OUR INTERVIEW. Prof. Curtis L. Hancock: Neo-Marxism is exceedingly strong in the United States

A constructive dialogue, which Leftist activists are not open to, would admit that America has some dark episodes in its past. But the counter-point to this is that America has struggled to correct its racist past and to improve all its social relations. The American Constitution provides the principles of individual liberty and universal human rights to hold the people accountable when they fail to honor those principles

— said Curtis L. Hancock, Adjunct Professor, Holy Apostles College & Seminary in an interview with the portal wPolityce.pl.

It looks like the protests after George Floyd’s death are only the driver of the revolution in the United States. In your opinion, is it possible that these protests are only a tool to implement Neo-Marxist revolution?

The protests that are currently happening in the United States are both the effect of Neo-Marxist sensibilities in the country, and also the occasion to further encourage Neo-Marxist ways of thinking. For many years, there has been an openly-proclaimed strategy of the Democrat Party “to never let a crisis go to waste.” So, activists who are usually fellow travelers with the Democrat Party are ready to exploit events like the tragedy and injustice that befell George Floyd. Such an event is interpreted through a narrative that has been promulgated in the educational establishment and the media for years, if not for generations, and has at last trickled down to the popular culture. It has become axiomatic among progressives in America that what happened to George Floyd is a symptom of systemic injustice in the society, an injustice that dates back to America’s founding. This point of view conforms to a vision of America that is enthusiastically taught in higher education. Accordingly, there are many voices in education and the media who are quick to announce that the tragedy of George Floyd further demonstrates that America is morally bankrupt and has a tainted past, a past so stained that it renders America virtually an illegitimate society. Only wholesale change, sought along Marxist lines, can be the remedy.

A constructive dialogue, which Leftist activists are not open to, would admit that America has some dark episodes in its past. But the counter-point to this is that America has struggled to correct its racist past and to improve all its social relations. The American Constitution provides the principles of individual liberty and universal human rights to hold the people accountable when they fail to honor those principles. Despite America’s occasional failures, she has also worked hard to correct them, as the Constitution prescribed her to do. America may still have to improve (what society doesn’t) but it should get credit for its progress. The Civil War (1861-1865) was fought to end slavery. Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party came about to incrementally improve the lives of African Americans, which ended segregation and brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The government over the past three generations has spent trillions of dollars to provide advantages for African Americans. Many, if not most, black Americans admit this. But this is a perspective that gets drowned out in the loud message of systemic oppression which is axiomatic among the Neo-Marxists.

In the United States, we have a large coalition of Leftists against conservatives. Is the fight only on the ground of politics? How do you perceive the whole situation?

The Left-wing effort to radically change America is not limited to politics. The late Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News, is famous for saying that “politics is downstream from culture.” This observation applies well to the aims of Leftists in America. While classical Marxism focused on economics, the “New” Marxism seeks transformation of culture. Cultural Marxism is the watchword. The idea is to target America’s civil society and endeavor slowly to change its bourgeoisie values. Civil society refers to the mores, habits, and beliefs that define a society independent of government regulation. The civil society consists of family, religion, and morality. Radicals, mainly through the schools and the media, have caused a couple of generations to doubt the values of traditional America. By changing attitudes about the civil society, Leftists have been able, almost imperceptibly, to change Americans’ sense of values. Hence, today many Americans believe things about the family, religion, and morality that would have been unthinkable even a generation ago. These incremental changes are supposedly justified because America has an invalid past, grounded in systematic injustice. Therefore the deconstruction of America’s bourgeoisie civil society is a service to humankind.

How strong is the Neo-Marxist movement in the USA?

Neo-Marxism is exceedingly strong in the United States. This is so, even if the average American is hardly aware of Marx and his influence. Marxist influence is strong because the universities train leaders who occupy the professions in society. Since radicals dominate the classrooms, society’s leaders have been influenced by Marxists. A Carnegie study reported that in 1969 there were three ideologically radical professors for every two conservatives on campus. By 1999, the ratio was 5 to 1. In his book, The Breakdown of Higher Education, Dr. John Ellis reports that today the ratio is 13 to 1. But even more dramatically, it is 48 to 1 among the population of recently hired and untenured professors. Other studies reveal such disproportions in the American media. Since the university is the training-ground for the professions in society, Marxist influence is bound to have had its impact. Arguably, almost every significant profession is dominated by Leftists and their sensibilities. This is certainly true of the schools, the media, the courts, the legal profession in general, the government, and even the clergy.

A powerful stimulus for Leftist influence in American culture was the work of the philosopher, John Dewey, who criticized traditional education with its paternalistic views about habit formation in students. For Dewey, such a paternalistic view of education turned school into indoctrination. Instead, he and his followers proposed a view of education that challenged traditions. This attitude was defining of the so-called “progressive education” movement in twentieth-century America. It was heavily influenced by the teachings of Rousseau, who thought that traditional education stymied students’ self-expression and creativity. Past views of education needed reform because they were dominated by old-fashioned attitudes about morality and unenlightened religion. Rousseau profoundly influenced Marx. So the legacy of progressive education through Dewey, under Rousseau’s influence, is arguably Marxist. The ideas of progressive education still dominate American education, even in the primary and secondary levels. The moral is that Dewey’s agenda exchanged one kind of “indoctrination” for another.

Catholic values have been eroded from the universities, even Catholic universities in the USA. How could it happen?

American Catholic universities tend to emphasize the social Gospel over all other interpretations of Scripture and Christian life. They have gone so far that they seem to define Jesus as a social reformer or political crusader. This seems contrary to the Gospel, since Jesus persistently disappoints those contemporaries who wanted to use him for ideological purposes. Jesus’s Parables (like the Wheat and Weeds) and Augustine’s City of God object to the idea that Christianity is a utopian political project. Instead, Christianity is about transforming the heart of the individual person. But interpreting Scripture as a political project plays to the commitment to social justice among today’s students. By interpreting Christianity as a matter of social justice, Catholic universities can pander to political correctness. Social justice is a way of insinuating Marxist doctrine into Christian teachings about justice. Justice, as understood in traditional Christianity, is a way in which an individual embraces one’s personal responsibility to respect one’s neighbors. But social justice transfers the idea of justice away from individual responsibility to the need to change social institutions. In collectivist ways of thinking, justice is about social structures rather than about the purity of the individual heart.

Contemporary Catholic universities are strong on the corporal works of mercy, but they marginalize the spiritual works of mercy. The traditional aim of Catholic education is to help a person through the cooperation of nature and grace to achieve the Christian conception of happiness, which is to become the kind of person worthy to be an eternal friend of Jesus Christ. Justice is a part of this happiness because human beings are social creatures. But such justice is a duty to form a habit of the individual human heart. It should not be confused with social justice, which is a device to replace an individual’s duty to be just for a collectivist conception of institutional change. Anyway, Catholic universities have replaced this traditional mission to cultivate Christian happiness with a utopian, even Marxist, vision of social education.

Are there any places of real Catholic education in the United States?

There are good teachers at virtually every Catholic educational institution. But often they are good in spite of the leadership and curricula at such schools. Unfortunately, a lot of Catholic educators are somewhat naïve about whom they hire. In their zeal to be inclusive, many administrators do not appreciate the challenge that comes from hiring a faculty member who has an animus against the Catholic vision of God, human nature, and morality. This is not to say that there shouldn’t be diverse ideas on campus. But one has to be realistic about whether some worldviews, taught by this or that faculty member, contradict the Catholic pursuit of wisdom. For the sake of diversity or inclusion, administrators will often blithely hire faculty who are materialists or atheists. I have known many such professors. Some of them teach that an enlightened, scientific mind ought to be an atheist. Religion, on their view, is a superstition.

Needless to say, this attitude is incompatible with the pursuit of Catholic wisdom, which involves a defense of the existence of God, the human soul, and objective morality. If it’s vigilant about its identity and mission, a Catholic university must also have faculty trained and prepared to challenge worldviews that contradict the Catholic faith. Because ideas have consequences, they can, if left unchallenged, undermine the mission and identity of the university. There needs to be a critical mass of faculty trained, disciplined, and committed to defend classical Catholic wisdom. Once that critical mass disappears, it is virtually impossible to recover it. This naiveté or indifference to anti-Catholic worldviews taught at Catholic universities is one reason these schools suffer an identity crisis today.

At Catholic Universities, there are good professors, but the student must be selective and not trust that the curriculum will surely place her or him with the best professors. One needs advice to navigate through the Catholic university today.

It’s hard to recommend universities without considerable qualification. But three, I believe, are still reliable: The Catholic University of America, Thomas Aquinas College (in California), and The University of Dallas.

Leftist activists in the USA are erasing monuments. This is a sign of revolution. They want to destroy the monument of King Louis IX in St. Louis. They even want to change the name of the city. How do you perceive these matters?

To transform a society, it is important to rob it of its history, which defines its national memory. Just as an individual person’s identity depends on retaining memory of who she is or what she has done, so a nation’s identity depends on keeping a sense of its history and transmitting it from generation to generation. The destruction of statues is a sign of rejecting, even eliminating, the record of the past. It began with toppling statues of Confederate Generals but it has devolved into attacking statues of American Presidents, including Lincoln and Grant, who defeated the Confederacy! Not surprisingly, the revolutionaries also attack religious figures. A statue of St. Junipero Serra was knocked down in San Francisco. St. Louis and other religious figures are in their sights. Since one of the best ways to undermine civil society is to get rid of its religion, attacks on religious symbols are expected.

Just on principle, it is unfair to judge people of the past by the standards of contemporary society. Mahatma Ghandi made some disparaging remarks about Muslims. Should this invalidate his life’s work? Martin Luther King, Jr. was a serial adulterer and apparently plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis. Does this cancel out his Civil Rights achievements? Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a much admired President among American historians, did not desegregate the armed forces. He also sent thousands of Japanese Americans into internment camps for the duration of World War II—an act that violated their Constitutional Rights. Should these failings require removal of statues that pay him tribute? In spite of these marks against him, he was, historians agree, a great wartime President.

From the perspective of Catholic social teaching, there is an argument for keeping statues, even if in those cases they remind us of a painful past—like the statue of a Confederate leader or the statue of a President like Andrew Jackson, who did some objectionable things, like owning slaves and engineering the displacement of thousands of Native Americans. On the other hand, he did some noble things. Catholicism is about appreciating the human condition in its completeness. By keeping in contact with our history, we are reminded that human beings are flawed, and yet in spite of their failings can do ennobling things. Furthermore, their examples, whether good or bad, remind us of our own calling to better ourselves. Monuments and symbols of history are teaching opportunities. They should be respected on that account. A people need not destroy its past to verify that they are good. They can be good because they learn from their past.

In your opinion, what should we expect in the near future? The escalation?

If there are other incidents that appear to involve racial conflict, there is likely to be more protests and even violence. Also the police have been demoralized, especially in cities run by Democrats. New York, for example, is witnessing a spike in shootings of 174% compared with shootings in 2019. It’s important to note that even if the protests became completely non-violent, there is still escalation of hostilities in cultural life as people continue to be punished if they do not accept the terms of the “woke” culture. The escalation is likely to consist of heightened social pressure to acquiesce to the demand for radical change. One may resist at his peril. In the media and in academia, if one departs from the accepted or politically correct positions, he or she is likely to suffer reprisal. There are numerous examples of Journalists and professors who have lost their jobs, or at least been ostracized, by challenging accepted views on the Left. Nor is the corporate world immune to this kind of punishment. Anxious to profit by virtue signaling to the Left-Wing agitators, people employed by corporations also risk reprisals. I expect these kinds of pressures to escalate, as a Stalinist atmosphere will persist, an atmosphere that encourages people to censor themselves to minimize risk.

Why is no one talking about the communist roots of the activists initiating the protests in the USA?

There is a reluctance to explore and discuss the communist background of American social activism because so much of it is connected with rhetoric that surrounds race relations. Leftist ideology exploits white guilt in America. Self-conscious of the fact that America has a racist past, many white liberals seek “redemption” by conceding that America is systemically racist. Many of them try to authenticate their new state of grace by admitting that indeed they themselves must be racist on account of white privilege. If one challenges the idea of systemic racism, this challenge is itself taken as evidence that one is complicit in racism. Racial politics camouflages but at the same time exploits Marxist attitudes. This explains the success, in large measure, of the Black Lives Matter movement. Marxists can be counted on to come up with a snappy slogan. Black Lives Matter is clever because it puts anyone who would challenge the movement on the defensive. Certainly black lives matter, because all lives matter. But people have been punished for adding that qualifier. It turns out that Black Lives Matter is even disingenuous in its regard for black lives.

The movement’s appreciation of black lives seems very selective. Over a thousand black babies are aborted every day in America. Annually, more black babies are aborted in New York City than are born. These facts virtually go unreported, a phenomenon that reminds one of Stalin’s chilling remark that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of million is a statistic. Nor is it just the unborn that belie the slogan. In America’s inner cities, there is the enormity of black on black crime. This fact too tends to be downplayed, or ignored, by the mainstream media. Just this weekend, there were 17 killed in Chicago shootings; 50 were wounded. One weekend a month ago, there were 85 shootings and 24 fatalities. Like the media, Black Lives Matter hardly pays attention.

Barack Obama used to meet leaders of BLM in the White House. But like they, he ignored the carnage in his hometown. During his eight years in office, 4000 persons were murdered in that city. I hardly remember Obama drawing attention to the slaughter. For BLM, black lives matter when they are an opportunity for Leftist partisans to use the deaths of black people to advance their agenda to transform American society. Otherwise, they are reduced to another cold statistic.

The interview was conducted by Anna Wiejak.