Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World

by Andrew Breitbart

But he still wasn’t winning in America. Marcuse had a big, big problem: America’s founding ideology is still far sexier than that of the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility. Even if Marcuse was promising unending sex, drugs, and rock and roll, most Americans were more interested in living in liberty with their families, in a society that values virtue and hard work rather than promiscuity and decadence. So Marcuse had to find a way to defy the opposition. He found it in what he termed “repressive tolerance.” In 1965, Marcuse wrote an essay by that name in which he argued that tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish—and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down.