If it does, you can blame … J. R. R. Tolkien?
. . . one of the things that I talk about is what I like to call “West Coast White nationalism” because West Coast White nationalism, a lot of the people that I know on the West Coast who think in terms of a racially defined new order of society, you take one look at them and you think that they’re hippies or you think that they’re liberals. Their lifestyles and their attitudes embrace a lot of things like Eastern spirituality, and drinking fruit juice, and wearing sandals, and granola, and vegetarianism, and organic food and organic farming, all these sort of things that you think are kind of hippie things.
If you look at the roots of a lot of the West Coast hippie culture and also the hippie culture in Europe for that matter, a lot of it goes back to Tolkien. What doesn’t come from the New Left, let’s say the Frankfurt School and things like that, a lot of it comes from Tolkien which is pretty much directly connected with European Traditionalism. — Greg Johnson
According to this view, ’60s hippies took Tolkien’s “message of stewardship of nature” to heart; forty years later, those self-same counterculturalists (e.g., Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama) are now running (some would say “ruining”) traditionalist culture:
While in regards to issues such as preserving the environment there is truth to this, it’s obvious that the counterculture movement of the 1960s brought about great societal change, mainly due to the influence of cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School.
Critics of cultural Marxism have made the argument that it is an ideological tool to subvert traditional institutions and concepts such as Western Civilization, nationalism, Christianity, race, gender, and the family. In his book [The] Death of the West, Pat Buchanan asserts that cultural Marxists have taken control of the American media and use it as a tool to infect the minds of Americans. Other traditional conservatives have made similar arguments. William S. Lind stated that “Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.” In his book The Strange Death of Marxism, Paul Gottfried argues the point that Marxism outlived communism in [the] form of cultural Marxism rather than economics.
While they have vast differences in ideology and values, both Tolkien in his works and the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School laid the ideological ground work for the 1960s counterculture movement, which most political thinkers characterize as left-wing. Causes that were associated with the hippie movement include the anti-war, pro-environment, anti-racist, feminist, and anti-consumerist ones.
More recently, the Left much like the modern Right has sold out many of the their principles to big capital and consumerism; however, the influence of the Frankfurt School remains and has influenced society though the media and academia.
You can read more about this in Robert Stark’s “Tolkien versus the Frankfurt School : The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly of the Left”.
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Web resources:
The Frankfurt School
The Death of the West
