Daniel J. Flynn

     In the decades that followed the Red victory in China, Western Marxists would urge their followers to embark upon their own Long March through the West’s cultural institutions. Perhaps the Left could not militarily overthrow governments in the West. It could, however, take over the campuses, the media, Hollywood, and other societal-shaping institutions. If the strategy proved successful, it would make the idea of a real revolution irrelevant.

     In The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, Roger Kimball details how civilization in the world’s most prosperous nation was radically altered in just a few decades. The cultural revolution has bequeathed a variety of social ills, including an astronomical increase in crime, illegitimacy, divorce, sexually transmitted diseases, and drug use. Somewhat predictably, the 1960s-era cultural revolutionaries are as dysfunctional as the society they did so much to mid-wife.

     In the style of Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals and E. Michael Jones’ Degenerate Moderns, Kimball dissects the cultural revolution of the past 40 years and finds it the biographies of its catalysts writ large.

     Among those observed are Norman Mailer, the left-wing novelist who nearly killed one of his wives by stabbing her inches from her heart; Alfred Kinsey, whose masochistic perversions sparked him to produce fraudulent sex "research" that validated his own bizarre behavior; and Susan Sontag, whose Marxism caused her to tell many untruths, including writing ten years after Castro’s seizure of power that "No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published."

     A chapter on the Beats of the 1950s describes them as "drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius." William Burroughs, a drug-addict who also had sex with children, killed his wife by playing a William Tell game with a revolver and a glass of water. Jack Kerouac died in an alcoholic haze. Allen Ginsberg, a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, took "off his clothes at every opportunity" and once warned America, "We will get you through your children." Upon his death, an assortment of Ginsberg’s belongings (including old sneakers and smoked marijuana joints) were purchased for more than $1 million by Stanford University. Shouting dirty words and stream of consciousness prose passed for literature among the beats. Anyone who didn’t like their work, their familiar refrain went, just didn’t appreciate "art."

     The oft-venerated Black Panthers were more than just the romanticized, home-grown guerrilla revolutionaries that upper-class leftists loved to fawn over. They were a criminal gang whose leadership included murderers, rapists, and drug dealers. Foremost among them was Eldridge Cleaver, a paranoid drug addict whose own experience led him to write that "rape is an insurrectionary act." Facing charges of attempted murder, Cleaver fled to Algiers, where he set up an American "government in exile." His travels also brought him to North Korea, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and, finally, back to the United States, where in 1975 he plead guilty to lesser crimes and served 1,200 hours of community service. A crack-addict in his later years, he died in obscurity.

     While Kimball chose to profile Cleaver, he could have randomly selected just about any former Panther with high name recognition to show an individual who embodied the group’s violent nature. Mumia Abu-Jamal sits on death row for executing a Philadelphia cop. Asatta Shakur, a murderess who gunned down a New Jersey State Patrolman, lives grandly in Cuban exile. George Jackson, who tossed a guard to his death from the third tier at California’s Soledad Prison, caused his own demise and the deaths of several others—including a judge that was decapitated—in a botched courthouse escape attempt. Most recently, H. Rapp Brown awaits trial for the murder of two Georgia policemen. America’s Long March had its victims too.

     The Left often accuses the police of having a preoccupation with the Panthers. If they don’t, they should have.

     Today, Hollywood lionizes this glorified street gang in movies like Panther. Universities have given surviving Black Panthers tenure. Angela Davis, who supplied the guns in Jackson’s doomed escape attempt, held the University of California’s highest academic honor, the Presidential Chair, for three years. Warren Kimbro, who confessed to, and was convicted of, murdering Alex Rackley, a Panther who was tortured with boiling water before his life ended, became a dean at a college in the northeast.

     Slowly, the Left began hijacking the institutions which provide information. The Long March proved so successful in the media, never devoid of partisanship to begin with, that by 1992 a full 89% of the Washington press corps cast their vote in the presidential election for Clinton. Many in the entertainment industry have adopted the idea that all art is political, with four of the five nominees for "Best Picture" at the 1999 Academy Awards centering their plots on various liberal themes. The writer of one awful film, The Cider House Rules, even thanked Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, rather than the people who turned his book into a movie, when he received an award. It is the academy, however, where the Long March has been most complete. "If American universities these days are rarely scenes of serious student agitation, that is partly—perhaps primarily—because there is little that the radicals demanded that they did not get," Kimball writes.

     Many conservatives, the author laments, "have adopted the strategy of denial." The economy is great, so they ignore the immorality that pervades the culture. This strategy, however, is not much worse than one which identifies the problem but offers no solution. Kimball is partly guilty of this, as home-schooling is about the only remedy he endorses. Kimball’s book, however, never purports to be a how-to guide for combating societal decay, so it is perhaps unfair to judge him on a playing field he does not enter.

     The Long March is a brilliant expose of the personalities that projected their own deviancy upon the culture over the last several decades. As absorbing as it is gloomy, Kimball’s book is one of the few that future observers may look to when attempting to understand just what went wrong.

     "Utopian movements succeed because they tell people something they desperately wish to hear," Roger Kimball informs readers. "Whether or not the message is true is beside the point." Unfortunately, the decline Kimball speaks of in his book is all too true.