Herbert Marcuse was a German and American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin and then at the University of Freiburg, where he received his PhD under the supervision of Martin Heidegger. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research, which later became known as the Frankfurt School. In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control.
I've read “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) and One-Dimensional Man (1964).
Marcuse's work became the New Left’s operating manual they adopted after the industrial working class refused to revolt.
One-dimensional Man.
Marcuse observed that an advanced industrial society delivers comfort.
He saw that people tended to recognize themselves in their commodities. Critique was absorbed as a lifestyle.
He characterized this as “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom.”
He determined that a leftist system does not need secret police to keep most people in line.
His conclusion was that a successful suborning of Western society needs controls on consumption, infiltration of administration, and the creation of a closed universe of discourse in which alternatives can be made to sound insane.
Those seem familiar, don't they?
Repressive tolerance
Marcuse said that tolerance — the concept of letting all sides speak freely — protects the existing order.
So, he taught the left's thought leaders that tolerance must become partisan:
“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
He advocated for the withdrawal toleration of speech and assembly from the "wrong" side.
He said, stop “the words and images which feed this consciousness” at the point of entry — school, press, the academy. The student must “learn to think in the opposite direction” or he will slot facts into the old framework. Pattern recognition thus became racist, misogynist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, etc. as needed.
That is not a later distortion by woke HR. That is the text.
The DEI workshop, the speech code, the sneer at the long post on JPP, the claim that some speech is violence; those are Marcuse's ideas in action.
Tolerance becomes a single-edged weapon for leftists, not a principle for everyone.
The smashed piggy bank is recoded as righteous redistribution; dissent from the recoding is what must not be tolerated.
When property/family/nation/history/merit are “oppression,” even neutrality toward the old meanings is itself considered repressive by the leftist.
Liberating tolerance requires the new vocabulary to have a monopoly.
Newspeak. Orwell knew what he was writing about.