KUHNER: The fetal solution

For much of the 20th century, socialists have sought to erect a utopian society. Karl Marx thought the proletariat would serve as the engine of revolutionary change. World War I, however, exposed the profound illusion at the core of the old Marxism. Nationalism, not class warfare, proved to be the dominant force in history. German and French workers sided with their fellow bourgeois countrymen rather than rise up in solidarity and overthrow their capitalist masters. Hence, the modern left realized that in order to overthrow capitalism, the very culture that sustains it - Christianity - must be destroyed. Economic struggle was to be replaced with cultural struggle.

Liberalism has long been at war with traditional America. During the 1960s, it launched a sweeping sexual revolution. It has created a new morality; the counterculture has become the dominant culture. Its central principles are individual gratification and personal liberation. God, country, family - these are the values of a prior age, a Christian civilization that is no more. Prominent new-left theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse, championed Sigmund Freud's "pleasure principle." Marcuse argued - and campus radicals eagerly embraced - the notion that sex was the key to individual fulfillment. Marriage and the traditional family were to be subverted through sexual perversity and promiscuity. It was Marcuse who coined the phrase "Make love, not war."

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