The long march through the institutions has wrought a strange kind of revolution. The images of the old revolts—soot-covered laborers burning down prisons and sacking ministry buildings—do not apply. The critical theory revolution, by contrast, was almost invisible. The long march through the institutions was so gradual, so bureaucratic, it went nearly unnoticed.
But today, after it has come to a conclusion, the dynamics of this new ideological order have become clear. It is revolution from above, rather than from below. It is revolution in the abstract, rather than the concrete. It is a revolution of information, rather than production—and it is a revolution no less significant than the great revolutions of the past.
In the 1960s, Marcuse had sketched out the beginning stages of this process, arguing that bourgeois capitalism and state communism were both destined to fail. Like Marx, he was convinced that “capitalism produces its own gravediggers,”1 but, additionally, he had lost faith in Stalinist communism, having written a bitter book denouncing the Soviet Union’s descent into tyranny.2
Marcuse proposed a third way, encouraging his predominantly white, college-educated followers to learn the methods of managing the large enterprises and to gradually install the critical theories as their governing ideology. Although Marcuse lamented that the working class had become “antirevolutionary,” it was also rapidly becoming obsolete: the “means of production” in the advanced technological society were increasingly abstract, rather than concrete, affairs, and the most urgent task was to constitute a new elite, rather than a new proletariat.
This revolution has now run its course. Marcuse established the ideology with his critical theory of society. His disciples developed the model for elite capture in the universities. And the next generation of left-wing activists expanded it everywhere.
The result of this process is the creation of a new ideological regime—composed of a unity between the university, the media, the state, the corporation—that has coalesced around the critical theories, transmitted them through the public bureaucracy, and enforced the new orthodoxy through the top-down management of private life. This regime is decentralized and diffused. It functions through the maintenance of myths, beliefs, and incentives, rather than central leadership or direction.
The universities served as the initial hub, but the language of the critical theories was quickly translated into the language of the state and the corporation. The practices of the New Left were professionalized as “social science” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
When the New Left was in the minority, Marcuse preached “extra-parliamentary” political mobilization and criticized the Establishment for using manipulative language. Today the roles are reversed. After the left-wing ideologues began to dominate the institutions and consolidate power in the bureaucracy, they created their own one-dimensional linguistic universe, seeking to put their authority beyond political opposition. Thus the political concept of “liberation” becomes the mathematical concept of “equity.” The ideological concept of “white privilege” becomes the scientific concept of “implicit bias.” The moral concept of “racism” becomes the statistical concept of “racial disparity.” They framed their revolution in terms of the social sciences because, they believed, it would legitimize elite management of society—and freeze out the “antirevolutionary” working classes, which had, since Marcuse’s time, opposed their rule.
The new regime is a synthesis of Marcuse’s critical theory, which he supported, and one-dimensional society, which he opposed. The university, the media, the state, and the corporation have all submitted to this strange hybrid and, together, now function as the “vital center” that mediates the relationship between the institutions and the public.3 The new elites participate in this governing system through osmosis, absorbing the concepts and vocabulary created by the critical theories, then transmitting them through the management of the institutions.
The story of the long march through the universities was largely complete a generation ago—but that was only the beginning.
* * *
Marcuse believed that the university could serve as the “initial revolutionary institution”4 but was not, in and of itself, powerful enough to transform the broader society. The intellectuals could produce knowledge but, left alone, could not break through the one-dimensional universe of the Establishment. “Under the rule of monopolistic media—themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power—a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society,” he said. “The meaning of words is rigidly stabilized. Rational persuasion, persuasion to the opposite is all but precluded.”5
The solution, then, was to extend the “long march through the institutions” to the media and to build a counter-narrative apparatus with the power to subvert the Establishment narrative and replace it with the narrative of the critical theories. He implored the students to learn “how to use the mass media, how to organize production,” as part of a “concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions” and develop mastery over “the great chains of information and indoctrination.”6
Over time, they did. The radicals waged a generational war for the prestige media and the critical theories became the house style of establishment opinion.
The triumph of this “long march through the media” can be represented in miniature through the conquest of the New York Times, which has long been the top prize in American media. Fifty years ago, the Times ridiculed Marcuse. One reviewer trashed An Essay on Liberation as a “rehash of discredited fantasies” that “reeked of totalitarianism.”7 Another published a snide criticism of Counterrevolution and Revolt, portraying the philosopher as a ridiculous, if slightly dangerous, figure who gave false legitimacy to violence and revolution.8 When Marcuse died in 1979, the paper published an obituary dismissing the professor as a transitory historical artifact, noting that “as the social unrest of the 1960’s dissipated, Dr. Marcuse faded from view just as suddenly as he had become a visible, if reluctant, folk hero.”9
But the Establishment voices at the Times underestimated Marcuse, whose ideas would outlast and eventually supplant the moderate position at the paper of record. Like one of the Weathermen’s time-controlled bombs, Marcuse’s philosophy would eventually explode—and consume the newsroom.
This conquest came late but progressed quickly. According to a veteran New York Times reporter, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals, the paper’s ideological shift began in the aftermath of the Great Recession, as executives laid off many veteran writers and began hiring hundreds of younger reporters who had been steeped in the critical theories at elite universities. These new employees waged a “generational battle” against existing leadership at the paper and the writers’ union, eschewing traditional labor concerns in favor of agitating for the implementation of diversity programs and left-wing ideological priorities. “I think what’s happening in the larger body of the Times very much mirrors what was happening in the union,” said the reporter, “and now we’re deeply immersed in DEI battles and battles over race [and] gender.”
It was, in the words of another writer, a “revolution.”10
Following their takeover of the union, the faction of younger, ideologically driven employees—not just writers, but designers, coders, marketers, and other creatives—set a new tone for the newsroom and shifted the paper dramatically leftward. As the social scientist Zach Goldberg has meticulously documented, the vocabulary of the critical theories rapidly conquered the paper’s linguistic universe. Between 2011 and 2019, the frequency of the word “racist(s)” and “racism” increased by 700 percent and 1,000 percent; between 2013 and 2019 the frequency of the phrase “white privilege” increased 1,200 percent and the frequency of the phrase “systemic racism” increased by 1,000 percent. This new sensibility quickly captured the op-ed page, as well as the hard news sections and the offices of management, human resources, and diversity programming.11
Meanwhile, the spirit of Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance,” in which accusations of racism and sexism are wielded to silence dissent, has become the dominant internal culture. According to the veteran Times reporter, there is a pervasive fear among many older managers and editors, who “feel which way the wind’s blowing” and disappear during moments of controversy, hoping to maintain their reputation and avoid public condemnation. “There was a strain of left-liberal thinking on free speech that owes very much to Marcuse, and that’s probably true in our newsroom as well,” said the senior reporter, noting that the old stalwarts of free expression, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, have also succumbed to the logic of Marcuse’s philosophy. “It could be a real disaster,” the writer said. “You can’t just keep calling everything racist and think that that’s going to hold forever.”12
The capture of the New York Times was a pivotal turn in the long march through the institutions. The New Left–inspired activists had already achieved hegemony over the academic journals, but these publications reached a limited, insular audience of professors and administrators. The Times, by contrast, penetrates the consciousness of 100 million readers, plus immense secondary audiences on television, radio, and social media.13 If the university provided the theory of the revolution, the paper provided the mechanism for transmission, turning the fringe ideas formulated in An Essay on Liberation and at the Flint War Council into the new liberal consensus. As the Times changed, the other primary channels of left-leaning media followed suit: the Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC14—even the wire services15—all converged on the framing and language of the New Left.
After securing power, the activists in the new “counter-media” deployed the model of political change that had been developed in the universities: flooding the discourse with heavily loaded political concepts in order to shape the popular consciousness and precondition the public for left-wing political conclusions. This process could be called “linguistic overload,” in which a key set of ideological phrases is repeated at mass scale and embedded into the public mind through the force of repetition. As Marcuse had counseled the young activists, “the sociological and political vocabulary must be radically reshaped: it must be stripped of its false neutrality; it must be methodically and provocatively ‘moralized’ in terms of the Refusal.”16
When this is accomplished, the activists believed, the masses will interpret their experience through the language of revolution—say, “systemic racism” or “police brutality”—and arrive at the predetermined conclusions almost automatically.
* * *
The next conquest in the long march through the institutions was the state.
Already, by the time Marcuse had emigrated to the United States, the New Deal had established the federal government as the great shaper of American life. It employed more than 1 million citizens and scattered an army of managers, bureaucrats, and technical workers throughout the country.17 With President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the federal government redoubled its efforts and pushed the bureaucracy even deeper into social, political, and family life.
The situation today has, if anything, intensified: public agencies employ approximately 24 million Americans,18 spend more than $1 trillion per year on means-tested welfare programs,19 and subsidize approximately half of all households through entitlements and transfer payments.20 Moreover, the modern state has a much more sophisticated technology of control: through advances in the social sciences and specialization of the managerial professions, the state not only seeks to build suspension bridges and administer Social Security, as it did following the New Deal, but to quantify and manipulate the most intimate expressions of human behavior, down to the relationship between parent and child.
Thus, for activists who want to influence society in a profound way, the state is the ultimate mechanism, both through its direct political power and its subtler capacities for social engineering. By the 1970s, the ambitious and highly educated activists of the New Left came to see the state, especially the vast administrative bureaus that operated outside of meaningful legislative control, as the highest prize. They realized, as Marcuse had suggested, that the most effective way to circumvent the democratic process was to administer the institutions of knowledge production and to ensure that the discourse was guided by the spirit of liberation—that is, according to the critical ideologies.
The state, it turned out, was an easy capture. The revolutionaries were able to easily translate the strategies, tactics, and policies of the universities to the state bureaucracy. There was barely any resistance at all.
The activist-bureaucrats had a simple list of objectives: capture the culture of the federal agencies; enforce political orthodoxy with critical theory–based DEI programs; turn the federal government into a patronage machine for left-wing activism.
The first step has already been accomplished. The political culture of the federal agencies is almost indistinguishable from that of the universities. Using political donations as a proxy for political culture, the federal departments are overwhelmingly left-wing. In the 2020 presidential election cycle, employees at the Department of Justice sent 83 percent of all contributions to Democrats. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the number was 84 percent. At the Department of Health and Human Services, 88 percent; and at the Department of Education, a full 93 percent.21 Overall, according to analysis by Bloomberg, nondefense federal employees sent 84 percent of all presidential donations to Democratic nominee Joseph Biden—within striking distance of the rate in universities, 93 percent.22
This culture is further reinforced through the creation of permanent “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs that turn the narrative of the critical theories into orthodoxy and use the methods first developed by Erica Sherover-Marcuse to enforce codes of speech and behavior. These programs are now pervasive. The administration of President Joseph Biden has mandated “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in every department of the federal government23 and the largest agencies have phalanxes of “diversity officers” who administer the bureaucracy in accordance with left-wing ideology.24
The programming at Sandia National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear weapons arsenal, is representative of the general orientation of “diversity and inclusion” in the federal government. In 2019, executives at Sandia sent a group of white male employees to a three-day reeducation program in order to expose their “white privilege” and deconstruct their “white male culture.” The mandatory training, which was called the “White Men’s Caucus on Eliminating Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Organizations,” utilized the techniques of the New Left–style “consciousness-raising” groups to humiliate, degrade, and disintegrate the participants, so they could be reoriented toward “anti-racism.”25
To begin the sessions, the trainers explained that their intention was to expose the “roots of white male culture,” which consists of “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” and “striving towards success”—which might be superficially appealing but are, in fact, rooted in “racism, sexism, and homophobia” and “devastating” to women and minorities. This culture, according to the program materials, imposes a “white male standard” on others and leads to “lowered quality of life at work and home, reduced life expectancy, unproductive relationships, and high stress.”
In order to break down this culture, the trainers for Sandia demanded that the white male employees make a list of associations about “white men” and read a series of statements about their “white privilege,” “male privilege,” and “heterosexual privilege.” The trainers wrote down the answers to the first question, which included “white supremacists,” “KKK,” “Aryan Nation,” “MAGA hat,” “privileged,” and “mass killing,” then asked the men to accept their complicity in the white male system and repeat a series of confessions: “white people are more wealthy”; “white privilege is viewing police officers as there to protect you”; “white privilege is being first in line.”
As the reeducation program concluded, the trainers asked the men to write letters “directed to white women, people of color, and other groups regarding the meaning of this Caucus experience.” The men were exhausted and apologetic, pledging to atone for their whiteness and to become “a better ally” to the cause. “The caucus allowed me to see the [privilege], although not previously realized, that I have as a white male in society and at Sandia,” wrote one. “I’m sorry for the times I have not stood up for you to create a safe place. I’m sorry for the time I’ve spent not thinking about you,” wrote another. Their submission was complete.
Finally, as a broader structural matter, the new federal “diversity and inclusion” apparatus also functions as a patronage machine for left-wing activism.
All of the major grantmakers in education, humanities, and sciences—the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation—have become permanent benefactors of the critical theories, no matter which political party holds the presidency and the legislature. For decades, these entities have showered hundreds of millions of dollars on universities, artists, researchers, writers, and cultural figures who echo the euphemisms of the revolution, as if they constituted a secret password for support. The institutes function as their own fiefdoms: career bureaucrats outmaneuver political appointees and, through long-built patronage networks and a “one-party” selection process similar to those in the universities, funnel enormous gifts to outside activists, who are not subject to federal oversight and transparency requirements.
The list of approved arts and humanities grants during the Obama and Trump presidencies—the latter of which was ostensibly opposed to the critical ideologies—illustrates the absolute nature of this patronage system. During this period, the Department of Education funded hundreds of left-wing programs, including an endless repetition of programs and studies that repeated the basic mantras of DEI: “educational equity,” “using data to achieve equity,” “equity through action,” “building school capacity to address equity at scale,” “equity-driven research-practice partnerships,” “efficacy, efficiency, and equity,” “systemic change to improve equity,” “equity-focused educators,” “opening pathways to institutionalize equity,” “creating an equity-minded campus,” “building equity through sustainable change.”26
Meanwhile, the NEA and the NEH pursued the same political line, funding, for example, a speaking series on “race, reconciliation, and transformation,” a national black writers’ conference on “reconstructing the master narrative,” an artist-in-residency program for “racial equity,” a leadership certificate program in “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” an art exhibit on “race, gender, and globalization,” an overseas research program that “aims to dismantle hierarchies of race and civilization,” and a biography exploring “the Black Power movement,” a “dance theater trilogy on race, culture, and identity,” and a stage play for “a manifesto on race in America through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate.”27
Even the National Science Foundation, which one might assume to be insulated from the critical theories, has succumbed. Through Democratic and Republican administrations, the institute has subsidized left-wing political work, including a multimillion-dollar initiative for dismantling “the institutional and intersectional barriers to equity” in universities, a million-dollar partnership to “accelerate diversity, equity, and inclusion systemic change,” a plan for “creating faculty change agents” who implement policies related to “unconscious bias,” a program to explore “the use of technology in building more socially conscious systems to mitigate institutional racism,” a dissertation on “the lure of whiteness and the politics of ‘otherness,’” a postdoctoral fellowship on “racial/ethnic subjectivity and grassroots community organizing,” a conference to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the astronomical sciences, and dozens of other programs on “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.”28
Together, these programs direct hundreds of millions of dollars toward left-wing activism and have become the dominant culture of the agencies. The federal bureaucracy, which was designed to be neutral, or at least accountable to the executive, is now a creature of its own prerogatives. The bureaucrats claim to pursue knowledge, but, in truth, pursue power, all under the justification of technical expertise. The state becomes the primary vehicle of revolution. It no longer seeks to serve the public but, following the dictates of critical theory, seeks to subvert itself.
It is a revolt of the state against the people—and, to that end, it is rapidly gaining power.
* * *
The final conquest in the long march through the institutions is the extension of the critical theories into America’s largest corporations.
At first, this seems like an insuperable contradiction: the critical theorists were vicious critics of capitalism and wanted nothing more than to abolish it. Yet their ideas have made inroads into the centers of capitalist power. Today, every one of the Fortune 100 corporations has submitted to the ideology of the critical theories, filtered through the language of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” They have established new bureaucracies, created new programs, and organized new training regimens for their employees on “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” “racial capitalism,” and “prison abolition.”29
How is this possible? Because the corporation is no longer the domain of the conservative establishment.
In fact, the cultural orientation of the most profitable companies matches, or even exceeds, the liberalism of academia, government, and education. According to employee political donations, Google and Facebook are more liberal than the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan; the consulting firms Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG, PwC, and Ernst & Young are more liberal than the departments of the federal government; and the employees of Disney, Nike, Starbucks, and Capital One are more progressive than the teachers and administrators of the public schools.30
Part of this is due to a change in cohort and, as with the New York Times, a generational “revolution.” For the graduates of the prestige universities who then enter the corporate world, the critical theories serve as a proxy for a sophisticated, progressive worldview and an aesthetic connection to the 1960s counterculture, which is still perceived as high-status. They see Marcuse’s “new sensibility” and the managerial-class career ladder as methods of personal liberation from suburban upbringings and Middle American values. For many of them, the culture captures the mind and the politics follows.
Meanwhile, for executives, adopting the principles of the critical theories, watered down as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” functions as an insurance policy against left-wing activism campaigns and costly, often frivolous discrimination lawsuits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. By circulating materials and requiring training programs on “racial equity” and “systemic racism,” corporations can signal their liberal bona fides and create a preemptive defense for any “hostile work environment” or “race and gender discrimination” claims.
In addition, under the aegis of “diversity and inclusion” initiatives, executives can direct financial contributions to left-wing activist organizations, which serve as protection payments against protests, boycotts, and public relations campaigns. The major corporations have made a simple calculation: they have achieved all of their desires from the political right on economics—tax cuts, free trade, deregulation—and so they are looking to appease their potential enemies from the political left on culture. It is a classic inside-outside game. Corporate lobbyists quietly secure favorable legislation through congressional Republicans, while corporate executives publicly announce their contributions to “racial equity” and pledge allegiance to “social justice.”
This dynamic was crisply illustrated following the death of George Floyd, which inspired months of rioting, looting, and violence in American cities. As looters sacked retail stores and burned commercial districts to the ground, the CEOs of the great companies announced themselves not on the side of “law and order,” as they had in the 1960s, but on the side of the protestors and rioters. The largest fifty companies in America immediately pledged $50 billion toward “racial equity,”31 with the CEOs of companies such as Cisco, Pepsi, and Nike publicly repeating the street slogan “Black Lives Matter,”32 JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon kneeling in simulated protest of the national anthem,33 and McDonald’s declaring the social-justice martyr George Floyd “one of us.”34
These businesses understand there is always a tax: in the past, they might have paid the mob or the union to achieve peace; today they pay the equity consulting firm and the racial activist organization. The latter is perhaps more sophisticated—after all, it was created by elite intellectuals rather than working-class toughs—but the arrangement is the same. The outside pressure group, backed up by the threat of violence, extracts payments from the dominant economic player, which calculates them as a cost of doing business.
The problem, however, is that the critical theories can never be satisfied. Petty corruption eventually congeals into bureaucracy: one-time cash payments to activists become long-term contracts with diversity consultants; the discovery of subliminal bias in the workplace leads to an endless inquisition; temporary initiatives harden into full-time departments. Once corporate managers have accepted the premise of the critical theories, they can never rid themselves of the consequences.
The content of corporate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs is nearly identical to those of the universities and the federal agencies. In recent years, these programs have become enormously popular at Fortune 100 companies, such as American Express, Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Disney, Verizon, AT&T, Google, and Facebook.35 Some of these firms now force white male executives to repeat a series of self-criticisms and renounce their “white privilege,” “male privilege,” and “heterosexual privilege”;36 others encourage employees to “identify [their] privilege,” “defund the police,” “participate in reparations,” and “decolonize [their bookshelves].”37
But this style of program is not limited to the high-tech corporations in the coastal cities. Walmart, for example, is hardly the stereotype of the left-wing corporation—the company is based in deep-red Bentonville, Arkansas, and has traditionally supported conservative causes—and yet its executives have bought into the critical theories hook, line, and sinker.
In 2021, chief executive Doug McMillon announced the creation of the Walmart.org Center for Racial Equity and pledged $100 million to “address the drivers of systemic racism” and “[shift] power, privilege, and access” in American society.38 According to whistleblower documents, the company has also instituted a mandatory training program for executives that denounces the United States as a racist society and teaches lower-income, white store employees that they are guilty of “white privilege” and “internalized racial superiority.”
The training manual, designed in partnership with a Greensboro, North Carolina–based consulting company called the Racial Equity Institute, reads like the text of Prairie Fire transliterated into the language of the corporation. The program begins by explaining that the United States is a “white supremacy system” designed by white Europeans “for the purpose of assigning and maintaining white skin access to power and privilege.” Walmart frames American history as a long sequence of oppressions, from the “construction of a ‘white race’” by colonists in 1680 to President Barack Obama’s stimulus legislation in 2009, “another race neutral act that has disproportionately benefited white people.”
Following Erica Sherover-Marcuse’s “emancipatory consciousness” model, the program maintains that limitations in white consciousness uphold social oppressions. Therefore, according to Walmart, the objective is to create a psychological diagnosis of “whiteness,” which can then be treated through “white anti-racist development.” Whites, the manual explains, are inherently guilty of “white supremacy thinking,” which is based on the belief that “one’s comfort, wealth, privilege and success has been earned by merits and hard work,” rather than through the benefits of systemic racism. As a result, white Americans have been subjected to “racist conditioning” that indoctrinates them into “white supremacy,” which includes the racist values of “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “power hoarding,” “right to comfort,” and “worship of the written word.”
Racial minorities, on the other hand, are constantly suffering under the yoke of “constructed racist oppression” and “internalized racial inferiority.” Their internal psychology is considered shattered and broken, dominated by internal messages such as “we believe there is something wrong with being a person of color,” “we have lowered self-esteem,” “we have lowered expectations,” “we have very limited choices,” and “we have a sense of limited possibility.” Minorities, Walmart claims, thus begin to believe the “myths promoted by the racist system” and have feelings of “self-hate,” “anger,” “rage,” and “ethnocentrism,” and are forced to “forget,” “lie,” and “stop feeling” in order to secure basic survival.
The company’s proposed solution, again following the model of the old “consciousness groups,” is to encourage whites to participate in “white anti-racist development,” a psychological conditioning program that reorients white consciousness toward “anti-racism” and cedes power to minorities inside and outside the corporation. To this end, white employees must accept their “guilt and shame” and the idea that “white is not right,” acknowledge their complicity in racism, and, finally, begin taking responsibility and moving toward “collective action,” whereby “white can do right.” The goal is for whites to climb the “ladder of empowerment for white people” and re-create themselves with a new “anti-racist identity.”39
On the surface, there is a glaring contradiction in such corporate DEI programs: the corporation is oriented toward the profit motive, while critical theory seeks to subvert it. However, as Marcuse understood a half century ago, the Establishment, represented in the purest form by the multinational corporation, has a tremendous capacity for folding the contradictions into its own machinery. Corporate executives, sensing the momentum of the critical theories in the universities and the necessity of protecting themselves from the federal civil rights bureaucracy, make concessions to the ideology with the intention of flattening it, co-opting it, and rendering it harmless.
Companies such as Walmart might condemn “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “power hoarding” as “white supremacy culture” while ruthlessly operating on those principles in the global market. They might lecture minimum-wage store employees about their “white privilege” while hauling in hundreds of millions of dollars in executive compensation.40 They have paid the tax and believe they can continue on with business as usual.
The result, of course, is critical theory as farce: the ideology of the revolution passed through the human resources department.41 And while executives might be adopting these programs with cynical motives—to launder their reputations, to protect against frivolous lawsuits, to recast the corporation as an instrument of redemption—the simple fact of hypocrisy does not rule out the damage that can be done. Regardless of their intentions, when corporations submit to the dictates of DEI, the ideology gains power and, through constant repetition, makes an imprint on the mind. The language of the critical theories becomes the new language of access: those aspiring to enter the elite must become fluent in order to establish themselves in the institutions, even the corporation.
Whether they intend to or not, the managers, technicians, and operators become the new foot soldiers in the long march.
* * *
Marcuse did not live to see this revolution unfold.
As the drama surrounding his work receded, so did the scrutiny. The chancellor of UCSD, seeking to tamp down criticism, had dismissed Marcuse as a “paper revolutionary”;42 in 1973, the FBI removed him from the active Administrative Index, concluding that Marcuse was “not considered dangerous at the present time.”43 When his students asked him about the height of the New Left, he expressed nostalgia. “That was the heroic age,” he said. “You will never see another age like it.”44
But Marcuse was too modest. He had created an enormous body of work, from his first dissertation on German literature to his final book on Marxist aesthetics. He had built a cadre of intellectuals, activists, and revolutionaries. And, despite the disappointments during his own life, he had laid the ideological foundation for the revolution to come.45
Today, his critical theory of society, which he developed in near obscurity, has embedded itself in every major institution, from the Ivy League universities to the Fortune 100 corporations. Marcuse’s ideas, although they have often been flattened and euphemized, have risen to an astonishing prominence in public life.
In 1968, at the height of his notoriety, a French journalist accused Marcuse of agitating for a “Platonic dictatorship of the elite.” He responded without hesitation: “To be perfectly frank, I don’t know which is worse: a dictatorship of politicians, managers, and generals, or a dictatorship of intellectuals. Personally, if this is the choice, I would prefer the dictatorship of the intellectuals, if there is no possibility of a genuine free democracy. Unfortunately, this alternative does not exist at present.”46
This distinction has now vanished. The lines between academia, media, government, and business are no longer reliable lines of demarcation. The intellectuals have captured the tongues of the politicians, managers, and generals; the vocabulary of the university is now indistinguishable from the vocabulary of the state. The upper half of Marcuse’s “new proletariat”—the white, affluent, educated class—now speaks the language of revolution on behalf of the poor, the minority, and the oppressed. The members of this class can move smoothly across geography and institution, secure that their symbolic sophistication, technical knowledge, and right opinion can find a position anywhere.
Marcuse’s “dictatorship of the intellectuals” and “dictatorship of politicians, managers, and generals” have now converged. His critical theory has become the normative ideology of the universities and his “counter-institutions” have become, at least as a matter of public affirmation, the dominant institutions across every domain.
This represents a change in regime—a cultural revolution. The victory of the critical theories has displaced the original ends, or telos, of America’s institutions. The university no longer exists to discover knowledge, but rather to awaken “critical consciousness.” The corporation no longer exists to maximize profit, but to manage “diversity and inclusion.” The state no longer exists to secure natural rights, but to achieve “social justice.”
The means, too, have changed. As Marcuse predicted, the critical revolution could not win through the democratic process established in the Constitution; rather, it depended upon the mobilization of “extra-parliamentary” forces, the capture of elite institutions, and, when necessary, political violence to advance left-wing ideology “against the will and against the prevailing interests of the great majority of the people.”47
After the capture of the institutions, however, this method went through an inversion. The descendants of the New Left could use their position in the great bureaucracies to shift the culture from the top down and to exert authority over the “antirevolutionary” masses. They began to wield their own tools of repression. The intellectuals build political narratives at industrial scale. The DEI departments create new codes of speech and behavior. The bureaucrats invent and then punish dissenters for crimes of pure subjectivity, such as “microaggressions,” “microassaults,” and “microinequities.”48
The triumph of the long march through the institutions, however, does not represent the ascension of rational, scientific government, nor the arrival of Marcuse’s “direct democracy.” It represents the extension of bureaucratic power and the creation of a new one-dimensional society. As the activists moved from a position of negation to a position of authority, they slowly undermined their own legitimacy as a movement of subversion and their own rationale as a method for liberation.
The outcome is a revolt of the state against the people. The bureaucracy fortifies its own power and privilege while waging a taxpayer-financed revolution against the middle and lower classes. Liberation becomes the pretext for domination. The counterculture becomes the Establishment. The revolution solidifies into bureaucracy.
In the summer of 1979, while traveling in Germany for a conference, Marcuse suffered a stroke and, after a short struggle in the hospital, passed on. His friends and family organized a small funeral service in the woods near the town of Starnberg that was attended by close colleagues who had helped develop the critical theories; the activist Rudi Dutschke, who had designed the long march through the institutions; and Marcuse’s third wife, Erica, who had created the model for modern “diversity and inclusion” programming.49 Years later, at a ceremony to put his ashes to rest, Marcuse’s graduate student Angela Davis commemorated him as the intellectual leader of the New Left’s revolution.50
Marcuse turned out to be a prophet. In the final months of his life, a young disciple asked him if “his life’s project had been to prepare the theory for future revolutionary movements.”
Marcuse responded with pleasure: “Yes, you could say that.”51