media, producing an anti-family culture.

The neo-Marxists didn’t look to the economic theories of Marx, but to his earlier, more destructive impulses. They didn’t want to abolish capital, they wanted to abolish society. In this book de Toledano provides the history of the aims, origins, rise and dominance of these intellectual barbarians.

Years before he had inflicted the unscientific maunderings of Das Kapital and the dogmas of dialectical materialism on a long-suffering world, Marx called for what had to be accomplished—the ‘ruthless destruction of everything existing.’ That destruction would wipe out religion, the family, morality, the free interplay of men and economic forces, human relationships, and everything that made Western civilization…
So in 1922, the conspiracy was hatched at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow by Karl Radek, a power in the Politburo and the representative of Lenin, Felix Djerzhinski, head of the Soviet secret police, Georg Lukas, cultural commissar of the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik revolution, and Willi Muenzenberg, the Comintern’s organizational genius. The seemingly modest instrument was the Institute of Social Research, planted in the prestigious Frankfurt University, and dedicated to neo-Marxism… ‘We will take over the intellectuals,’ Willi Muenzenberg boasted. ‘We will make America stink.’

To a great extent, the conspiracy succeeded, and de Toledano recounts in brutal detail how the cluster of intellectuals around the Institute of Social Research became the powerful group known as the Frankfurt School. It began in Germany, where the Institute, led by Theodore Adorno had a connection to almost every debasement of art and culture, but it did not end there. Its outreaches into Britain compromised the intelligence services of that country, but the greatest harm came when the Frankfurt School decamped to America, courtesy of John Dewey and Columbia University.

From Columbia, it methodically began to blast the minds of America’s educators, and through them America’s future. “John Dewey’s sponsorship gave the Institute a lock on Teacher’s College—the foremost educational institution in the U.S. The influence of Teacher’s College, in fact, reached out across the country, as its graduates filled more that 60 percent of all teaching and educational and administrative posts in the country.”

That is power, and de Toledano chronicles how the likes of Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Kurt Lewin, and Max Horkheimer used it to pervert America. The author overreaches at times—Dewey would have been a poisonous influence even if he had never heard of the Frankfurt School—by stretching to involve the Frankfurt School in almost every nefarious intellectual project. There was no shortage of intellectual decay and subversion in the 20th century, far more than any one group could be responsible for. Still, the Frankfurt School was a major player in the corruption of the intellectuals, and de Toledano has provided a valuable account of how this came about.

The writing is largely superb, with only a few slips. The opening is too much of a standard conservative culture-warrior screed, and there is an embarrassing goof midway through the book where he uses the same unflattering phrase to describe both Karl Mark and Kurt Lewin in their dealings with women. Though accurate in both cases, that’s the sort of error editors should catch. But a few hiccups aside, this was a superb, extremely informative read.