They had penetrated the academies—my American Studies program at Tulane had far more Adorno and Gramsci and Horkheimer and Marcuse than Twain or Jefferson or Lincoln. There was some trickle-down intellectualism going on—all the college students who worked through these programs and took swigs from the Frankfurt School bottle labeled “Drink Me” shrank mentally and ended up as parts of the Complex. But that didn’t explain how American society as a whole was taken over by this stuff.
