In 1960, sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, in which he announced, in the words of a retrospective reviewer, fifty years after the work's original publication, "the end of a thirty-year nightmare with fanatics, apostles, and messiahs whom history had exposed as demagogues and monsters." Bell was referring to the Communist sympathies of his youth, the attractions of which and great dangers were detailed by six prominent postwar intellectuals in The God That Failed.
Ideology, as defined by Bell, "is an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality... a set of beliefs, infused with passion... [that] seeks to transform the whole of a way of life.... Ideology is a secular religion." The danger posed by the vision of utopia driving the ideologue, according to Bell, was the absence of any reckoning of the "costs of the enterprise, and some realization of, and justification for, the determination of who is to pay."
Because the grand utopian vision is so far removed from any present reality — utopia literally means "no place" — its achievement can only begin with the destruction of everything about the present order. And it will inevitably be illiberal — something that must be imposed from without by an enlightened few. The phrase "revolutionary violence" is thus redundant.
Bell's expectation going forward of "moderation in action, orderliness in society, reconciliation in politics and civil discourse in public language" failed to materialize. Before the '60s were over, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (who would later marry) had broken from the Students for a Democratic Society and formed the Weather Underground, which declared war on the United States and embarked on a bombing campaign and a series of bank robberies.
The goal of the revolution, Ayers and Dohrn proclaimed, was "the destruction of American imperialism and the achievement of a classless world; world communism." They aimed to wage armed struggle and become the vanguard of the revolution.
Three members of the Weather Underground were killed when a nail bomb they were planning to place at a dance at Fort Dix exploded prematurely in their Greenwich Village townhouse. The group was also at the center of a Brinks robbery in Nyack, New York, in which one armed guard and two policemen were killed.
To become tougher and more militant, the group engaged in Maoist struggle sessions, in which they sought to rid themselves of "counterrevolutionary ideology" and condemn their failed bourgeois practices. In one such session, Dohrn described herself as a "token woman... who organized for white supremacist and chauvinist politics," and thereby "sold out the revolution." As a consequence, and fortunately for her, she was thrown out of the group and lost all her friends and comrades.
Ayers and Dohrn's son Zayd, named for a Black Panther Party member slain by the police, has now written a searching and sometimes scathing memoir of his upbringing and his parents' ideology, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground. His mother, for instance, believed that non-violence was impossible "in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created." In explaining the nail bomb, Bill Ayers told his son, it would make the American servicemen feel what it was like for the Vietnamese harmed by their bombs. Zayd is puzzled by the willingness "to kill to stop the killing."
BELL WAS NOT ALONE in predicting the end of ideology. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man, in which he concluded that liberal democracy and market capitalism no longer had any competitors in the realm of ideas.
But the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky would prove a better prophet of the future than either the sociologist Bell or the political scientist Fukuyama. In "The Terrorist Mind," (the Free Press) Gary Saul Morson, a leading Dostoevsky scholar, presents the latter as having provided a "literary precedent for the normalizing of terrorism," in his great political novel The Demons. Written in 1871–72, a century prior to China's Cultural Revolution and Cambodia's Pol Pot, the novel's protagonist, terrorist leader Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, fully anticipated their murderous hatred for individuality and genius: "Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned.... We'll reduce all to a common denominator. Complete equality!"
Dostoevsky's readers did not have to wait long for the terrorism he portrayed to become a reality. "Between October 1905 and the end of 2007," writes Morson, "about 4,500 Russian government officials and an equal number of private individuals were killed or injured in terrorist attacks."
Morson makes two points about the revolutionaries that bear emphasis. First, they came from the "ranks of the highly educated or prominent." Many were the offspring of the very people who supplied targets. And so it is today. Luigi Mangione, who shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back, was valedictorian of his Baltimore private school, and earned two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Cole Allen, the most recent attempted assassin of President Trump, graduated Cal Tech, the college with the highest average SATs in the country.
Second, "most were inspired by ideology, the sheer thrill of killing, or both." He points out that 34 Harvard groups expressed their approval of the October 7 massacre on Israelis, based on ideologies claiming to advance "social justice," which made murder "not just morally permitted, but morally necessary."
Apparently, the longer one spends in higher education, the more likely one is to condone violence as a means of promoting social change. In one recent poll, 23 percent of high school students agreed with the statement, "Violence is often necessary to create social change." For college graduates, the figure was 26 percent. But for those with graduate or professional degrees, the figure jumped to 40 percent.
Dostoevsky knew the highly educated type well, as he had himself been a member of the radical Petrashevsky Circle in his youth, and was even put before a firing squad for his activities, prior to gaining a last-moment reprieve. He wrote of his former colleagues later, "There was not a single 'monster' or 'scoundrel' among the Petrashevsky Circle." But their education made them all the more susceptible to "that well-known cycle of ideas and concepts that had then taken such a firm hold on young society."
WHAT BELL AND FUKUYAMA failed to anticipate is the degree that radicals of the '60s would burrow within the professorate and turn higher education into an increasingly ideological endeavor, with ever decreasing diversity of opinion. The requirement that candidates for academic appointments, even in STEM subjects, specify how their research would advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is one means of enforcing that uniformity.
As examples of the radical to academia pipeline, Bill Ayers became a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois–Chicago campus, and after Bernadine Dohrn turned herself in to the authorities, she was quickly hired by one of America's leading law firms, Sidley and Austin, at the request of her father-in-law, the chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison. Subsequently, she became an adjunct professor in Northwestern University's legal aid clinic. Kathy Boudin, after serving 20 years in prison for her role as the getaway driver in the Brinks heist, became a professor of social work at Columbia. These are just a small sampling of the '60s radicals who entered academia.
And the indoctrination has moved down to public K-12 education as well. It no longer engenders surprise when students participate in demonstrations as part of their "civics education." For instance, the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union declared this past May Day as an opportunity to advance their students' civic education by taking them to anti-Trump demonstrations. The CTU defended that participation as supporting their students in finding their "voice, vision, their agency and their place in the community." Meanwhile, less than one-third of Chicago public school students can read at grade level.
Required ethnic studies programs in many states are inevitably based on a highly tendentious left-wing curriculum, in which the oppression of Palestinians by Israel has pride of place.
IT WOULD APPEAR that the academic indoctrination has been effective. Each successive generation for the last three decades has been more radical than its predecessors: more hostile to America; more likely to express support for intimidation and cancellation of campus speakers with unacceptable viewpoints; more likely to reject bourgeois morality, including the entire second tablet of the Ten Commandments; more likely to see violence as necessary to bring about social change; more supportive of socialism or communism; and more hostile to Israel and supportive of its demise.
The mayor of America's largest city is a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the mayor of Chicago, the third-largest city, is closely affiliated. Hasan Piker, a virulently anti-Israel podcaster, who has said that the US "deserved" 9/11, and who openly describes himself as a communist, has a YouTube channel with two million subscribers and growing.
The next Congress will likely include ten DSA members or those adjacent, and perhaps even two senators. With 120,000 members at present, it is the largest socialist membership organization in American history.
And the DSA members are not some kind of genteel Fabian socialists in the mold of Sidney and Bernice Webb, but hardcore ideologues. Jake Altman, a member from 2012 through 2022, highlights the organization's recently issued platform at the Free Press. The DSA would replace the Constitution's system of checks and balances and limited government by getting rid of the presidency and Supreme Court, which both would be subservient to Congress — the better to consolidate power, as in totalitarian states. It calls for the abolition of prisons and the police, universal free housing and free college for all, the end of "commodified housing" (i.e., privately owned rental units), the cancellation of all college debt, a 32-hour workweek, and open borders.
In the foreign policy realm, the group would close all American military bases abroad, and end all sanctions on the totalitarian regimes in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. How would all the free stuff be paid for? Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara gives the classic Bolshevik answer: "Expropriate the expropriators." And far from eschewing violence, the DSA recently formed a group called the Red Rabbits to prepare for a "national uprising against federal agents and police brutality."
Washington Democratic congressman Adam Smith, a former supporter of Israel, voted with 102 other Democrats to cut off military funding for Israel, after his home was vandalized, a fire set in his driveway, a staff member physically assaulted, town meetings shut down, and his neighbors were treated to loud demonstrations in the middle of the night. The late-night demonstrations outside his home were organized by one of his opponents for the Democratic nomination.
One striking aspect of this new radicalism is that it is far more popular with highly educated whites than with the working class and minorities it claims to benefit. Two of the DSA members almost certain to be the next Congress are graduate students, or were until just recently. As Rich Lowry put it, "Their movement is, by and large, most attractive to Caucasian associate professors of sociology who think they haven't achieved the station in life that they deserve."
The three New York City DSA members who recently prevailed in the city's Democratic congressional primaries all fared far better in white, college-educated neighborhoods, and proved to have little appeal among the less affluent and racial minorities. Recent polls in Michigan show Abdul El-Sayed, who has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, ahead among college-educated voters 48 to 41 percent in the Democratic senatorial primary. While his white opponent, Haley Stevens, leads 56 to 34 among the non-college educated.
ALL THREE DSA candidates who won the Democratic Party nomination in the recent New York primaries focused their campaigns, even when running against other progressives, on being the most anti-Israel candidates. The various ideologies dominating academia today — settler-colonialism, Third-Worldism — all treat Israel as a special case of ignominy, ignoring that Jews are the indigenous people of the land.
And in their hostility to Israel many of those enemies will not be restrained by conventional morality in their pursuit of "social justice." It is far from clear that prosecutors, for instance, will be able to secure a jury of 12 in New York City to convict Luigi Mangione of murder for shooting a health care executive and father of three in the back at close range, very much in the manner of the pre-Bolshevik terrorists in Russia.
In a recent New York Times podcast titled "The Rich Don't Play by the Rules, So Why Should I?" host Nadia Spiegelman, Hasan Piker (who lives in a $2.7 million West Hollywood mansion), and journalist Jia Tolentino (whose Brooklyn brownstone is valued at $2.2 million and who has a second home upstate) justified stealing, re-termed "microlooting," from high-priced stores like Whole Foods. Tolentino, however, said she only stole to help a poor neighbor. It did not occur to her that she could just have purchased the food for a poor neighbor. Nor is theft the only crime she condones. She would legalize blowing up oil pipelines.
In a recent poll, 39% of Gen Z-ers and 38% of Millennials admitted to shoplifting, as opposed to 18% of Baby Boomers.
In other words, the permission structures for mayhem in the name of a good cause are wide open. And they could lead to widespread violence against American Jews, as they already have on many campuses and elsewhere.
If anyone doubts that, read of the recently filed federal indictment of eight individuals associated with the University of Michigan. Those indicted demanded that the university divest entirely from Israel and threatened various trustees, employees, and the university provost with "autonomous actions" if they did not comply.
The conspirators discussed among themselves how to harm targets and their families, including by poison, bombs, and psychological torture. One of them, then a medical student, boasted that he would poison a target, and a co-conspirator wrote of burning down the home of another target. And some of these threats were acted upon, including vandalizing homes, throwing bottles containing acid through windows, and spray-painting threats on the Jewish Federation building.
Could such actions be harbingers of more to come?